The Filson Historical Society and Cincinnati Museum Center
  • “I Would Not Have a White Upon the Premises”The Ohio Valley Salt Industry and Slave Hiring in Illinois, 1780-1825

“We will I believe get the Wabash Saline,” wrote Andrew Jackson to his wife Rachel in May 1803, referring to the likelihood that he and his business partners would become the first renters and salt producers at the federally-controlled saltwater springs on the Wabash River in southern Illinois. In a letter to President Thomas Jefferson a year earlier, Jackson observed that large salt manufacturers in the West had developed a virtual monopoly over the commodity, controlling supply in order to drive up prices. Jackson and his partners proposed to correct this by producing salt “to benefit our country and not Self agrandizement [sic].” By regulating the price and availability of what Jackson called a “necessary of life,” he averred to Jefferson that “Publick good [is] the only object.” But when he wrote to Rachel with the cautious good news in 1803, Jackson admitted that in renting the federal saline, “My hope is that it will place me above the frowns or smiles of fortune.” Jackson was not alone in believing that the salt business would make him wealthy, nor was he alone in failing to see that belief realized. Jackson and his partners ultimately decided against entering a business that could just as easily break fortunes as make them, but he rightly observed salt’s value to the public good and its potential to create wealth on the Ohio Valley frontier.1

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Gold medal presented to Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) by Congress.

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[End Page 49]

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Map of the United States, 1794.

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Salt and the river networks through which it moved played a significant role in establishing regional patterns of trade and capital investment in an era marked by contests over labor practices in the expanding West. By the time production began at the federal saline in Illinois, slave hiring was common throughout the regional salt industry to offset the substantial financial risk. In contravention of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which banned slavery, a special allowance for hiring slaves within the federal salt works was granted during the Illinois territorial period and was later written into the first state constitution. Illinois statehood and the subsequent debates over extending the slave hiring allowance coincided with the escalating national debate over the expansion of slavery in the West. The expiration of the allowance gave both pro- and anti- slavery advocates reason to position the saline as central to the controversy over slavery in the state, but the allowance itself had virtually nothing to do with any organized effort to extend slavery north of the Ohio River.2

The slave hiring allowance has been largely overlooked by historians or conflated with other protections for indenture that allowed Illinoisans to hold black servants in de facto slavery. Early historians of Illinois’s slavery debates of 1823-1824 cared little for the origins of the allowance, assuming that efforts to renew and expand it were part of a larger effort by proslavery Southern settlers to turn Illinois into a slave state. The initial reason for the allowance became unimportant in the dramatic struggle for the soul of the state. Recent scholarship has followed [End Page 50] this lead in focusing on the debates themselves, on the other portions of the Illinois constitution that allowed for indenture, and on the underlying racism on both sides of the debate. In practical terms, legal slavery in Illinois existed only on the federal saline lands, and an examination of how and why the federal government allowed slaveholding within the borders of a free territory and state repositions slavery in Illinois not only as an ideological battleground, but as a real labor arrangement whose roots lay deep in slavery’s borderland. We can better understand how slave hiring came to be permitted—and why it ultimately perished—in an ostensibly free territory and state by placing it within the context of the business and labor regimes of the Ohio Valley salt industry, which allowed slave contracts to cross an ambiguous practical boundary between slavery and freedom.3

The Ohio Valley Salt Industry

The regional salt industry that supplied Kentucky, Illinois, and the broader Ohio Valley was part of a frontier economy that connected communities on both sides of the Ohio River and deep into the hinterlands. Salt, cash, slaves, and contracts crossed state and territorial lines, and permeated geographical and practical boundaries between slavery and freedom. Retail stores at large salt works were nodes of commerce in otherwise unsettled areas, and salt itself served as currency on the specie-poor frontier. Salt making was among the first domestic industries in the region, and unlike trapping or farming, required direct and frequent infusions of capital and manpower to construct and maintain its infrastructure. The difficulty and expense of operating salt works was central to the development of the industry’s labor practices and patterns of capital investment. Manufacturers guarded thin profit margins with stingy and manipulative market practices and sought to save on labor costs and increase productivity by renting slaves from local owners when possible, rather than employing less reliable white laborers, who might quit without notice if offered better terms elsewhere. Neither practice was entirely successful, but both played crucial roles in the formation and operation of salt works throughout the Ohio Valley, including the federal saline in Illinois.4

The salt industry in the Ohio Valley first coalesced in the 1780s, and remained practically the same over the next several decades. Saltwater in the region came from subterranean saline springs, which showed above ground as “licks” where buffalo and other animals congregated to lick the residue at the surface. Once a lick was located, test wells were sunk and the water sampled to determine the depth and quality of the spring. If the brine was deemed strong enough to yield profitable output, one or more large permanent wells were dug, often six feet or more in diameter. These were walled with timber, and pumps or pulleys brought water to the surface. The water then flowed through extensive networks of wooden pipes into iron kettles mounted in brick furnaces, where laborers stoked fires with wood cut from surrounding timberland. The water evaporated [End Page 51] as it boiled, leaving refined salt to be shoveled into barrels and shipped to market. Ideally, furnaces burned constantly to conserve fuel, and the kettles were tended day and night since the process required a practiced eye and precise timing when removing finished salt.

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Diagram of Salt Works by J. Colquhon, ca. 1810 (prototype)

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[End Page 52]

Constructing the physical infrastructure of salt production was costly, difficult, and time-consuming. Wells, pumps, pipes, kettles, and furnaces were only the bare essentials; salt works also needed warehouses, housing and provisions for the workers, barrels, wagons, livestock, tools, and stockpiles of materials to repair or expand the works. Before the first quarter of the nineteenth century, most of the metal goods, like kettles and fittings for pipes and furnaces, had to be floated down the river from manufacturers in Pennsylvania. Bricks for the furnaces, wooden pipes, wagons, barrels, and construction materials for the cabins, sheds, and warehouses could usually be obtained nearer at hand, but they also required transport and sometimes months of waiting. Once everything was on site, workers were needed to assemble, run, and maintain the extensive apparatus of the works. A salt works might begin with only a dozen hands, but could quickly grow to hundreds of workers performing a wide variety of tasks around the clock.

