The African American Experience in Antebellum Cabell County, Virginia/West Virginia, 1810–1865

FALL 2011 3 The African American Experience in Antebellum Cabell County, Virginia/ West Virginia, 1810-1865 Cicero M. Fain III L ocated on the Ohio River in western Virginia, adjacent to southeastern Ohio and eastern Kentucky, antebellum Cabell County lay at the fulcrum of east and west, north and south, freedom and slavery. Possessed of a bountiful countryside—replete with wildlife, timber, pristine streams and creeks, and rich river-bottom soil along the navigable Ohio and Guyandotte rivers—it held great potential for settlers who sought to put down roots. Drawn by its promising location and cheap, arable land, migrants settled in the county in increasing numbers in the early 1800s, and many settlers took their slaves with them. Yet like most counties on Virginia’s western border, antebellum Cabell County was, in historian Ira Berlin’s words, a “society with slaves” rather than a “slave society.” In contrast to the rice and cotton-growing regions of the Deep South where the institution of slavery shaped the political economy and “the master-slave relationship provided the model for all social relations,” slavery never became central to the economy or social structure of Cabell County. Unlike Kanawha County, Virginia, to the northeast (and from which it was formed in 1809), Cabell County lacked industrial slavery. Unlike Jefferson County in the lower Shenandoah Valley, it lacked the numbers to support plantation slavery. Distant from plantation society and the rigid social and cultural norms imposed by the planter elite of eastern Virginia, Cabell County reveals the significance of slavery even within a “society with slaves” like central Appalachia, the impact of western expansion on slavery, and the hardening of racial attitudes in the Ohio Valley. Equally important, the county’s antebellum history helps illuminate the ways in which African Americans living in this border region exercised agency in order to better their condition.1 By 1810, almost three thousand people resided in Cabell County, including 221 slaves and twenty-five Indians, or as one local historian notes, “about 1½ persons to the square mile.” In the county’s early years, it had only two villages of note. Guyandotte, formed in 1810 at the confluence of the Guyandotte and Ohio rivers, featured a number of businesses and a small but growing port. THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE 4 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY County Map of Virginia and West Virginia, by S. Augustus Mitchell Jr., 1867, and same map with Cabell County, West Virginia, highlighted. CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER CICERO M. FAIN III FALL 2011 5 By the early 1830s, the town hosted many river travelers and benefitted from the construction of a road that connected it to the James River and Kanawha Turnpike at Barboursville, the county seat. Formed in 1813 and situated south of Guyandotte along the Guyandotte River, Barboursville was surrounded by large expanses of fertile land and plentiful timber. Farming and manufacturing formed the economic foundation of the village in its formative years. Increasing settlement in and near Guyandotte and Barboursville in the eastern part of the county close to the turnpike sparked economic growth throughout the early 1800s.2 The county’s early white residents recognized the value of young slaves. In 1811, Samuel Witcher sued his father Daniel Witcher Sr. for possession of “negro man Harris, girl Patsy, girl Phebey, boy David, and girl Charlotte.” In June 1813, William Dingess arrived in Cabell County accompanied by three enslaved boys, Steven, Simon, and Abram. In May 1814, John Chapman settled in the county with his slaves, seventeen-year-old Jo and fifteen-year-old Frank. In November 1814, an unidentified individual brought Barbary, a five-year-old “malotte” (mulatto) from North Carolina. By 1815, the county’s eighty-nine slaveholders owned 219 slaves, an average of two and a half slaves per household. Through the mid-1800s, the low population density, geographic isolation, and preponderance of small farms worked by yeoman farmers facilitated more personal relationships between masters and slaves than on the larger plantations of eastern Virginia.3 However, masters’ familiarity with their slaves did not necessarily lead to more instances of manumission in Cabell County. In 1806, the state of Virginia required manumitted blacks to leave the state within twelve months...