ago impoverished the soil almost beyond recovery and became
entirely unprofitable."
Those words were written some thirty-five years ago and refer to a time
long prior to that date. Now, the fact is that at least one-half the
soil of Kentucky has never been under cultivation, and could not,
therefore, have been exhausted by slave-labor. At least a half of the
remainder, though cultivated ever since, is still not seriously
exhausted; and of the small portion still left a large share was always
naturally poor, so that for this reason slave-labor was but little
employed on it. The great slave-holding region of the State was the
fertile region which has never been impoverished. To return from this
digression, it may be well that the typical Kentucky farmer does not
find among his negroes a bad one; for in consequence of the early
non-importation of slaves for barter or sale, and through long
association with the household, they have been greatly elevated and
humanized. If he must sell a good one, he will seek a buyer among his
neighbors. He will even ask the negro to name his choice of a master and
try to consummate his wish. No purchaser near by, he will mount his
saddle-horse and look for one in the adjoining county. In this way the
negroes of different estates and neighborhoods were commonly connected
by kinship and intermarriage. How unjust to say that such a master did
not feel affection for his slaves, anxiety for their happiness, sympathy
with the evils inseparable from their condition. Let me cite the case of
a Kentucky master who had failed. He could pay his debts by sacrificing
his negroes or his farm, one or the other. To avoid separating the
former, probably sending some of them South, he kept them in a body and
sold his farm. Any one who knows the Kentuckian's love of land and home
will know what this means. A few years, and the war left him without
anything. Another case is more interesting still. A master having
failed, actually hurried his negroes off to Canada. Tried for defrauding
his creditors, and that by slave-holding jurors, he was acquitted. The
plea of his counsel, among other arguments, was the master's
unwillingness to see his old and faithful servitors scattered and
suffering. After emancipation old farm hands sometimes refused to budge
from their cabins. Their former masters paid them for their services as
long as they could work, and supported them when helpless. I have in
mind an instance where a man, having left Kentucky, sent back hundreds
of dollars to an aged, needy domestic, though himself far from rich; and
another case where a man still contributes annually to the maintenance
of those who ceased to work for him the quarter of a century ago.
The good in human nature is irrepressible. Slavery, evil as it was, when
looked at from the remoteness of human history as it is to be, will be
adjudged an institution that gave development to certain noble types of
character. Along with other social forces peculiar to the age, it
produced in Kentucky a kind of farmer, the like of which will never
appear again. He had the aristocratic virtues: highest notions of
personal liberty and personal honor, a fine especial scorn of anything
that was mean, little, cowardly. As an agriculturist he was not driving
or merciless or grasping; the rapid amassing of wealth was not among his
passions, the contention of splendid living not among his thorns. To a
certain carelessness of riches he added a certain profuseness of
expenditure; and indulgent towards his own pleasures, towards others,
his equals or dependents, he bore himself with a spirit of kindness and
magnanimity. Intolerant of tyranny, he was no tyrant. To say of such a
man, as Jefferson said of every slave-holder, that he lived in perpetual
exercise of the most boisterous passions and unremitting despotism, and
in the exaction of the most degrading submission, was to pronounce
judgment hasty and unfair. Rather did Mrs. Stowe, while not blind to his
faults, discern his virtues when she made him, embarrassed by debt,
exclaim: "If anybody had said to me that I should sell Tom down South to
one of those rascally traders, I should have said, 'Is thy servant a dog
that he should do this thing?'"
IV
But there was another person who, more than the master, sustained close
relationship to the negro life of the household--the mistress. In the
person of Mrs. Shelby, Mrs. Stowe described some of the best traits of
a Kentucky woman of the time; but perhaps only a Southern woman herself
could do full justice to a character which many duties and many burdens
endued with extraordinary strength and varied efficiency.