As salt works became ersatz settlements, productivity increased, but so did the expenses and risks associated with keeping the works running at a profit. Like many others who thought the high-demand commodity would provide a smooth road to easy riches, Marcus Huling, in Wayne County, Kentucky, instead found that salt production required “an immense deal of Expense and Labour.” Mary Daniel, who had some experience making salt, cautiously advised her brother regarding the prospects for production at Bullitt’s Lick in Kentucky: “If it turns out as I expect you will draw something handsome the second year,” but she warned that the first year’s work would yield no profit at all, for “you can’t possibly form a just Idea of the expence that we shall be at in setting the works a going.” Andrew Jackson’s partner John Coffee estimated that it would cost nearly $50,000 to run the Wabash Saline with sixteen furnaces for the first year, and that was even after taking into account the value of the materials already on hand.5

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Diagram of Salt Works prototype (detail).

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If an entrepreneur survived the crucial first year, the process of refining salt was subject to many costly problems and delays that could lead quickly to ruin. The labor-intensive and extractive nature of the work meant that producers were always at the mercy of the weather, water quality, and the availability of men and materials. Edmund Lyne’s chronicle of time lost between September 1787 and September 1788 at Blue Lick, Kentucky, gives an idea of the challenges faced by salt makers even after they had established their works:

3 Weeks [lost] at the time the Indians killed Mason which was Sept. 5th 1787. First Week in Novr. employed in getting in Corn. From Decr 22 till Febry 3rd I made only 2¾ bushels salt. Febry 3rd. Kettles set to work—worked till Febry 15th the thaw then set in + high water, which preventing working till 20th thence to the 24th when my Waggon broke down. My waggon being not repaired till March 20th that evening the Kettles were set to work thence worked till the 29th then stoped on acct. Indians. Then lay idle to June 9th thence worked to the July 6th. Then lay idle for the want of hands ‘till the 15th thence idle for [the same] till the 21st then to work, thence worked for a considerable time losing only one Week when the [illeg.] Waggon gave way, lost till Sept. 7 1788 21 weeks in all.6

Salt manufactures could do little to guard against such frequent and potentially catastrophic setbacks; many suffered wild fluctuations in both productivity and profitability, leading them to abandon the pursuit entirely. As smaller producers failed, successful entrepreneurs bought out their leases and worked the most profitable springs while letting others stand idle. When Nathaniel Harris tried to expand his production at the works he rented from Adam Shepherd and Henry Crist at Long Lick, Kentucky, in 1796, they declined, having rented the rest of their works for one year to Thomas Smith, on the promise that he would keep them idle in hopes of raising the price of salt. Other attempts to control the volume of salt in the market, and the monopolistic practices observed by Andrew Jackson in 1802 and 1803, still hindered the market in western Tennessee in 1808 when petitioners in Nashville appealed to the federal government to introduce salt from the Illinois works into their market to bring down prices and to “correct the impositions and abuses that have taken place is the sale of that article.” These impositions and abuses, although a burden to merchants and consumers, were one way for salt producers to offset the significant challenges they faced in getting their product to market.7

Salt producers’ attempts to mitigate financial risks only intensified the capriciousness of the industry by entangling capital within convoluted and sometimes volatile networks of credit, contract, and obligation. In 1785, Thomas Perkins wrote from Lincoln County, Kentucky, to General Joseph Palmer in Boston to report on the state [End Page 54] of frontier salt production. He observed critically that “The business is carried on by people who have but little knowledge and less curiosity, and it seems to me managed in a very slovenly manner.” This was likely a reference to both inefficient refining practices and the fact that the business of salt making was exceptionally complicated, and sometimes underhanded. Although one person typically claimed ownership of a salt spring, the right to make salt was often leased to one or more entrepreneurs, who sometimes worked the springs themselves, but more often subcontracted the actual labor. “In few instances have the lessees manufactured salt themselves,” noted one observer of the Illinois saline, instead “they generally sub-leased the saline in fractions to individuals.” When several salt makers held leases on the same spring, those contracts stipulated how much water each could draw for their own works, as well as improvements to be made to the existing infrastructure, and the amount of rent (often in salt) to be paid to both the primary lessee and the landowner.8

Subcontracting was one of the industry’s most significant and troublesome features. Because the owners of saline springs rarely had the knowledge to work them, they employed numerous managers and overseers, who in turn subcontracted much of the work. “Men of competent capital to work the whole establishment,” wrote Territorial Delegate-elect Nathaniel Pope, “are generally devoid of the required information, which can only be acquired by a long apprenticeship in the school of experience. That information is most frequently found in men of moderate capital…[and] those are in fact the manufacturers of the salt.” Equipment and labor used at salt works added layers of complexity to the production process. Subcontractors sometimes employed their own men and material and sometimes rented the same from owners and lessees. This meant that the kettles might belong to one party, the furnaces to another, the pipes to another, and the wagons and horses to yet another, to say nothing of the contract arrangements that provided the works with laborers, both free and enslaved.9

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Map of the State of Kentucky; with the Adjoining Territories (detail), 1795.

