Читать книгу Driven toward Madness - Nikki M. Taylor - Страница 13

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BEFORE THE BLOOD

I have but four, the treasures of my soul,

They lay like doves around my heart;

I tremble lest some cruel hand

Should tear my household wreaths apart.

My baby girl, with childish glance,

Looks curious in my anxious eye,

She little knows that for her sake

Deep shadows round my spirit lie.

My playful boys could I forget,

My home night seems a joyous spot,

But with their sunshine mirth I blend

The darkness of their future lot.

—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, 1857¹

Mary’s death at her own mother’s hands cannot be comprehended without going back to the source of the Garners’ trauma—the place from which they had run, two farms in Richwood in Boone County, Kentucky, and where the younger couple was known as Peggy and young Simon. Agriculture was the primary economic activity in the state. Kentucky led the South in the production of rye and barley and the raising of horses; it ranked second in the production of hemp, tobacco, corn, wheat, and raising of sheep, and third in hogs. The soil and climate in the Bluegrass State could not yield cotton, rice, or sugarcane; tobacco, though, was prevalent. On the eve of the Civil War, Kentucky produced 25 percent of the nation’s total tobacco crops. Throughout most of the early nineteenth century, the state was second only to Virginia in tobacco cultivation, and during the Civil War, Kentucky surpassed Virginia. In Kentucky, 65 percent of the tobacco was produced on small farms—not on plantations, such as the ones in Virginia.² As important as tobacco was to Kentucky, the crop played second fiddle to subsistence crops such as corn, rye, and barley.

The small farmers who populated antebellum Kentucky never became as dependent on slave labor as whites in other southern states. Slaveholding simply never became widespread there. For example, in 1850, nearly 77 percent of the adult white males in the state did not own any slaves. Of those who did, their average number of holdings was the fourth smallest in the nation.³

Boone County, where the Garners were enslaved, is the northernmost county in Kentucky. In the antebellum era, its rolling hills and plush greenery distinguished its landscape. The county’s economy was built by farmers who sold Indian corn, butter, wheat, rye, hay, flax, and hogs. Most farmers sold a diversity of goods ranging from wheat to butter to slaughtered animals. The county ranked second in the state in orchard goods, fifth in wheat, and tenth in hogs. Raising hogs was popular and profitable in Boone County because of its proximity to Cincinnati, or “Porkopolis,” a major national pork-packing center. Roughly 40 percent of Boone County farmers who produced these goods depended on slave labor to do so.⁴ In 1850, the county boasted 11,185 residents, and more than 19 percent of them, or 2,100, were enslaved—a percentage that is slightly lower than the statewide average. Richwood, the town where the Garners lived, had a significantly higher density of enslaved people than the rest of the county and about double that of the entire state. About half the residents in that small town were enslaved. Without a doubt then, Richwood was a slaving community. Only 485 white households owned Boone County’s entire slave population, which averages about four per slaveholding family. Most of the slaveholders in the county were yeoman slaveholders, defined as those who owned fewer than nine slaves (There were a few extremes, though: one Boone County slaveholder owned twenty-five enslaved people.). Only thirty-seven free African Americans lived in the county, making Boone among the counties with the smallest ratio of free blacks in the upper South. The low number of free blacks suggests that it was rare for slaves to be freed or manumitted in that county; and those who were freed, left.⁵

Kentuckians then and now often boasted that slavery was “milder” or more “innocent” in the Bluegrass State than on cotton plantations in the deep South. They wrongly assume that slavery in Kentucky was physically less demanding and grueling, beatings and punishments less brutal, and the destruction of slave families less common. Kentuckians also wrongly assume that slave owners in their state were benevolent patriarchs who treated their bondspeople humanely. Gaines’s attorney would later remark that “the slavery of Kentucky is so mild in form that I infinitely prefer it to the poverty of the North.” He added, “The condition of slaves in the South is much better . . . than the half-starved free colored people of the North.” Whites living in Richwood in the 1850s claimed that the Garners were “well-housed,” “well-fed,” and looked “contented and happy.” They also insisted that the Garners had “always received great kindness” and “the comforts of a family.”⁶ When the Garners escaped and violently resisted returning to that “mild” slavery, they discredited such fantasies.

No, enslaved Kentuckians did not work in cotton fields in the searing sun from sunup to sundown; nor did they work on rice plantations in humid, malarial conditions, but those facts do not mean their enslavement was “mild.” Kentucky slavery had its own brand of hardship and horror. The smaller size of Kentucky farms was a disadvantage for enslaved African Americans, not a benefit. For one, the smaller the number of slaves a farmer owned, the greater the workload for them.

