A History of Blacks in Kentucky: From Slavery to Segregation, 1760–1891 by Marion B. Lucas (review)

Marion B. Lucas. A History of Blacks in Kentucky: Front Slavery to Segregation, 17601891 . Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society,2003, Second Edition. 430 pp. ISBN: 0916968324 (paper), $ 24.95. n 1992, the Kentucky Historical Society published Marion B. Lucas' s A History of Blacks in Kentucky:Prom Slavery to Segregation,17601891 as a part of Kentucky' s " Black History Project" funded by the Kentucky legislature in 1978. KHS has now reissued the book, with a new introduction , in paperback. Lucas, a professor of-history at Western Kentucky University,aims in this book to recount the story of slaverv in Kentucky and its aftermath from its victims' vantage point, so much so that he alerts readers that all persons appearing in the book should be assumed black unless indicated otherwise. The book,extensively researched,draws on records in the National Archives, manuscripts from repositories all over Kentucky, church records, county archives, newspapers, and a vast array of published sources. The notes and bibliography are awesome. Using this rich panoply of source material, Lucas successfully sketches a picture of black life usually kept their slaves in a hut or two,not in large quarters." Thus the relationship between owner and owned could often be more personal than in the Deep South' s Black Belt. Coleman also argued that slaves themselves thought their plight easier thin in other states. To this, Lucas objects,declaring that Slavery in Kentucky was not a mild form of servitude , for,to the modern mind, no such condition existed." ( 43) He goes on to call slavery in ati\form a " heinous evil" before agreeing that slaves actually fared better in Kentucky than elsewhere. Lucas must have had Barbara Jeanne Fields in mind when he wrote those words. Shortly bet(, re he published the first edition of his book Fields Ivrote her orrii studv of slaverv in . in upper South in nineteenthcentury Kentucky and its origins in the previous century. This volume now serves as the standard history of Kentucky slavery,unseating a book by J.Winston Coleman, Slavery Times in Kentucky,published in 1940. Coleman most memorably called Kentucky slavery the mildest in the entire United States. Lucas does not highlight this question, raising it only briefly and not until page fortytwo , but he does agree that slavery in the commonwealth was a small timers' affair. Slaves lived on farms more often than plantations and typically worked sideby side with their owners. And Kentucky farmers state, Maryland, titled Shit,en, and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteentb Centilry (1985).In that book, Fields indignantly repudiated any suggestion that slavery could be " mild." She also attacked the idea that Maryland, the first southern state to end slavery, deserved any credit for doing so. Unlike Lucas, Fields applied a Marxist theoretical model to her study of slavery,arguing that capitalism had already rendered slavery largely obsolete. Maryland, increasingly urbanized, found slavery less appropriate"for advancing capitalism than free wage labon ( Fields, 55) Although doubtless familiar with Fields' work, Lucas finds his inspiration in two much older works: Kenneth R Stampp' s, Tbe Peculiar Institution :Slavery in tbe AnteBellum South C 1956) and Stanley Elkins', Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life 1959). Historians usually credit Stampp as the first white historian to treat slaves sympathetically and Lucas takes a similar tone. Elkins is harder to figure: historians usually criticize his work for comparing slaves to concentration camp inmates,arguing that SPRING 2004 77 A History of Blacks in Kentucky From Slavery to Segregation, 17601891 BOOK REVIEWS slave owners successfully broke the personalities of their victims. But,unlike Elkins,Lucas does not even hint that slavery defeated African American people. Nor does he engage the provocative questions raised by Fields. Unlike Maryland, Kentucky held on to slavery as long as possible. The legislature and courts rejected federal attempts to end slavery,resisting emancipation until the Thirteenth Amendment rendered further opposition futile at the very end of 1865. Even then,they did not really give up. The legislature did not so much discard its slave code as revise it for the new era. This meant,among many other things,that Kentucky blacks could not testify against whites until...