CITY STREETS / LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY
Slave Traders of Louisville, Kentucky
Louisville’s slave traders were the prime movers of American slavery
In 1838, Henry Bibb, an African American enslaved man, was being led through Louisville’s streets when he managed to escape his captors. As was typical for the time for any fugitive from bondage, Bibb was immediately pursued by mobs of angry, armed white men who banded together to pursue runaways, often for a reward of no more than a free drink of whiskey from the slave owners.
Bibb was born in 1815 to Mildred Jackson, an enslaved woman on a Shelby County, Kentucky, plantation. His father was James Bibb, a state senator for Kentucky. In 1850 Bibb detailed his Louisville escape in his autobiography Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself, a book that went on to become one of the best-known narratives of an enslaved man during the antebellum period. During his escape, the streets of Louisville held no refuge for Bibb. “To me,” he wrote, “it was like a person entering a wilderness among wolves and vipers, blindfolded.” He hid under a pile of wood during the day and could only move about in the dark of night.
Bibb was eventually caught near Lake Eerie, brought back to Louisville, and placed in the city’s workhouse, a place he described as “hell.” Prisoners were made to saw or break stones while dragging around massive logs chained to their feet at all times. Bibb endured this punishment for three months. He wrote that during his time at the workhouse, his wife Malinda was held at a “private house” where, according to him, the slave traders satisfied their “basest purposes.” At the workhouse, Bibb learned that his owner had sold him to one of the most notorious, cruel, and mean-tempered slave traders of Louisville, a man named Mathew Garrison.
At the end of his prison time in the workhouse, Bibb, along with other enslaved people, was “marched off to the river Ohio to take passage on board the steamboat Water Witch,” a name befitting the transport downriver to the slave marts and auction houses of New Orleans and Natchez.
The scholar Bridget Ford, in her 2016 book, Bonds of Union: Religion, Race, And Politics in A Civil War Borderland, writes, “White Kentuckians, and especially Louisville’s slave traders were the prime movers of American slavery.” The slave trade thrived in Louisville due mainly to satisfy the Deep South’s insatiable hunger for free labor for its cotton plantations. During the antebellum period, Kentucky’s traders sold an estimated seventy-seven thousand enslaved people out of state and into the Deep South. Being shipped south from Louisville on the Ohio River is the basis for the expression “sold down the river.”
The flourishing slave trade of Louisville, Kentucky, is one of the most overlooked and downplayed chapters in the narrative of the South’s enslavement of American Americans. It is instructive to look back at the history of slave trading in America and the rise of cotton in the South to understand how they fueled Louisville’s slave trade.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade
The Transatlantic Slave Trade was the most massive forced deportation of humans in history. Over four-hundred years, 12.5 million Africans were enslaved and shipped across the Atlantic to provide free labor for tobacco, coffee, sugar, and cotton plantations located in the Americas. These high-value commodities were then sent to Europe and sold. The slave trade profits created the powerhouse economies of Denmark, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United States.
The 5,000-mile journey across the Atlantic, also known as the Middle Passage, was notorious for its horrors. The ships were tightly packed with not enough room for the Africans to sit up. The heat in the holding areas was unbearable. Oxygen levels would often become so low that the candles would not burn. Scholars write that between 15 and 25 percent of the enslaved blacks died aboard these ships.
The majority of the enslaved people’s destination was the colonies in the Caribbean, Brazil, and Jamaica. Although the United States only took in less than 4% of the entire volume of the Transatlantic Slave trade — an estimated 500,000, the reproduction rate in America was much higher than elsewhere. Thus, births to enslaved women soon outnumbered imports.
The first enslaved African Americans landed in Point Comfort, Virginia, in 1619 via the cargo ships White Lion and Treasurer. They were transported to Jamestown and sold into servitude.
At first sight, it may appear odd that an emerging society so profoundly tied to its Christian roots may condone slavery. Early Americans often used tortured biblical interpretations to justify slavery. For example, Genesis 9:20–27 tells Noah and Ham’s story, resulting in Canaan’s curse, which marked all descendants as slaves. Furthermore, Genesis 17:12–13, 27, mentions servants bought and established as inheritable property. More than anything else, it seemed enough that the Bible takes the existence of slavery for granted. Many years later, when the Deep South had a large enslaved population, ministers would point out that the Hebrews, God’s chosen people, had owned slaves and that Christ had never condemned slavery.