She was mistress of distinct realms--the house and the cabins--and the
guardian of the bonds between the two, which were always troublesome,
often delicate, sometimes distressing. In those cabins were nearly
always some poor creatures needing sympathy and watch-care: the
superannuated mothers helpless with babes, babes helpless without
mothers, the sick, perhaps the idiotic. Apparel must be had for all.
Standing in her door-way and pointing to the meadow, she must be able to
say in the words of a housewife of the period, "There are the sheep; now
get your clothes." Some must be taught to keep the spindle and the loom
going; others trained for dairy, laundry, kitchen, dining-room; others
yet taught fine needle-work. Upon her fell the labor of private
instruction and moral exhortation, for the teaching of negroes was not
forbidden in Kentucky.
She must remind them that their marriage vows are holy and binding; must
interpose between mothers and their cruel punishment of their own
offspring. Hardest of all, she must herself punish for lying, theft,
immorality. Her own children must be guarded against temptation and
corrupting influences. In her life no cessation of this care year in
and year out. Beneath every other trouble the secret conviction that she
has no right to enslave these creatures, and that, however improved
their condition, their life is one of great and necessary evils. Mrs.
Stowe well makes her say: "I have tried--tried most faithfully as a
Christian woman should--to do my duty towards these poor, simple,
dependent creatures. I have cared for them, instructed them, watched
over them, and known all their little cares and joys for years.... I
have taught them the duties of the family, of parent and child, and
husband and wife.... I thought, by kindness and care and instruction, I
could make the condition of mine better than freedom." Sorely
overburdened and heroic mould of woman! Fulfilling each day a round of
intricate duties, rising at any hour of the night to give medicine to
the sick, liable at any time, in addition to the cares of her great
household, to see an entire family of acquaintances arriving
unannounced, with trunks and servants of their own, for a visit
protracted in accordance with the large hospitalities of the time. What
wonder if, from sheer inability to do all things herself, she trains her
negroes to different posts of honor, so that the black cook finally
expels her from her own kitchen and rules over that realm as an autocrat
of unquestioned prerogatives?
Mistresses of this kind had material reward in the trusty adherence of
their servants during the war. Their relations throughout this
period--so well calculated to try the loyalty of the African
nature--would of themselves make up a volume of the most touching
incidents. Even to-day one will find in many Kentucky households
survivals of the old order--find "Aunt Chloe" ruling as a despot in the
kitchen, and making her will the pivotal point of the whole domestic
system. I have spent nights with a young Kentuckian, self-willed and
high-spirited, whose occasional refusals to rise for a half-past five
o'clock breakfast always brought the cook from the kitchen up to his
bedroom, where she delivered her commands in a voice worthy of Catherine
the Great. "We shall have to get up," he would say, "or there'll be a
row!" One may yet see old negresses setting out for an annual or a
semi-annual visit to their former mistresses, and bearing some
offering--a basket of fruits or flowers. I should like to mention the
case of one who died after the war and left her two children to her
mistress, to be reared and educated. The troublesome, expensive charge
was faithfully executed.
Here, in the hard realities of daily life, here is where the crushing
burden of slavery fell--on the women of the South. History has yet to do
justice to the noblest type of them, whether in Kentucky or elsewhere.
In view of what they accomplished, despite the difficulties in their
way, there is nothing they have found harder to forgive in the women of
the North than the failure to sympathize with them in the struggles and
sorrows of their lot, and to realize that _they_ were the real practical
philanthropists of the negro race.
V
But as is the master, so is the slave, and it is through the characters
of the Shelbys that we must approach that of Uncle Tom. For of all
races, the African--superstitious, indolent, singing, dancing,
impressionable creature--depends upon others for enlightenment,
training, and happiness. If, therefore, you find him so intelligent that
he may be sent on important business, so honest that he may be trusted
with money, house, and home, so loyal that he will not seize opportunity
to become free; if you find him endowed with the manly virtues of
dignity and self-respect united to the Christian virtues of humility,
long-suffering, and forgiveness, then do not, in marvelling at him on
these accounts, quite forget his master and his mistress--they made him
what he was. And it is something to be said on their behalf, that in
their household was developed a type of slave that could be set upon a
sublime moral pinnacle to attract the admiration of the world.
