Man in the Middle: Conway Barbour and the Free Black Experience in Antebellum Louisville

WINTER 2010 25 Man in the Middle: Conway Barbour and the Free Black Experience in Antebellum Louisville Victoria L. Harrison I n 1856, Conway Barbour, a free mulatto steamboat steward living in Louisville, Kentucky, moved his pregnant wife and their four children north to Cleveland, Ohio. Barbour had taken the trip at least once before. In the summer of 1854, he served as Kentucky’s delegate to an emigration convention in Cleveland sponsored by Martin Delany, a meeting dedicated to the notion that free blacks must leave the United States in order to find true freedom. While Barbour’s interest in emigration was short-lived, his interest persisted in migrating to pursue opportunities outside the South. Encouraged by his friend, William H. Gibson, a well-known musician and teacher in Louisville’s African American community, Barbour abandoned the relatively safe space he had created in Kentucky. The Barbours owned property on Walnut Street and were, according to Gibson’s memoir written fifty years later, prominent in black society. Even so, Barbour took his family north in the mid-1850s, the first of their several subsequent relocations. Only a few years later, Barbour deserted his family and property in Cleveland, and married his mistress, a sister of a fellow steward, in Alton, Illinois. Once settled , he became a highly visible businessman, eventually proprietor of the hotel Louisville, c. 1850. From William Wells, Western Scenery (Cincinnati: Onken, 1851). CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER MAN IN THE MIDDLE 26 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY and restaurant above the city’s new train depot. When that business failed in 1869, he moved again, this time to Arkansas, where he served in the general assembly in 1871, a so-called black “carpetbagger.” He spent his last years in a battle with James W. Mason, the mulatto son of Arkansas’s largest antebellum slaveowner, for political supremacy among the Republicans of Chicot County in that state’s deep southeastern Delta region. Barbour lost. He died in Lake Village in 1876, and although his family members are buried in Alton, Chicago, and Columbus, Ohio, the location of his grave is unknown. On its face, Barbour’s story appears to be an argument for “agency,” a term more often associated with historiographical discussions of antebellum slavery than of free blacks in the transitional middle decades of the nineteenth century. Seizing on opportunities as they arose, Barbour was the quintessential man-onthe -make, a Gilded Age man before that era took full form. A closer look, however , at his early years reveals that, despite his ambition, Barbour’s ability to control his destiny was limited. As a free “mulatto” in a slave society, Barbour was an anomaly. For white southerners, “free black” was an oxymoron, a contradiction that was in fact the essence of the antebellum African American experience that varied over time and space within the South. Free blacks were not supposed to exist, but they did. Highly restricted, they might individually thrive; oppressed, some possessed at least a measure of self-determination. The uncertainty compelled free blacks to employ varying strategies, emigration and migration among them, in their quest for survival and happiness. This paper looks at the efforts of one man, Conway Barbour, and his family to manage their predicament within a broader discussion of conditions for free blacks in antebellum Louisville. Reported at his death as having once been the “favorite servant” of Virginia’s governor, James Barbour, Conway Barbour was probably not typical and, judging by his later actions, did not consider himself as such. More typically, he left no papers, and so remaining remnants in the public record must tell his story. That record suggests a larger tale, one of Louisville’s free blacks coping with a geographic and racial terrain that historians have designated the “middle ground.”1 Historians interested in the plight of free blacks in the antebellum South typically emphasize their vulnerabilities and the ambiguities associated with being neither enslaved nor free, although specific regional differences have been identified . Baltimore’s large free black population, for example, was overwhelmingly darker-skinned and poor, unlike more racially and economically stratified cities such as Charleston and New Orleans where free mulattoes made up a black elite...