There is a direct relationship between the quantity of work obligations and the quality of life for enslaved people.⁷ Those living and working on small farms had to perform farm and household duties. Because of the various livestock and crops being raised and grown at the farm where Peggy lived, her range of chores may have included milking the cows, churning butter, herding sheep, cutting their wool, feeding the animals, collecting firewood, preparing the soil for seeding, planting, and harvesting the crops. In addition, she also may have been responsible for work inside the Gaineses’ home, including cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, sewing, and canning food. In addition to farmwork and house duties, enslaved women on small farms would have also been charged with minding the children of their owners. Without a doubt, the work was exhausting and perpetual.

Enslaved Kentuckians would have been on call virtually around the clock, with little privacy or time to themselves. Many did not even have separate living quarters. Added to that misery, those enslaved on small farms had more daily contact with their owners, which proved harmful, in most cases. The greater contact with owners increased the likelihood that they would endure not only more racist verbal insults and physical assaults, but sexual abuse as well. Given their low numbers per farm, Kentucky slaves were geographically isolated from other African Americans. In short, enslaved Kentuckians did not have much access to, or opportunity to participate in, a viable community. Without the comfort and support of a community, despair, isolation, and hopelessness could easily consume them.⁸

Although enslavement on small Kentucky farms clearly was difficult, the disposition and character of the owner trumped all other conditions in determining the quality of bondage. Being overworked, isolated, and overly exposed to indignities were characteristic of slavery on small Kentucky farms. An exacting, abusive, and cruel owner made things worse. To be enslaved on a small farm with such an owner was—as far as the Garner family was concerned—worse than death. The Garners’ collective and individual histories teach us that the brutality or mildness of slavery depended not just on the region or the kind of crop enslaved people tended to, but the character of the owner.

THE GAINES FAMILY

Archibald Kinkead Gaines, born 1 January 1808, was the eighth of thirteen children of Susan Elizabeth Mathews (who went by Elizabeth) and Abner LeGrand Gaines. Native Virginians, the Gaineses had migrated to Boone County, Kentucky, in the early nineteenth century. Abner Gaines purchased 236 acres of land, which lay at a transportation junction in Boone County. Soon a small settlement called Gaines Crossroads sprang up near his land. Gaines Crossroads and the town born of it eventually became Walton, Kentucky. Abner operated a farm, a mail stage line, and a tavern that was frequented by travelers en route to Lexington. In addition to running his tavern, he also acted as the town’s justice of the peace and sheriff. Upon his death in 1839, Abner left nearly all of his estimated $12,000–$15,000 in wealth to his youngest daughter, including his farm, home, tavern, livestock, and two slaves. He willed the other Gaines children $1,000 each and various keepsakes. Elizabeth, his widow and the family matriarch, inherited only the furniture and a carriage. Shortly after her husband’s death, she moved in with their second-oldest son, John Pollard Gaines, at his farm in nearby Richwood.⁹

The Gaineses had a high sense of obligation to one another. Just as John Pollard had done with the family matriarch, other family members took in relatives from time to time. For example, it was not unusual for an uncle to have his niece or nephew in his home for some time. The naming patterns in the Gaines family also reveal that they honored their kin with each birth. Sons were not named after their fathers, as one might expect, but received the first or middle names of an uncle, brother, grandfather, or even family friend. Male names John, Pollard, Abner, and LeGrand were recycled in several generations in various combinations. Similarly, Gaines women were named after their grandmothers or aunts. Matriarchs’ maiden names also were utilized. For example, many of Abner and Elizabeth’s children, grandchildren, and beyond received the middle name Mathews, which was Elizabeth’s maiden name. The only child who was not named in this tradition was Archibald Kinkead Gaines, who was named after Abner’s friend, Captain Archibald Kinkead, who lived in Woodford County, Kentucky.¹⁰

Several of the Gaines men built lucrative careers as attorneys, slaveholders, and politicians. John Pollard Gaines and Richard Mathews Gaines were successful attorneys who also owned lucrative farms and plantations. Richard once had served as the US attorney in Mississippi before relocating to Chicot County, Arkansas, where he owned the Mason Lake cotton plantation. James Mathews Gaines was one of the three wealthiest farmers in Boone County; his farm was valued at $50,000 in 1850 (roughly $25 million today). Another brother, Benjamin Pollard Gaines, owned a 5,000-acre cotton plantation in Chicot County, Arkansas, and seventy-seven slaves, and Abner LeGrand owned a cotton plantation in New Orleans. The Gaines brothers, like their father Abner, made brilliant real estate purchases that happened to lie at transportation crossroads like their father’s had. For example, William constructed a shipping landing on his plantation along the Mississippi River in Chicot County, Arkansas, called Gaines Landing, which became one of the busiest shipping ports on the Mississippi River from 1830 through the Civil War. He also pioneered the development of Hot Springs, Arkansas. A couple of other sons built respectable military careers. Most noteworthy is the career of John Pollard Gaines of Richwood, Kentucky, who served in both the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. In the Mexican War, Gaines surrendered to Mexican General José Vicente Miñón at Encarnación in late January 1847 and subsequently was taken as a prisoner of war. When news of his captivity made it back to Boone County, the story had changed to his having been captured—not that he had surrendered. In 1847, the community honored that presumed bravery by electing Gaines to Congress in absentia as a Whig.¹¹