The Rise of Cotton
The temperate climate of Kentucky and its relatively short growing season was ill-suited to extensive plantation-style agriculture. However, the spread of cotton cultivation in the Deep South created an intense demand for enslaved labor in the Gulf States. The textile industry’s extraordinary growth in Britain and New England between the 1800–1850s was responsible for the high demand for cotton. The invention of the cotton gin, which allowed for easy separation of the seeds, did not reduce the labor needed for cotton picking. The gin had the opposite effect and made cotton production extremely profitable for the first time, thereby increasing the need for enslaved workers. In 1808 international slave trade was banned in the United States. Hence, the domestic slave trade was the only option to meet this insatiable need.
The result was a flourishing business based on African Americans’ sale from the Upper South, where cotton could not be grown, to the Deep South, where cotton had become the prime crop. In effect, although Kentucky did not benefit as much directly from enslaved labor, the Commonwealth became wealthy from selling enslaved people to the Deep South. The period’s primary transportation routes were over water, and the Ohio River became a major route to move enslaved laborers downriver. Louisville’s location at the Ohio banks placed it in a prime spot for slave trading in the city. Through the 1850s, Louisville exported 2,500–4,000 enslaved African Americans a year to the Deep South.
Due to its long growing season, cotton was a labor-intensive crop. Enslaved workers plowed the land in March, dropped seeds into the ground in April, and continuously worked to clear away the surrounding grass once the plant grew. In between, they had to plant corn and peas to feed themselves. Once cotton ripened in August, the long four-month picking season began. Being sent to the Deep South’s cotton plantations was a fate all enslaved people dreaded, for it meant backbreaking labor, disease, malnutrition, and death.
The Economy of the South Versus the North
Before we get to the devastating effect Louisville’s slave trade had on African Americans, it is first useful to highlight just how critical enslaved labor had become to the Southern elite’s survival.
Many slavery apologists have downplayed the critical importance of slave labor in the Southern economy. However, slavery in the South was a colossal institution. By 1860, out of a total U.S. population of 12 million, the enslaved people numbered over 4 million. The money invested in buying enslaved people accounted for 20% of the entire national wealth. Slaveholding accounted for more national wealth in the U.S. than railroads and manufacturing combined. Whereas the investment in railroads and manufacturing totaled $2.2 billion, the wealth in the purchase cost of enslaved labor was $3 billion. A critical distinguishing fact highlighted by historians is that northerners invested in land, whereas southerners invested in enslaved people.
Wealthy Southerners were not interested in the way Northerners built their wealth. They looked down on it. “We have no cities — we don’t want them,” said U.S. Senator Louis Wigfall of Texas in 1861. “We want no manufacturers: we desire no trading, no mechanical or manufacturing classes…As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want.”
One of the Southern-secession movement’s notable leader and proponent, William Lowndes Yancey, told a Louisville audience in October of 1860 that Lincoln’s election would spell the South’s end. He went on to say:
“Twenty-eight hundred millions of dollars are to be affected by the decision of this question. Four millions of people are to be affected by it — four millions of slaves. Not only that, but the social and domestic relations of the eight millions of whites of the South are of necessity more or less affected by the decision of this question.”
It was no surprise that the South was willing to go to war over the question of slavery. Their enormous wealth was all tied up in it.
The Slave “Trail of Tears”
Many are familiar with the Native American Trail of Tears when President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Ultimately, thousands of Native Americans were forcibly relocated from the southeastern United States to the lands West of Mississippi River — a journey of 1,000 miles. As a result, 4,000 Cherokee men, women, and children died of exposure, disease, and starvation. The Cherokee Natives refer to this forced relocation as “Trail where they cried.”
However, few have heard of the “Slave Trail of Tears” or what is sometimes known as the Second Middle Passage.