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Because it was rare that owner, lessees and subcontractors were simultaneously present, it was not unusual for contracts to be stretched or violated. Absenteeism, along with the complicated and, at times, vague terms of contracts allowed the various parties to either forget or openly infringe upon the rights of others. In 1807 at Bullitt’s Lick in Kentucky, three salt producers complained bitterly to the subcontractor who maintained their wells. “You promised that after the next Sunday we should not want for water,” they began, “but alas that appears to be like all the rest of all your promises for on Monday night last we were obliged to blow out [the furnaces] for want of water.” The producers warned that if there was no water when they next visited the wells, “you must from henceforth consider yourself not under our Employment.” Always alert to the prospect of gaming the system, leasers, owners, renters of equipment, and other subcontractors frequently landed in county courts to settle disputes that encompassed every aspect of the salt-making process, from the conveyance of salt water to furnaces, to the maintenance of kettles, to the hiring or leasing of laborers.10

Slave and Free Labor in Salt Production

After the expense and effort required set up a productive salt works, the problem of how to provide enough hands to perform the work constantly occupied salt producers. In his observations for Joseph Palmer, Thomas Perkins counseled that if Palmer wished to enter the business in Kentucky, then “I should advise by all means to bring workmen from New England—they are more active and more industrious, and better men than can be procured in this Country.” Whether Perkins referred to free workers or slaves is unclear, but other salt entrepreneurs echoed his concern about the importance and difficulty of finding reliable local labor. Because salt manufacturing required some knowledge and skill, as well as tiring work around the clock, owners and renters of salt works constantly weighed whether to employ more expensive, yet reliable, skilled workers or cheaper, yet risky, unskilled laborers. At the very least, one experienced overseer living full-time at the works was considered essential. At Bullitt’s Lick in 1785, Robert Daniel advised his business partner William Christian that the “Intricacy required for [salt making] is of such a Nature that without the greatest care and diligence nothing can be made…it would be greatly to y[ou]r advantage as well as mine to Imploy some good Industrious carefull man to manage the business.” Most serious salt entrepreneurs, especially those who absented themselves from remote salt works, employed such an overseer or manager.11

Even with a good overseer, labor management in the salt industry could be troublesome. Absentee owners and lessees who owned slaves rarely made their chattel available as laborers. In these instances, overseers frequently hired slaves from nearby owners. On the Little Sandy River, one frustrated overseer wrote his employer in 1815: “The repugnance which the people have to their Negros [End Page 56] coming to this place and the high price given by others it will be impossible to get any in this quarter.” This overseer also noted that “the negroes themselves are much opposed to coming here not knowing what kind of hands they might fall into.” Another overseer reported that some local owners were asking as much as $130 or $140 per slave for an unspecified rental period. The next year at the same works, another manager rented five slaves at $100 dollars each. They formed only a small part of a larger force of thirty-four hired slaves, including new hires and “old stock” who stayed on from previous hires. The manager estimated that “If this force can be kept up it will be sufficient with the white men which will be necessarily employed.” At her family’s salt works at Bullitt’s Lick, Kentucky, Annie Christian observed in 1788 that “Renting [slaves] has amounted to something considerable,” and “a much more saving plan must be fallen upon.” To that end, Christian hoped soon to employ the family’s own slaves as woodcutters rather than hiring slaves from other owners. But most frontier slaveholders did not own sufficient numbers of slaves to use them for both salt work and farm or plantation work, even if they did live nearby.12

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Advertisement for runaway hired slave. Illinois Gazette, March 2, 1820.

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As in other areas of the regional economy, labor remained scarce. Consequently, salt works typically employed a combination of free white workers and rented slaves for both skilled and unskilled work as kettle tenders, coopers, blacksmiths, carpenters, brick masons, mechanics, well diggers, pump hands, woodcutters, and draymen. Management of a combined slave and free workforce presented significant challenges. Salt overseers were not typically experienced slave drivers, and slaves performed the same tasks and received similar treatment as free workers, eroding distinctions between free and enslaved labor. Because overseers were usually men who had worked in the salt industry in various capacities and understood all parts of production, they often labored alongside the men they oversaw, sweating over kettles and furnaces, unloading wood, digging wells, and repairing pipelines further collapsing slave-free distinctions. When William Green sold a slave named Dick who worked on his family’s salt operations in the summer of 1823, he reported that Dick had “been there so long that he has a great notion of his freedom.” In another instance, shortly after Robert Daniel hired Nicholas Merriwether, a “good Industrious carefull man,” to manage his and William Christian’s salt works at Bullitt’s Lick, the manager wrote that he was sending back to Christian a slave named Judah, who had engaged in “such miss Conduct that I should, I find be under the disagreeable necessity of inflicting such severe punishment that I would by no means undertake to do.” Overseers also lived with their workers, sharing cabins, mess tables, and taverns. This could make it [End Page 57] difficult to inflict harsh discipline on both slaves and free workers. Francis Gaines, an overseer along on the Little Sandy River, readily admitted to his employer in 1815 that “I absolutely feel incompetent to the management of a number of hands, the most of which bad ones…it will be necessary for you to employ some person that has been more in the habit of it than I have been.” Another overseer was described as “useless, because the hands not being afraid of him paid little or no attention to him…and because [he] seldom attempted to overlook them.”13

Managers at the salt works also had difficulty keeping and disciplining their free white workers. Salt work required shift work around the clock while the furnaces were burning, since starting and stopping the furnaces wasted valuable time and fuel. Kettle tenders, woodcutters, furnace men, and other hands were constantly on call, trading jobs with each other through long days and nights, so even one unreliable hand could throw the works into disarray. Francis Gaines described problems with several of his free workers at the Little Sandy Salt Works: “As to the employment of Mr. Chenowith…he is jobbing this week and will tend Kettles next—tho it seem to be with some reluctance that he agrees to go at it—it will be necessary to mark out his bounds.… Boyd will quit your employment… he is wonderfully spoilt.” Problems with white workers were so pervasive that one salt industry insider recommended that he “would not have a white upon the premises, except superintendants. It is impossible to keep them from taking the liberty of thinking.… If the process of operation be correctly arranged, thought by the common workman…is entirely superfluous.”14