Archibald K. Gaines took a more circuitous route to success than his brothers. In his twenties, he moved to St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, to seek his fortune—probably following a brother or uncle.¹² He returned to Kentucky soon thereafter and was appointed United States Postmaster in Walton on 16 April 1832. This is the same post that previously had been held by his older brother James.¹³ The job offered some steady income and respectability, but did not lead to wealth. In 1836, Archibald K. Gaines reputedly served in the Texas Army of Sam Houston during the Battle for Texas Independence. Afterward, he moved to Chicot County, Arkansas, where several of his brothers, Richard Mathews, William Henry, and Benjamin Pollard owned cotton plantations and managed Gaines Landing. Archibald K. Gaines worked as a land agent and may have also helped his brothers manage their plantations.¹⁴

Archibald married Margaret Ann Dudley of Scott County, Kentucky, on 26 August 1843 and she joined him in Arkansas. That union produced two children, Elizabeth, born in 1844, and John Dudley, born a year and a half later. A third child died in infancy two years later. Then in January 1849 tragedy struck Archibald when Margaret Ann, pregnant with their fourth child, fell down some stairs, receiving grave injuries. The baby was delivered stillborn, but she lingered on a few more days before finally succumbing to her injuries. Margaret’s dying wish was that her daughter, Elizabeth, be raised by her mother in Kentucky.¹⁵ Archibald Gaines returned to Kentucky with their two small children shortly after his wife’s death, likely to get assistance with raising them.

Around the same time, after serving just one term in Congress (1847–49), John Pollard Gaines—now released from captivity and back in Kentucky—lost his bid for reelection in the fall 1849 elections. Not long after that defeat, President Zachary Taylor appointed him governor of the Oregon Territory. John Pollard promptly sold his farm and his enslaved workforce to his younger brother Archibald, who had recently returned to the area widowed, raising his children alone, and needing a fresh start. John practically gave the farm to his younger brother. The bill of sale between the brothers dated November 1849 indicates that Archibald purchased five bondspeople—including Peggy, Sam, Hannah, Harry, and Charlotte—for $2,500 from his elder brother. Peggy was just sixteen and likely pregnant with her eldest son at the time of the sale.¹⁶ Archibald K. Gaines as a slave master certainly would be a grand experiment.

Widowed and desperately needing help raising his young children, Gaines turned to their aunt Elizabeth Dudley, Margaret’s younger sister, for assistance. Elizabeth was a familiar face, and both he and the children trusted her. The relationship between Gaines and his sister-in-law evolved from there, and the couple married at his church in Covington on 2 April 1850, just a little over a year after Margaret’s death. Their marriage may be unsettling to our modern sensibilities, but apparently, it was not at all unusual for Kentuckians to marry their deceased wives’ sisters, or even their own blood relatives, or in-laws, for that matter. Brothers John Pollard and Benjamin Pollard Gaines, for example, had married two women who were sisters. Endogamy, the practice of marrying a relative, apparently was common among southern elite whites. In general as many as 22 percent of marriages in some white, rural Kentucky communities were between first cousins.¹⁷ Given the pervasiveness of endogamy, Richwood residents would not have raised an eyebrow at Gaines’s marriage to his sister-in-law, since they were not blood relatives. The two immediately expanded their family: Margaret Ann (named in honor of Elizabeth’s dead sister) was born in 1851, and William Stockton in 1854. Gaines’s two sets of children, thus, were first cousins and siblings.

Gaines’s farm was a complex enterprise, sitting on 210 acres of land.¹⁸ Its name, Maplewood, was fitting given the farm’s many maple trees. In 1850, Gaines raised livestock and grew assorted crops for the market. He owned 11 horses, 21 milch cows (cows used for milk and butter), 4 working oxen, 110 hogs, and 95 sheep. These animals not only worked and fed his family but also produced income. The livestock yielded 90 pounds of wool and 400 pounds of butter in one year. Many of the 110 hogs were raised expressly to be sold in the pork-packing industry in Cincinnati. Maplewood also produced 250 bushels of wheat, 100 bushels of rye, 100 bushels of Irish potatoes, 50 bushels of oats, and 10 bushels of sweet potatoes that year. By far, though, Indian corn was the biggest farm product at Maplewood in 1850, to the tune of 1,200 bushels.¹⁹ Not all the produce at Maplewood was raised for profit. Much of the hay, oats, and corn would have been used to feed the livestock. Many of the bushels of potatoes would have been consumed by the Gaines family and their slaves, along with some of the hogs, since pork and potatoes were staples in southern diets then. Most of the wheat was produced for commercial purposes, as were the hogs (for cured hams and bacon), sheep (for mutton and merino wool), and milch cows. Maplewood was an extremely valuable farm in 1850, worth $15,000, placing it in the top twenty of the county’s most valuable farms. The value of that farm today would be $470,000. Certainly, that level of wealth elevated Archibald’s social position, respect, prestige, and honor in his community. By 1860, Maplewood’s value had ballooned to $26,000, which is equivalent to $814,000 today.²⁰ Although Gaines had not built his wealth on his own, the value of Maplewood in 1850 and 1860 placed him in the top echelon of Boone County’s farmers.