Attention is fixed on Uncle Tom first as head-servant of the farm. In a
small work on slavery in Kentucky by George Harris, it is stated that
masters chose the cruelest of their negroes for this office. It is not
true, exceptions allowed for. The work would not be worth mentioning,
had not so many people at the North believed it. The amusing thing is,
they believed Mrs. Stowe also. But if Mrs. Stowe's account of slavery in
Kentucky is true, Harris's is not.
It is true that Uncle Tom inspired the other negroes with some degree of
fear. He was censor of morals, and reported derelictions of the lazy,
the destructive, and the thievish. For instance, an Uncle Tom on one
occasion told his master of the stealing of a keg of lard, naming the
thief and the hiding-place. "Say not a word about it," replied his
master. The next day he rode out into the field where the culprit was
ploughing, and, getting down, walked along beside him. "What's the
matter, William?" he asked, after a while; "you can't look me in the
face as usual." William burst into tears, and confessed everything.
"Come to-night, and I will arrange so that you can put the lard back and
nobody will ever know you took it." The only punishment was a little
moral teaching; but the Uncle Tom in the case, though he kept his
secret, looked for some days as though the dignity of his office had not
been suitably upheld by his master.
It was Uncle Tom's duty to get the others off to work in the morning.
In the fields he did not drive the work, but led it--being a
master-workman--led the cradles and the reaping-hooks, the hemp-breaking
and the corn-shucking. The spirit of happy music went with the workers.
They were not goaded through their daily tasks by the spur of pitiless
husbandry. Nothing was more common than their voluntary contests of
skill and power. My recollection reaches only to the last two or three
years of slavery; but I remember the excitement with which I witnessed
some of these hard-fought battles of the negroes. Rival hemp-breakers of
the neighborhood, meeting in the same field, would slip out long before
breakfast and sometimes never stop for dinner. So it was with cradling,
corn-shucking, or corn-cutting--in all work where rivalries were
possible. No doubt there were other motives. So much work was a day's
task; for more there was extra pay. A capital hand, by often performing
double or treble the required amount, would clear a neat profit in a
season. The days of severest labor fell naturally in harvest-time. But
then intervals of rest in the shade were commonly given; and milk,
coffee, or, when the prejudice of the master did not prevent (which was
not often), whiskey was distributed between meal-times. As a rule they
worked without hurry. De Tocqueville gave unintentional testimony to
characteristic slavery in Kentucky when he described the negroes as
"loitering" in the fields. On one occasion the hands dropped work to run
after a rabbit the dogs had started. A passer-by indignantly reported
the fact to the master. "Sir," said the old gentleman, with a hot face,
"I'd have whipped the last d----n rascal of 'em if they _hadn't_ run
'im!"
[Illustration: CHASING THE RABBIT.]
The negroes made money off their truck-patches, in which they raised
melons, broom-corn, vegetables. When Charles Sumner was in Kentucky, he
saw with almost incredulous eyes the comfortable cabins with their
flowers and poultry, the fruitful truck-patches, and a genuine Uncle
Tom--"a black gentleman with his own watch!" Well enough does Mrs. Stowe
put these words into her hero's mouth, when he hears he is to be sold:
"I'm feared things will be kinder goin' to rack when I'm gone. Mas'r
can't be 'spected to be a-pryin' round everywhere as I've done,
a-keepin' up all the ends. The boys means well, but they's powerful
car'less."
More interesting is Uncle Tom's character as a preacher. Contemporary
with him in Kentucky was a class of men among his people who exhorted,
held prayer-meetings in the cabins and baptizings in the woods,
performed marriage ceremonies, and enjoyed great freedom of movement.