Whether free white workers thought too much or too little, there were often too few of them to keep an entire salt works running day and night, and high rates of attrition among those who were available endangered productivity. “[T]he great difficulty with white men is they won’t stick to it,” noted the Illinois saline agent to the governor in 1824, “not because they can’t do it,” but rather “it is a kind of business that requires many hands and each one to perform his part or the others are thrown out.” By the time large-scale salt production began at the federal saline in Illinois in the early nineteenth century, Kentucky entrepreneurs who leased the works expected to bring rented slaves into the territory, not only because it had become an industry norm, but also because the same labor challenges prevailed in southern Illinois as in northern Kentucky. If the works were to be profitably and effectively managed as a corrective to the price fixing elsewhere in the salt industry, they could not rely on free white workers alone. Like their competitors in Kentucky, they argued, the Illinois salt works would need to be manned with a combination of free and slave labor.15

The Illinois Saline and Slavery

In 1803, the federal government formed a treaty with a coalition of Native American leaders to acquire the salt springs on the Wabash River and the [End Page 58] surrounding timberland in exchange for an annuity in salt. Congress authorized leasing the springs to salt producers to promote production in the West and attempt to bring down the price. Most of the commercially productive salt works in the region were located near Louisville, Kentucky, nearly 400 river miles from the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. As the Louisiana Territory came under federal control and southern markets along the Mississippi River became more accessible to American commerce, establishing salt works on the northern bank of the Ohio River near the Mississippi facilitated flows of salt, settlement, and capital into the newly acquired regions. As one Illinoisan described the value of the Illinois saline, it “supplied a part of Kentucky, Tennessee and Indiana with Salt and opened a new near and safe market for their surplus produce.”16

The federal saline reservation was known variously as the Wabash Saline, the Ohio Saline, the Illinois Saline, and the U.S. Saline, and by the names of the two principal licks: the Lower Lick (later known as the “Nigger Well”) and the Half Moon Lick. John Bell of Lexington, Kentucky, held the first government lease in 1803, and he had likely been producing salt at the site even earlier. Bell died shortly after making his lease with the government, and Jonathan Taylor and Martin Bringman of Jefferson County, Kentucky, took over the remaining time, signing a new lease that began March 1, 1808. Taylor held the lease with Bringman and other partners until 1813, their tenure inaugurating the first large-scale operations at the salt works. John Bate, also of Jefferson County, then held the lease from 1814 to 1817, followed again by Jonathan Taylor who leased the Lower Lick in 1817, while Willis Hargrave and Meridith Fisher, George Robinson, James Ratcliff, and Timothy Guard held leases at the Half Moon Lick. From 1818 until 1830, Timothy Guard was most often identified as the primary leaser of the salt works, but there were other lessees and sublessees. 17

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Half Moon Lick.

AMERICAN STATE PAPERS: PUBLIC LANDS, 3: 273.

Unlike their counterparts in Kentucky, salt producers at the Illinois saline were forced to comply with strict contracts imposed by the federal government and enforced by territorial officials. Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin appointed Illinois Territorial Governor Ninian Edwards superintendent of the saline, a responsibility Edwards described as “a great deal of trouble” that required “considerable expense” on his own part. He complained that he found the saline duty “more troublesome to me than almost all those I had to perform as Gov[ernor]. I made [End Page 59] all the leases, superintended their execution, and had to travel to the lick repeatedly, receive monthly and quarterly returns of sales of salt and kept regular accounts, and had to receive every proposition (and they were very numerous) concerning this and other licks, to discuss and report upon those propositions to the Treasury Department, and to correspond with a multitude of private individuals.” In short, said Edwards, superintending the salt works was a “most unpleasant responsibility.”18

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Albert Gallatin (1761-1849).

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Federal management was intended to counteract the market practices of the regional salt industry by setting the prices and establishing non-competition clauses within salt makers’ contracts, but it also hindered producers, imposing conditions on production and prices. Taylor and Bringman’s contract—and all subsequent contracts that could be located—specified that lessees would not combine with or be interested in any other salt manufacturing operations and would cap the price of a bushel of salt, and sell only a limited number of bushels at one time. The latter stipulation presumably was to prevent competitors and unauthorized individuals from cornering the market, hoarding, or destroying the cheaper salt. Despite these prohibitions, a traveler on the Ohio River in 1807 found that third parties, or “private copartners” were buying salt at the contracted price, then reselling it on site at higher rates, presumably splitting the subsequent profits with the lessees or sublessees with whom they colluded. Albert Gallatin made the same observation a year later (although he did not suggest willful wrongdoing on the part of the lessees), noting a markup from seventy cents per bushel to two dollars. According to Gallatin, the continued scarcity of salt and high demand ensured that customers throughout Indiana, Illinois, western Kentucky, and western Tennessee would continue to pay inflated prices.19

Efforts to circumvent federal regulations at the Illinois saline did little to lessen the burdens on producers created by government. Producers were accountable to the federal government for contracted quantities of salt paid as rent, and they were ostensibly prohibited from setting or changing their own retail prices to offset manufacturing setbacks. The partnership of Taylor and Bringman was the first to engage in large-scale manufacture at the Illinois saline, and although they likely used some of the infrastructure put in place by John Bell, they were expected to substantially expand the works. In their lease from 1807, Taylor and Bringman agreed to “erect, establish, set up and fix at the said saline springs…kettles to the aggregate contents of fifteen thousand gallons for the purpose of making and extracting of salt” and they were expected to “increase the quantity of kettles to [End Page 60] the aggregate contents of at least twenty five thousand gallons, and…work and employ the same in the manufacturing and extracting of salt…in a workmanlike manner, and that without any willful neglect.” As early as August 1808, Taylor and Bringman begged a modification of their lease because they had not been able to extract the required amount of water. The terms were changed and the lease continued, but this was the first of many problems to come. The lease was again modified in 1810 with a lower rental rate, and the price at which the lessees were authorized to sell the salt was reduced, “in consequence of the large supply of Salt in the Western Country” and the “great difficulty in making sales.”20

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Map of Illinois Saline.

