Sherry Chandler

Nothing is that simple…

Literary Journeys was cancelled this spring, a considerable disappointment to me. I love the way this series of book discussions at the Kentucky History Center combines literature and history. The series has taught me much about the literary and social history of Kentucky and introduced me to works I probably would never have read otherwise, including Edith Summers Kelley’s Weeds (Feminist Press, 1982), a description of the lives of tobacco tenant farmers in Scott County first published in 1923. Other discoveries: Caroline Gordon’s Green Centuries and Richard Taylor’s Girty. The latter is out of print but Wind Publications will have a new edition out soon.

Some of the things I’ve learned have been disturbing, especially in studying the colonial period. Kentucky may have been a new Eden but there was more than one original sin. Our state was born out of wars of aggression and the exploitation of people of color. Consider, for example, this passage from Ellen Eslinger’s article “The Shape of Slavery on the Kentucky Frontier, 1775-1800″ from The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 1994, volume 92, pages 1-23:

The strong western demand for slave labor boosted price levels significantly. By the early 1790s, an adult male slave who might sell for seventy pounds in Virginia sold for a hundred pounds in Kentucky. The ready market for slaves encouraged at least some prospective migrants to bring surplus slaves for western sale. Kentuckian William Christian, for example, warned his mother, who was living in Botetourt County and preparing to join him in Kentucky that the western economy was so utterly devoid of cash that it was difficult to make any kind of purchase. The only item readily accepted in lieu of cash was slaves. Christian advised, “Unless you can sell in Botetourt to get some good working Negroes & money to bring with you you had better remain where you are.” Slaves were among the most liquid of western assets.

This great demand for labor came about because free men and women could not be hired to do the hard work of clearing and domesticating paradise, especially when they could go and claim land of their own. Seldom told in the legends of intrepids such as Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton, villains like Simon Girty, is the fact that much of the hard work of turning Kentucky into a land of plantations and horses was done by slaves. And though Kentucky never had the vast numbers of slaves that cotton states like Georgia and Alabama had, we continued a disturbing tendency to treat slaves as a “cash crop.”

Why do I bring this up now? For one thing because a couple of fairly recent collections by Kentucky poets have highlighted slave contributions: Davis McComb’s Ultime Thule, which deals with Stephen Bishop, the slave who mapped much of Mammoth Cave, and more recently Frank X. Walker’s Buffalo Dance, which deals with York, the slave who was taken along on the Lewis & Clark Expedition.

But there’s another relevance to current times and that has to do with the role of evangelical religion in politics. According to Eslinger’s article, it was not always a done deal that Kentucky would be a slave state:

In contrast to other states, Kentucky’s religious culture was dominated by evangelical denominations which provided a strong base of support for emancipation—strong enough to give prospective settlers who owned slaves reason for pause. While making plans to migrate in 1792, John Breckinridge confessed, “I am somewhat afraid of the Kentucky politicians with respect to negroes.” Similarly in 1798, a new settler named David Meade believed that western support of emancipation was strong enough that “I would not advise Slaveholders to come here immediately.” Emancipation stood as Kentucky’s most controversial political issue, dominating the state constitutional debates in 1792 and 1799.

Unfortunately, as Eslinger points out, the battle was lost:

The importance of slavery in frontier agriculture thus extended beyond the number of actual slaveowners. When Kentucky became a state in 1792, there existed enough support for slavery to overcome a strong church-based emancipation movement. Indeed, Kentucky was the first state to grant slavery constitutional protection.

Evangelical religion has played a strong role in the fight against slavery in this country. Martin Luther King, Jr., himself, was an evangelical preacher. So what has happened to transform our evangelicals from progressives to repressives? And what does this transformation indicate about the role of religion in politics? Good when it’s on our side, bad when it’s not? I just don’t know. But it’s all very distressing from beginning to end.

Related posts:

Niger ex-slave wins landmark case

Miscegenation, incest, manumission

Kentucky Revised Statute 158.190

Freedom from a State Religion

Frye on Poetry and Religion

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