There was one in nearly every neighborhood, and together they wrought
effectively in the moral development of their race. I have nothing to
say here touching the vast and sublime conception which Mrs. Stowe
formed of "Uncle Tom's" spiritual nature. But no idealized manifestation
of it is better than this simple occurrence: One of these negro
preachers was allowed by his master to fill a distant appointment.
Belated once, and returning home after the hour forbidden for slaves to
be abroad, he was caught by the patrol and cruelly whipped. As the blows
fell, his only words were: "Jesus Christ suffered for righteousness'
sake; so kin I." Another of them was recommended for deacon's orders and
actually ordained. When liberty came, he refused to be free, and
continued to work in his master's family till his death. With
considerable knowledge of the Bible and a fluent tongue, he would
nevertheless sometimes grow confused while preaching and lose his train
of thought. At these embarrassing junctures it was his wont suddenly to
call out at the top of his voice, "Saul! Saul! why persecutest thou me?"
The effect upon his hearers was electrifying; and as none but a very
highly favored being could be thought worthy of enjoying this
persecution, he thus converted his loss of mind into spiritual
reputation. A third, named Peter Cotton, united the vocations of
exhorter and wood-chopper. He united them literally, for one moment
Peter might be seen standing on his log chopping away, and the next
kneeling down beside it praying. He got his mistress to make him a long
jeans coat and on the ample tails of it to embroider, by his direction,
sundry texts of Scripture, such as: "Come unto me, all ye that are heavy
laden!" Thus literally clothed with righteousness, Peter went from cabin
to cabin preaching the Word. Well for him if that other Peter could have
seen him.
These men sometimes made a pathetic addition to their marriage
ceremonies: "Until death or _our higher powers_ do you separate!"
Another typical contemporary of Uncle Tom's was the negro fiddler. It
should be remembered that before he hears he is to be sold South, Uncle
Tom is pictured as a light-hearted creature, capering and dancing in his
cabin. There was no lack of music in those cabins. The banjo was played,
but more commonly the fiddle. A home-made variety of the former
consisted of a crook-necked, hard-shell gourd and a piece of sheepskin.
There were sometimes other instruments--the flageolet and the triangle.
I have heard of a kettle-drum's being made of a copper still. A Kentucky
negro carried through the war as a tambourine the skull of a mule, the
rattling teeth being secured in the jawbones. Of course bones were
everywhere used. Negro music on one or more instruments was in the
highest vogue at the house of the master. The young Kentuckians often
used it on serenading bravuras. The old fiddler, most of all, was held
in reverent esteem and met with the gracious treatment of the minstrel
in feudal halls. At parties and weddings, at picnics in the summer
woods, he was the soul of melody; and with an eye to the high demands
upon his art, he widened his range of selections and perfected according
to native standards his inimitable technique. The deep, tender, pure
feeling in the song "Old Kentucky Home" is a true historic
interpretation.
It is wide of the mark to suppose that on such a farm as that of the
Shelbys, the negroes were in a perpetual frenzy of discontent or felt
any burning desire for freedom. It is difficult to reach a true general
conclusion on this delicate subject. But it must go for something that
even the Kentucky abolitionists of those days will tell you that
well-treated negroes cared not a snap for liberty. Negroes themselves,
and very intelligent ones, will give you to-day the same assurance. It
is an awkward discovery to make, that some of them still cherish
resentment towards agitators who came secretly among them, fomented
discontent, and led them away from homes to which they afterwards
returned. And I want to state here, for no other reason than that of
making an historic contribution to the study of the human mind and
passions, that a man's views of slavery in those days did not determine
his treatment of his own slaves. The only case of mutiny and stampede
that I have been able to discover in a certain part of Kentucky, took
place among the negroes of a man who was known as an outspoken
emancipationist. He pleaded for the freedom of the negro, but in the
mean time worked him at home with the chain round his neck and the ball
resting on his plough.
[Illustration: THE PREACHER.]