AMERICAN STATE PAPERS: PUBLIC LANDS, 3: 273.

Troubles continued throughout that year, and when Ninian Edwards and Albert Gallatin asked Taylor and his partners to pay the government in cash for the finished salt on hand when their lease began, Taylor explained to Edwards, “There is such a want of specie in the country that we are obliged in order to vend our salt at any rate to instruct our Agents at the different deposits to barter it away for the produce of the Country which it is very probable we shall be obliged [End Page 61] to sell at a loss if there were no other reason this Circumstance of itself must convince your Excy. that we cannot promise money for the Salt.” Jonathan Taylor’s difficulty at the salt works, and Ninian Edwards’s irritation over the constant flow of contracts, correspondence, and modifications to the leases show how fully the federal saline in Illinois was enmeshed in the practices and expectations of the larger Ohio Valley salt industry.21

As in Kentucky, white settlers already in the region were unlikely to engage in time-consuming and labor-intensive salt work when better opportunities were available. Moreover, many had their own land to clear or their own enterprises to oversee. Consequently, overseers, free workers, and hired slaves at the Illinois saline came, like the lessees and subcontractors who employed them, from salt-producing regions of Kentucky where their experiences positioned them strongly within the marketplace. In 1805, just two years into the first saline lease with John Bell, the Indiana Territory, then including Illinois, enacted an allowance for the use of slaves in the territory. The allowance remained in force until 1809, when the Illinois Territory was created, and another was extended under Illinois territorial law in 1814. The separation of the Illinois Territory was precipitated in part by a growing pro-slavery sentiment, a welcome development for Taylor and his Kentucky partners. The 1810 territorial census listed twenty-six holders of indentures, or contracts, for hired slaves within the bounds of the saline reservation. Taylor and his partners together held 176 hired slaves, while others held from one to fifteen hired slaves each. The smaller lessees were likely subcontractors who employed their hired slaves in the typical salt work activities, from cutting and hauling wood, to tending kettles, building and repairing pipes and wells, coopering, ironwork, carpentry, and masonry.22

On this front, federal policy buttressed state advocacy. In 1813, a bill was introduced in the federal House of Representatives to “encourage the making of salt, at the United States Saline, in the Illinois territory, by the partial introduction of negroes therein.” The wording was disingenuous, since the use of hired slaves had long been permitted, but the provision that “no slave shall be introduced into the said territory, by any other than the lessees or sub-lessees of the said United States’ Saline, and for the sole and only purpose of working at said Saline” reflected the bill’s intent to address the labor needs of salt producers without abandoning the principles of the Northwest Ordinance. Shadrach Bond, an Illinois slaveholder and future first governor of the state, wrote to Ninian Edwards that he believed “the Partial introduction of Negroes to carry on the salt works I suppose will make a fuss with some” and he did not think the bill would pass. Bond was correct, but the failed bill’s language suggests common factors shaping labor, free and enslaved, throughout the Ohio Valley salt industry, including Illinois. The bill cited the “high price of labor, and the restrictions against slavery” for the inability of the salt works to meet public demand, and asked that “it may [End Page 62] be lawful for the lessees, or sub-lessees…to introduce into the said territory a sufficient number of negroes, owing service or slavery in some of the states or territories where slavery in permitted, to work the said Saline.” In 1814, an “Act concerning negroes and Mullattoes” adopted by the Illinois territorial legislature left out most of the language from the failed 1813 bill, but referenced the necessity of using hired slaves in the salt works because “the manufacture of salt…cannot be successfully carried out by white laborers.” This language reflected two decades of opinion and practice throughout the Ohio Valley: rented slaves were more reliable and thus more cost-effective than white workers. Enshrining the slave hiring allowance in a territorial statute did little more than acknowledge that the federal saline in ostensibly free territory was as fully integrated with the regional salt industry as were private producers in slaveholding Kentucky.23

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New Madrid Earthquake from Henry Howe, Historical Collections of the Great West (1851).

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Even as protections for slave hiring were written into territorial law, the regional salt industry experienced decline, especially in Illinois. Production at the federal saline decreased, not because there were too few hired slaves or free workers, but because salt production in the Ohio Valley was tied to factors beyond the control of even the federal government. Salt maker Joseph Street claimed that the massive New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812 had “materially affected the quality of the water” by contaminating the wells with fresh water, diluting the brine and reducing salt production. The partnership of Jonathan Taylor and Charles Wilkins survived by pooling their resources, but Street recalled that “Taylor after spending several years laboriously employed in conducting this concern found himself at its close nearly ruined.”24

John Bate’s subsequent tenure at the salt works was also financially disastrous. In a petition for federal relief, Bate claimed that the Ohio River rose in the spring of 1815 and overflowed the entire salt works for two months, not only stopping work and driving away his workers, but also destroying much of his expensive infrastructure. Wells, pumps, pipes, and furnaces had been rebuilt, but Bate claimed that the flood reduced the saline content of his wells, requiring him to invest even more heavily in new infrastructure to extract more water to produce enough salt to meet the terms of his lease. The government agent appointed to the works, Leonard White, agreed with this assessment in 1816 and advocated filling up the contaminated wells at the site to prevent them from affecting the working wells. Jonathan Taylor, who remained interested in the salt works, noted testily in 1815 that “The Saline is going fast to distruction John Bate is gone a begging to the City of Washington to surrender the works if he cant get the rent forgiven him…there cant be less than 40,000 Bush. of Rent Salt due the Government the Devil help such a Bag of Wind.”25

Bate struggled for three more years until 1817, when with approaching Illinois statehood the question of whether to allow multiple leases in order to make the saline more profitable was turned over to the territorial government. The addition of more leasers during the period of territorial management only exacerbated the saline’s problems. Leonard White explained as early as 1816 that the expensive terms in the saline contracts discouraged experienced salt producers with limited capital, forcing them into less desirable subleasing arrangements with speculative entrepreneurs. Moreover, White observed, these subleasers constituted “a third party over whom the United States have no immediate control.” This gave rise to further problems, since “there are so many more of this class tha[n] can actually get water, that they have injured the place considerably” by using too much timber and making too little salt. Since the government contracts specified that salt could only be sold at a set rate, and since there was now so much salt already on the market, “the means of payment [has] not increased in proportion, thereby injuring the credit of the place.”26 [End Page 64]

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Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States Northwest of the River Ohio, July 13, 1787.

