History of slavery in Kentucky

The history of slavery in Kentucky dates from the earliest permanent European settlements in the state, until the end of the Civil War. In 1830, enslaved African Americans represented 24 percent of Kentucky's population, a share that declined to 19.5 percent by 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. Most enslaved people were concentrated in the cities of Louisville and Lexington and in the hemp- and tobacco-producing Bluegrass Region and Jackson Purchase. Other enslaved people lived in the Ohio River counties, where they were most often used in skilled trades or as house servants. Relatively few people were held in slavery in the mountainous regions of eastern and southeastern Kentucky, where they served primarily as artisans and service workers in towns.^[1]

Kentucky was classified as the Upper South or a border state, between free states to the north and fellow slave-owning states to the south. Its farmers included independent, hardscrabble white farming families as well as plantation owners like those of the Deep South. Kentucky had southern economic, cultural, and social ties to slavery and plantations, and engagement with northern free-state industrialism and also western frontier ethos.

Kentucky entered the Union as a state deeply divided over the issue of slavery. The conflicting pulls of northern economic relations, westward expansion, and fundamental southern support for slavery and southern-style plantations caused Kentuckians to be morally divided over the issue of slavery before, during, and immediately after the Civil War.^[1]

Ellen Scott was raised enslaved in Owensboro, in Daviess County, Kentucky, as property of a planter named Albert Ewell. On the occasion of Lincoln's birthday in 1930, she recalled to a newspaper reporter her emancipation at age 12: "We could not feel the joy that folks think we felt. We had not been taught to have feelings, except fear; ground down, beaten, taught that negroes should not be allowed to read or write, there was but one thing we thought of. It was the lash, the horrible way it whistled on our backs, and the beatings we received...We are happy now. The Negro is making progress and becoming educated. I try to forget the days when I was a child. I have forgotten everything but the whip and the war."^[2]

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