In the 50 years before the Civil War, over a million enslaved blacks were forcibly moved from the Upper South states of Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky to the Deep South states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The rise of “King Cotton” in the South was directly responsible for this migration. To give an idea of this resettlement’s scope, the Smithsonian Institution states that it was 20 times larger than Andrew Jackson’s Native American removal of the 1830s. It was bigger than the 19th-century immigration of Jews to the United States when some 500,000 people arrived from Russia and Eastern Europe. It was larger than the famous wagon-train migration to the West, a vital part of the American story. This thousand-mile forced March of enslaved African Americans lasted longer and displaced more people than any other migration in North America before 1900.
Families were broken apart in this forced migration. In many cases, the slave traders separated children from their parents and wives from their husbands. “Tomorrow the negroes are to get off [to Kentucky],” a Virginian slave-owning woman wrote to a friend, “and I expect there will be great crying and moaning, with children leaving there mothers, mothers there children, and women there husband.”
Virginia was the most significant source for this deportation, with 450,000 people forcibly sent south between 1810 and 1860. In one year alone, 1857, the sale of enslaved people from Virginia amounted to $4 million — $440 million in today’s money.
The Slave Trail of Tears was many routes that led from the Upper South to the Deep South. In some instances, slaver traders marched enslaved blacks from Virginia or Maryland to Louisville, Kentucky. There they boarded steamboats that took them downriver to the booming slave markets of New Orleans or Natchez. There is a record of a steamer Hibernia, which arrived in Mississippi from Louisville in 1831. The enslaved passengers on the Hibernia all came from Albemarle County, Virginia. They had been force-marched in chains — a distance of nearly 500 miles to Louisville, where they had boarded the steamboat on the Ohio River to journey South.
The slave merchants moved the enslaved African Americans in “coffles” — a once-common word, which refers to a line of cattle or people fastened and driven along together. Bound by chains, often in groups as large as 200, they were sometimes accompanied by musicians to keep them “in good spirit.” They sometimes sang — mostly they were forced to, as they marched, but the songs were sad tales of separation and reunion only after death. But no matter. “The negroes are happy,” wrote William Waller, a trader who in 1847 walked from Virginia to Louisiana with his 20 enslaved workers — some as young as 8, all taken from their families and sold in the Deep South.
Slavery in Kentucky
In 1940, the historian J. Winston Coleman wrote a book titled Slavery in Kentucky. “Generally speaking,” he wrote, “the slaves [in Kentucky] were a happy, contented and carefree race; well-fed, as their looks testified, well-lodged and not overworked.” This assertion fits well with Kentucky’s lasting attempts to soft-pedal slavery’s role in its economy and culture. Coleman’s deeply-flawed perspective came to dominate the scholarly view of slavery in Kentucky for the next 50 years. Surprisingly, some anti-slavery activists also fell victim to this repeated assertion of the “mildness” of slavery in the Upper South state. Kentucky’s white people insisted on the idea that “slavery assumes its best aspect” in their Commonwealth.
Only in the last few decades, scholars like George C. Wright, J. Blaine Hudson, Gerald L. Smith, and Luther Adams have reevaluated African Americans’ history in Kentucky — and, more specifically, Louisville. These scholars’ work has provided ample evidence that this view of slavery being “mild” in Kentucky is entirely false. Buying, selling, leasing, insuring, and even borrowing against enslaved African Americans as commodities in Kentucky was a huge business.
It was only in the period following the Civil War that various organized and influential groups of Confederate veterans and their families began to rewrite the history of slavery and the reasons for the war. This effort came to be known as the Lost Cause. During this revisionist period, Kentuckians published textbooks, pamphlets, and periodicals that have affected and colored American slavery’s story right up to the modern era.
George C. Wright, currently a visiting professor of history at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, who has written numerous books on the history of African Americans in Louisville, describes the goal of his life’s work by saying:
“If I did nothing more than refute the assertion made by numerous scholars that, given the state’s proximity to the North, conditions were better for Kentucky blacks than for their southern counterparts, my work would have some value.”
The Business of Slavery in Louisville, Kentucky
Historians write that Louisville’s central business district “grew thick” with slave traders and slave pens through the antebellum period. It is impossible to overstate the scope of enslavement business in the River City. By 1860, with a total population of just 68,000, Louisville had some 300 firms purchasing and selling enslaved blacks.
There are heartrending accounts of hundreds of African-American “old gray-headed fathers & mothers” weeping at the open-air auctions of their enslaved offspring on Market Street. The children were to be shipped South and would never see their parents again. Karl Bernhard, a German traveler, described being a witness to the “revolting spectacle” of a pregnant mulatto woman auctioned off for $400 with her two children in a “coffee-house” of Louisville.
According to scholars, buying and selling of enslaved blacks was a normalized trade in Louisville. City directories of the time listed slave dealers with other respectable businesses such as lawyers and bankers, and newspapers ran advertisements for slave traders without any hesitation or reservations. Louisvillians saw the slave business, much like any other capitalist enterprise. Some of the more prominent traders in Louisville were W.F. Davis, William Kelly, John Clark, Thomas Powell, Jordan and Tarlton Arteburn, William F. Talbot, John Mattingly, and Mathew Garrison.
Buyers preferred enslaved people in their prime, ideally between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. In the early 1800’s one could expect to pay $350 to $450 for a female and between $400 and $700 for a male. In 2020 money, that translates to $7,200 to $9,200 for female and $8,200 to $14,400 for a male. Prices rose dramatically once the Southern trade heated up, and by 1860, prime enslaved people of both sexes brought in between $1,500 and $2,000, which roughly converts to $44,000 and $58,000 in 2020 dollars.
A lesser-known and an entirely separate category of enslaved African Americans consisted of what was known as the “fancy girls” trade. These were young, attractive, usually light-skinned, or mulatto females destined to be sex slaves or prostitutes. Buyers paid much higher prices for fancy girls — sometimes as high as 300% over the median prices, depending on their skin color, youthful appearance, and the beauty of their features. By the 1860s, their prices had risen as high as $2,000 ($58,000 in 2020) or more. There are records of men having paid over $5,000 ($157,000 in today’s money) for some fancy girls. The Kentucky Derby was a peak time for the fancy girls’ trade as wealthy men from around the country came to Louisville to bet on horse races.
In Louisville today, a historical marker on 2nd and Market Streets memorializes the slave trade. The last line on the marker states, “Slave traders were often social outcasts avoided by all but fellow traders.” Historians and researchers have long dismissed this view of slave traders as unsavory characters as pure propaganda. The city benefitted directly from the slave trade. By 1860 as much as 20% of Louisville’s revenue came from taxes on slaves.
The Life of Henry Bibb
After being shipped from Louisville to New Orleans, Bibb escaped once again. Relentlessly pursued by his captors, he was caught by them. Bibb’s life became a cycle of escapes and recaptures as he kept trying to get back to his family and take them to Canada.
Eventually, Bibb left for Canada without his family. He became a lecturer, abolitionist, author, and newspaperman. In 1851 Bibb set up the first black newspaper in Canada, The Voice of the Fugitive. He remained active in abolitionist causes to the end of his life.
On February 26th, 1851, Bibb penned an editorial in his newspaper titled “ANOTHER SOUL-DRIVER GONE.”
Bibb wrote:
“ANOTHER SOUL-DRIVER GONE
M. Garrison, of Louisville, Ky., whole life has been spent in making brothels, prostitutes, widows, and orphans, is at last dead and gone to his reward. In the fall of 1839, he bought and carried us, confined with irons in connection with other slaves, to the city of New Orleans and sold us. We have often witnessed his cruelty towards his victims, both male and female, when they were confined with heavy irons and could not help themselves. We have heard him say that he never felt happier than when he had a female confined and apply a scourge to her back –” ah! how he liked to hear them beg and scream.” He would often travel through the State of Kentucky to buy up the handsomest mulatto female slaves that he could find, without any regard to separating husbands and wives, and would take them to New Orleans, and sell them for the basest purposes. He kept a slave pen in the city of Louisville for several years. A fugitive, who has just arrived in Canada, from that city, informs us that Garrison had a falling out with one of his slave holding chums, who shot Garrison through the head with two balls from a revolver; which is the way such characters generally settle their difficulties, before they leave the world.”
In 1854, 16 years after he escaped from the slave traders of Louisville, Kentucky, Henry Bibb died in Canada at the age of 39.