JOURNALS OF THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS, 32: 343

As they struggled to make their respective enterprises profitable, salt makers continued to use hired slaves, primarily from Kentucky, as permitted by the Illinois constitution until 1825. In correspondence over the future of the saline and the division of the wells among the several lessees, sublessees, and subcontractors, there was no mention of the use of hired slaves or other workers, suggesting that for those involved in arranging and executing leases, the question [End Page 65] of what sort of labor would actually be employed at the works was of relatively minor importance. But the allowance for slavery become a focal point for both pro- and anti-slavery politics within the state, and the saline became embroiled in the statewide slavery debates of 1823-1824, which resulted in a popular referendum and rejection of the further introduction of slavery or extension of the slave hiring provision. The polarized debate pointed to the diminished role of the salt industry and its labor practices within the state economy and political discourse. In the face of a growing antislavery movement, and the broader controversy over the proposal to write slavery into the Illinois constitution, extending the provision for hiring slaves made neither commercial nor political sense.27

Constraints on labor in the Ohio Valley salt industry played a key role in creating the slavery allowance in Illinois, and also in its eventual demise. The evident corruption, the difficult work of salt production, and continuing financial problems at the saline, combined with the growing political controversy over slave labor in the state, ensured that the saline was in decline even during the statehood process. By 1818, the saline’s declining profitability and poor management, and the likelihood that it would eventually pass out of state control, made the slave hiring provision far less controversial in its own right than the debates it spurred after statehood. Rather than an attempt to enshrine slavery within the state’s constitution, the slave hiring allowance was a remnant of earlier federal concessions to salt makers who had struggled to operate profitably in the public interest. The allowance attempted to promote and regulate salt production, but it ultimately failed as completely as the Northwest Ordinance’s ostensible ban on slavery. Even as the question was openly and vigorously debated in the 1820s, the failure of the saline’s public role and the decreasing profitability of its salt production meant that there was little chance—convention or not—that the saline would continue to provide the foothold for slavery that proslavery advocates needed and antislavery activists feared.

Thomas Bahde

Thomas Bahde teaches in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion at Oregon State University. He is the author of The Life and Death of Gus Reed: A Story of Race and Justice in Illinois during the Civil War and Reconstruction (2014) and editor of The Story of My Campaign: The Civil War Memoir of Captain Francis T. Moore, Second Illinois Cavalry (2011).

Footnotes

1. Andrew Jackson to Thomas Jefferson, Aug. 18, 1802, and Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, May 26, 1803, in The Papers of Andrew Jackson, Vol. I, 1770-1803, eds. Sam B. Smith and Harriet Chappell Owsley (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), 308-309, 331.

2. On the Ohio Valley salt industry as a factor in early settlement and economic development, see John A. Jakle, “Salt on the Ohio Valley Frontier, 1770-1820,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 59 (Dec. 1969), 687-709. For the salt industry in western Virginia, and especially at Kanawha, see John Edmund Stealey, III, “Slavery and the Western Virginia Salt Industry,” The Journal of Negro History 59 (Apr. 1974), 105-131. For the federal government’s stance on western slavery and inability to enforce slavery restrictions, see John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007); and Paul Finkelman, “Evading the Ordinance: The Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and Illinois,” Journal of the Early Republic 9 (Winter 1989), 343-370; Finkelman, “Slavery and the Northwest Ordinance: A Study in Ambiguity,” Journal of the Early Republic 6 (Winter 1986), 343-370.

3. Recent work on the Ohio River as a borderland has provided a framework for the present article, but also fails to engage the salt industry or the slave hiring allowance. See especially Matthew Salafia, Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage along the Ohio River (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). For an examination of the allowances for servitude and slavery in the Northwest Territory, [End Page 66] and in Illinois and Indiana specifically, see Paul Finkelman, “Evading the Ordinance”; Finkelman, “Slavery and the Northwest Ordinance”; and Finkelman, “Slavery, the ‘More Perfect Union’, and the Prairie State,” Illinois Historical Journal 80 (Winter 1987), 248-269. See also Peter S. Onuf, “From Constitution to Higher Law: The Reinterpretation of the Northwest Ordinance,” Ohio History 94 (1985), 5-33. For the slavery controversy in Illinois, see James Simeone, Democracy and Slavery in Frontier Illinois: The Bottomland Republic (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000); Robert P. Howard, Illinois: A History of the Prairie State (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1972). Early histories of Illinois that cover the saline allowance in the context of the 1823-1824 slavery debates include: Clarence Walworth Alvord, The Illinois Country, 1673-1818 (1920; repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Theodore Calvin Pease, The Frontier State, 1818-1848 (1919; repr., Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1987); and Norman Dwight Harris, The History of Negro Servitude in Illinois, and the Slavery Agitation in that State, 1719-1864 (Chicago: McClurg and Co., 1904).

4. On salt works as market centers, see the store records for 1806-1814 at the Goose Creek Salt Works in Clay County, Kentucky, James and Hugh White Account Books, Special Collections, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky (hereafter FHS); see also Edmund Lyne’s accounting in salt for goods and services at Blue Lick in the Edmund Lyne Estate Papers/Durrett Collection, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (hereafter SCRC).