Gaines’s wealth was determined not just by the value of his farm; the number of enslaved persons a slaveholder owned also mattered. In fact, enslaved persons were the crucial “building blocks of a planter’s way of life, social mobility, and self-conceptions.”²¹ In 1850, Archibald K. Gaines owned just nine slaves, classifying him as one of Boone County’s numerous yeoman slaveholders. His enslaved workforce of nine included five women, aged fourteen to thirty-two; two adult males, twenty-four and twenty-five years old; and two boys, a preteen and a five-month-old infant male—likely Peggy’s oldest son, Thomas, also known as Tommy. Gaines depended on the labor of the five enslaved women, who were in their prime working and reproductive years. In fact, his wealth directly depended not only on black women’s productivity at Maplewood, but also on their reproductivity. Still, with nine bondspeople in 1850, Gaines ranked among the top 13 percent of slaveholders in Boone County—even as a yeoman. There was nothing exceptional about him, Maplewood, or his choices in crops that promised he would be anything other than a yeoman slaveholder into perpetuity. Yet a year later, he owned twelve bonds people, moving him to the top 4 percent of all slaveholders in Boone County.²² In short, the reproductivity of the women Gaines owned quickly catapulted him from the ranks of yeoman slaveholders to small planters—technically defined as those who owned between ten and twenty slaves. It was a meteoric rise by Kentucky standards. But being a successful farmer was one thing, and a successful slave owner quite another.

Considering the size of his enslaved workforce, the value of his farm, and his family prominence, Archibald K. Gaines had the trappings and appearance of a member of the landed, southern elite. Southern honor was rooted in an inner conviction of one’s own self-worth and pride about one’s morality, values, and unimpeachable conscience; those feelings are projected outward and confirmed by society. In other words, honor began with self. According to the late historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Honor serves as ethical mediator between the individual and the community by which he is assessed and in which he also must locate himself in relation to others.” In short, a man was honorable only if his community believed him to be and he had a reputation for being so. Gaines imagined himself honorable and projected that to his Richwood community, which, in turn, accepted him as a man of honor.²³ Honor was not solely determined by character, though; it could also be earned in southern society through wealth—specifically land and slave ownership. The community automatically bestowed honor on a man with Gaines’s wealth. Hence, his wealth cemented his standing as an honorable man in his community.

In the Old South, gentility was a higher, more refined form of honor based on the graces of sociability, learning, and piety—although the weight of each of those graces varied depending on location. Sociability is likability, or a person’s social graces, disposition, and friendliness. A premium was placed on the spoken word as a component of honor, especially eloquence, charisma, engaging conversation, humor, charm, and wit. Archibald K. Gaines possessed none of the refinement, sophistication, or charisma that would qualify him as genteel. He received only a basic education. He was rather reticent, inarticulate, and generally uncomfortable speaking publicly. What social graces he lacked, he made up for in piety. An active member of Trinity Episcopal Church in Covington, his community considered him “orthodox,” and he was known to be supportive of the local clergy.²⁴

Physical appearance also mattered among Southern gentility. Gaines was described as a slender man who was slightly above medium height, with a wrinkled face. He had a small head with bushy, gray hair, matched by a gray mustache and goatee. One reporter noticed his “small foot and hand: the latter looks rough, but more from exposure than labor.” Gaines’s clothing seemed “careless” to the reporter. In the South, physical appearance and stature were considered outward reflections of honor—primal honor. Poor health, a small head or stature, and signs of physical labor such as worn hands could negate or diminish honor. Although Gaines appeared to dress carelessly and had small feet and hands with rough skin, the reporter ultimately assessed that his “general manner and appearance [were] rather gentlemanly. . . . There is nothing coarse, disagreeable or repulsive about his appearance, but on the contrary he seems to be (and we have no doubt he is) an agreeable and intelligent gentleman.”²⁵ “Gentlemanly” men exuded honor, practiced chivalry, and behaved courteously. But “gentlemanly” and gentility are not the same concepts. