Been Coming through Some Hard Times: Race, History, and Memory in Western Kentucky

2. Slavery, the Terror of Imagination, and Exiled Freedom in Liberia

2 Slavery, the Terror of Imagination, and Exiled Freedom in Liberia The centerpiece of this chapter is the unpublished journal/diary of Ellen Kenton McGaughey Wallace, a slave owner who resided both in Hopkinsville and on a nearby farm. Her private reflections about local and national events between 1849 and 1865 reveal the world of the slave owning elite and the ideology of slavery and racial domination. These reflections also embody the benign paternalism and expressions of constitutional fealty that underpin current celebrations of “southern heritage.” The journal is one of many sources of those historic memories that are profoundly racialized. Wallace’s reflections, however, outline contradictory images of the slave. On the one hand, she portrays the ideal bondsman, personified by her slave, Lewis, as passive and religious. On the other, she fears a nightmarish inversion of the faithful, childlike slave into an insurrectionist bent on vengeance and freedom. For that reason, the Wallace journal provides a valuable contemporaneous source on the suspected slave rebellion of 1856, a terror of imagination that spawned intense and grotesque violence against suspected plotters. Wallace’s private expressions of fear that bondsmen would violently seize freedom occurred at a time when a few slaves in Hopkinsville attained freedom through legally sanctioned manumission. But it was a freedom contingent on the slave’s assent to resettlement in Liberia. This, too, was integral to the worldview of whites in Hopkinsville, as few slave owners considering manumission would accept 34 Slavery, Terror of Imagination, and Exiled Freedom free black people in their midst. The most extensive record of a Christian County slave bound for Liberia concerns Alexander Cross. He accepted manumission and emigration to Liberia under special circumstances; he was freed in order to become the first missionary sent to Africa by the American Christian Missionary Society, founded in 1849 by the Disciples of Christ Church. Extant documents depict him as a model of Christian faith, at once passive and compliant, in the ideal manner of Lewis, whom Wallace lavishly praised. However, both the slave Lewis and the liberated Cross remain silent. They have no voices in effect, but instead are spoken for or about, respectively, by Wallace or various members of Cross’s sponsoring church. Because no letters from Christian County slaves or former slaves have come to light, those from Rachel Eddington to her former owners in Ohio county (approximately sixty-five miles northeast of Hopkinsville) provide insight, through her own words, into a former slave’s desperate life after Liberian resettlement, which seemed to her more akin to exile. The drama of the lived experience of slavery is thus considerably more elusive than its objective demographic and ecological features outlined in the previous chapter. White voices dominate the documentary record of slavery, not only in Christian County but also throughout the South. A case in point is Liberty County, Georgia. Even amid an extensive record of the social life of the county’s slave owners, Erskine Clarke remarks that “an act of imagination” remains essential if one is to penetrate their world. Indeed, a disciplined imagination enabling one to transcend his own time and discern the consciousness and outlook of people of the past is a vital tool for any historian. The problem, however, is all the more acute in regard to slavery, which demands even more resourcefulness in depicting the experience of bondage, given the dearth of documentary sources and the historical muting of black voices. Clarke thus calls for use of the widest array of evidence, or “witnesses,” including not only rare slave letters and testimonies but also the findings about other communities of slaves, photographs, histories of slavery, and, if cautiously employed, the letters, court documents, and other materials written for and by slave owners.1 Melton A. McLaurin, for example, in his eponymous book, Celia, A Slave, reconstructs the trial and execution of a Missouri slave who killed her master after he raped her. Celia is not known through her own words but only through very limited historical evidence of the “manner in which others responded to her.”2 The author makes many inferences—acts of imagination in Clarke’s terms—to fill the interpretive spaces that would not be so gaping if Celia’s words had survived. This is precisely the challenge in understanding slavery in Christian County and environs, requiring as it does consideration of a range of sources, including letters, wills of 35 Slavery...