5. Marcus Huling to David Huling, Oct. 23, 1826, Edward C. Thurman Collection, FHS. Mary Daniel to her brother, Nov. 21, 1783 [typescript], Bullitt’s Lick Papers, vol. 1, Robert Emmett McDowell Collection, FHS. For the Coffee estimate, see J. Ward Barnes, “The Salt Works and Pioneer Life,” in Saline County: A Century of History (Harrisburg, Ill.: Register Publishing Co., 1947), 45, citing from the John Coffee Papers, Dyas Collection, Tennessee State Library and Archives.

6. Ledger entry, undated, appears after entry for Aug. 23, 1788, Edmund Lyne Estate Papers, Durrett Collection, SCRC.

7. Deposition of Nathaniel Harris, Sept. 3, 1796, Bullitt County Circuit Court, Robert Emmett McDowell Collection, vol. 5, p. 90, FHS. George Washington Campbell to Albert Gallatin, Aug. 29, 1808, Brown-Ewell Family Papers, George Washington Campbell Retained Letterbook Drafts 1807-1821, FHS.

8. Thomas Perkins to General Joseph Palmer, July 24, 1785 [typescript], Thomas Perkins Papers, FHS. Nathaniel Pope to Josiah Meigs, Dec. 12, 1816, in “Lead mines and salines. Communicated to the House of Representatives, January 21, 1817,” American State Papers, Public Lands, vol. 3. A traveler to the region in 1808-1809 reported that annual rent for a single furnace at May’s Lick, Kentucky was three hundred dollars. See Fortescue Cuming, Sketches of a Tour to the Western Country (Pittsburgh: Cramer, Spear, and Eichbaum, 1810), 154.

9. Nathaniel Pope to Josiah Meigs, Dec. 12, 1816, in “Lead mines and salines. Communicated to the House of Representatives, January 21, 1817,” American State Papers, Public Lands, vol. 3, 273.

10. Ezekiel Field, Henry Churchill, C. Sanders to Mr. Thomas Joyce, Sept. 23, 1807, Miscellaneous Papers, Thomas Joyce, FHS. See multiple cases from Bullitt and Jefferson Counties, portions of which are transcribed in the Robert Emmett McDowell Papers, FHS.

11. Thomas Perkins to General Joseph Palmer, July 24, 1785 [typescript], Thomas Perkins Papers, FHS. R. Daniel to Col. William Christian, May 7, 1785, Bullitt Family Papers, William Christian Correspondence, FHS.

12. Thomas Prince to David L. Ward, Jan. 14, 1814, Speed Family Papers, David L. Ward Correspondence, FHS. Francis H. Gaines (Little Sandy Salt Works) to David L. Ward (Louisville), Feb. 11, 1815, Speed Family Papers, David L. Ward Correspondence, FHS. Annie Christian to Alexander S. Bu[llitt], Apr. 24, 1788, Bullitt Family Papers, Annie Christian Correspondence, FHS. The antebellum iron industry in the South had much in common with the early salt industry in that free whites and enslaved blacks worked side by side and the system tolerated a more flexible form of slavery, despite work that was miserable and often dangerous. See especially John Bezís-Selfa, “A Tale of Two Ironworks: Slavery, Free Labor, Work, and Resistance in the Early Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly 56 (Oct. 1999), 677-700; and Charles B. Dew, “Disciplining Slave Ironworkers in the Antebellum South: Coercion, Conciliation, and Accommodation,” American Historical Review, 79 (Apr. 1974) 393-418. For slave hiring generally, see Jonathan D. Martin, Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); Keith C. Barton, “‘Good Cooks and Washers’ Slave Hiring, Domestic Labor, and the Market in Bourbon County, Kentucky,” Journal of American History, 84 (Sept. 1997) 436-460; Clement Eaton, “Slave Hiring in the Upper South: A Step Toward Freedom,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 46 (Mar. 1960) 663-678.

13. William S. Green to John C. Green, July 25 1823, Green Family Papers, FHS; Nicholas Merriwether to William Christian, Nov. 7, 1785, Bullitt Family Papers, William Christian Correspondence, FHS. Francis Gaines to David Ward, Mar. 1, 1815, Speed Family Papers, FHS. Deposition of William Crutchlew, Mar. 4, 1808 in Bullitt County Circuit Court, case of Jonathan Irons vs. John Hundley [typescript], Jonathan Irons, Irons Lick, Fort Nonsense, vol. 4, Robert Emmett McDowell Papers, FHS. [End Page 67]

14. Francis H. Gaines (Little Sandy Salt Work) to David L. Ward (Louisville), June 13, 1815, Speed Family Papers, David L. Ward Correspondence, FHS. J[ames?] Colquhoun to David L. Ward, Feb. 21, 1814, Speed Family Papers, David L. Ward Correspondence, FHS.

15. Leonard White to Edward Coles, Oct. 9, 1824, cited in John Musgrave, Slaves, Salt, Sex, and Mr. Crenshaw: The Real Story of the Old Slave House and America’s Reverse Underground R.R. (Marion, Ill.: IllinoisHistory.com, 2005), 151. Musgrave transcribes much of White’s letter and cites a collection at the Illinois State Archives that has since gone missing. Musgrave’s self-published work is problematic for several reasons, but seems at present to be the only source for this letter; the work is cited here with reservation.

16. “Treaty with the Delawares, Etc., 1803,” June 7, 1803, Charles J. Kappler, Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 64-65. Questions submitted to Joseph M. Street, Esq. (with answers) n.d. [1816?], Ninian Edwards Papers, Chicago History Museum, Chicago, Illinois (hereafter CHM). There was a salt works near Ste. Genevieve in the French-held region on the Mississippi River, but its production was relatively small and not widely available to American settlers in the Ohio Valley before 1803. See Jakle, “Salt on the Ohio Valley Frontier, 1770-1820,” 696.