Christmas was, of course, the time of holiday merrymaking, and the
"Ketchin' marster an' mistiss Christmus gif'" was a great feature. One
morning an aged couple presented themselves.
"Well, what do you want for your Christmas gift?"
"Freedom, mistiss!"
"Freedom! Haven't you been as good as free for the last ten years?"
"Yaas, mistiss; but--freedom mighty sweet!"
"Then take your freedom!"
The only method of celebrating the boon was the moving into a cabin on
the neighboring farm of their mistress's aunt and being freely supported
there as they had been freely supported at home.
Mrs. Stowe has said, "There is nothing picturesque or beautiful in the
family attachment of old servants, which is not to be found in countries
where these servants are legally free." On the contrary, a volume of
incidents might readily be gathered, the picturesqueness and beauty of
which are due wholly to the fact that the negroes were not free, but
slaves. Indeed, many could never have happened at all but in this
relationship. I cite the case of an old negro who was buying his freedom
from his master, who continued to make payments during the war, and made
the final one at the time of General Kirby Smith's invasion of Kentucky.
After he had paid him the uttermost farthing, he told him that if he
should ever be a slave again, he wanted him for his master. Take the
case of an old negress who had been allowed to accumulate considerable
property. At her death she willed it to her young master instead of to
her sons, as she would have been allowed to do. But the war! what is to
be said of the part the negro took in that? Is there in the drama of
humanity a figure more picturesque or more pathetic than the figure of
the African slave, as he followed his master to the battle-field,
marched and hungered and thirsted with him, served and cheered and
nursed him--that master who was fighting to keep him in slavery?
Instances are too many; but the one may be mentioned of a Kentucky negro
who followed his young master into the Southern army, stayed with him
till he fell on the field, lay hid out in the bushes a week, and
finally, after a long time and many hardships, got back to his mistress
in Kentucky, bringing his dead master's horse and purse and trinkets.
This subject comprises a whole vast field of its own; and if the history
of it is ever written, it will be written in the literature of the
South, for there alone lies the knowledge and _the love_.
It is only through a clear view of the peculiar features of slavery in
Kentucky before the war that one can understand the general status of
the negroes of Kentucky at the present time. Perhaps in no other State
has the race made less endeavor to push itself into equality with the
white. This fact must be explained as in part resulting from the
conservative ideals of Kentucky life in general. But it is more largely
due to the influences of a system which, though no longer in vogue, is
still remembered, still powerful to rule the minds of a naturally
submissive and susceptible people. The kind, affectionate relations of
the races under the old regime have continued with so little
interruption that the blacks remain content with their inferiority, and
lazily drift through life. I venture to make the statement that,
wherever in the United States they have attempted most to enforce their
new-born rights, they have either, on the one hand, been encouraged to
do so, or have, on the other, been driven to self-assertion by harsh
treatment. But treated always kindly, always as hopelessly inferior
beings, they will do least for themselves. This, it is believed, is the
key-note to the situation in Kentucky at the present time.
COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY
I
The institutions of the Kentuckian have deep root in his rich social
nature. He loves the swarm. They very motto of the State is a
declaration of good-fellowship, and the seal of the commonwealth the act
of shaking hands. Divided, he falls. The Kentuckian must be one of many;
must assert himself, not through the solitary exercise of his intellect,
but the senses; must see men about him who are fat, grip his friend,
hear cordial, hearty conversation, realize the play of his emotions.
Society is the multiple of himself.
Hence his fondness for large gatherings: open-air assemblies of the
democratic sort--great agricultural fairs, race-courses, political
meetings, barbecues and burgoos in the woods--where no one is pushed to
the wall, or reduced to a seat and to silence, where all may move about
at will, seek and be sought, make and receive impressions. Quiet masses
of people in-doors absorb him less. He is not fond of lectures, does not
build splendid theatres or expend lavishly for opera, is almost of
Puritan excellence in the virtue of church-going, which in the country
is attended with neighborly reunions.