17. With statehood in 1818, control over the salines was transferred to the state, and in the late 1820s Illinois began the decades-long process of privatizing the saline lands. Bate is often identified as “Bates,” but “Bate” occurs more frequently in a wider range of original records. Because multiple and often-overlapping leases and subleases were made throughout the period, it is difficult to establish concrete dates and an exhaustive list of the lessees and sublessees. Lease contract between Jonathan Taylor and Martin Bringman of Jefferson County, Kentucky and William Henry Harrison, Governor of the Indiana Territory, Feb. 27, 1807, Box 1, Folder 1, Ninian Edwards Papers, CHM. Fisher has been tentatively identified as originally from Henderson County, Kentucky, Ratcliff tentatively from Butler County, Kentucky. Willis Hargrave was appointed state inspector of the saline by Governor Shadrach Bond in Apr. 1819, suggesting that he was no longer personally interested in the saline. See Shadrach Bond to Willis Hargrave, Apr. 19, 1819, in Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library, Vol. IV, Executive Series, Vol. I, The Governors’ Letter-Books, 1818-1834, eds. Evarts Boutell Greene and Clarance Walworth Alvord (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1909), 13-14. For the leasers in 1818, see Shadrach Bond to Willis Hargrave, May 18, 1819, in The Governors’ Letter-Books, 1818-1834, 16-17. For Taylor’s 1817 lease, see Ninian Edwards Papers, Illinois History and Lincoln Collections, University Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Two early articles on the Gallatin County salt works with a great deal of partial and unverified information are George W. Smith, “The Salines of Southern Illinois,” Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society for the Year 1904 (Springfield, Ill.: Phillips Brothers, 1904), 245-258; and Jacob W. Myers, “History of the Gallatin County Salines,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 14 (Oct. 1921-Jan. 1922), 337-350.

18. Ninian Edwards to Edward Tiffin, Nov. 9, 1813; and Ninian Edwards to Daniel P. Cook, Dec. 23, 1824, Ninian Edwards Papers, CHM. For an example of the sort of unpleasant and complicated problems Edwards faced, see several letters to Edwards reprinted in Ninian W. Edwards, History of Illinois, from 1778 to 1833 and Life and Times of Ninian Edwards (1870; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1975), 529-543.

19. Lease contract between Jonathan Taylor and Martin Bringman of Jefferson County, Kentucky and William Henry Harrison, Governor of the Indiana Territory, Feb. 27, 1807, Ninian Edwards Papers, CHM. Christian Schultz, Travels on an Inland Voyage (New York: Isaac Riley, 1810), 199. Albert Gallatin to Thomas Jefferson, Nov. 3, 1808, including report entitled “Wabash Salines,” The Thomas Jefferson Papers, series 1: General Correspondence, 1651-1827, Library of Congress.

20. Taylor/Bringman lease with Harrison and proposed amendment to lease, dated Aug. 10, 1808, Ninian Edwards Papers, CHM. Albert Gallatin to Ninian Edwards, June 29, 1810, and Jonathan Taylor to Ninian Edwards, Aug. 12, 1810, Ninian Edwards Papers, CHM.

21. Albert Gallatin to Ninian Edwards, June 29, 1810, and Jonathan Taylor to Ninian Edwards, Aug. 12, 1810, Ninian Edwards Papers, CHM. For the difficulties of running the saline, see Pease, The Frontier State, 65-66.

22. “An Act concerning the introduction of Negroes and Mulattoes into this Territory,” Aug. 26, 1805, Laws of the Indiana Territory, vol. 21 of Illinois State Historical Society Collections, ed. Francis S. Philbrick (Springfield: Illinois Historical Library, 1930), 136-39; “An Act concerning negroes and Mulattos,” Dec. 22, 1814, The Laws of Illinois Territory, 25: 157-158. A list of holders of slave indentures or leases within the U.S. Saline in 1810 was compiled from the Servitude and Emancipation Records Database, Illinois State Archives, http://www.ilsos.gov/GenealogyMWeb/servfrm.html, accessed Nov. 20, 2011.

23. U.S. 12th Congress, 1811-1813, House of Representatives, Feb. 6, 1813, “A Bill to Encourage the Making of Salt” (Washington, DC, 1818), Early American Imprints no. 30142. S[hadrach] Bond to Ninian Edwards, Feb. 7, 1813, Ninian Edwards Papers, [End Page 68] CHM. “An act concerning negroes and Mulattos,” The Laws of Illinois Territory, 25: 157-158.

24. Questions submitted to Joseph M. Street, Esq. (with answers) n.d. [1816?], Ninian Edwards Papers, CHM. Deposition of Joseph M. Street before Justice of the Peace R. C. Weightman, Washington, DC, signed Mar. 11, 1820, Ninian Edwards Papers, CHM.

25. Report of the Secretary of the Treasury, on the case of John Bate, Dec. 24, 1817, Serial Set Vol. No. 7, Session Vol. No.3, 15th Congress, 1st Session. H.Doc. 38. Leonard White to Josiah Meigs, Aug. 17, 1816, in “Lead mines and salines. Communicated to the House of Representatives, January 21, 1817,” American State Papers, Public Lands, 3: 272. Jonathan Taylor to William Taylor, Nov. 19, 1815, Miss Marion Amis Green Collection, FHS.

26. On the division of the lease in 1817-1818, see Bond to Hargrave, May 18, 1819, in Greene and Alvord, eds., The Governors’ Letter-Books, 1818-1834, 16-17. Leonard White to Josiah Meigs, Aug. 17, 1816, in “Lead mines and salines. Communicated to the House of Representatives, January 21, 1817,” American State Papers, Public Lands, 3: 272.

27. For the role of the saline slave hiring allowance in the slavery debates, see Pease, The Frontier State, 73-74, 84-85. After 1825, it was illegal to use rented slaves from other states within the Illinois saline, but the practice of using legally indentured black servants as permitted under Article Six of the constitution continued until a new state constitution was adopted in 1848, although many of these contracts were illegally or fraudulently made. [End Page 69]

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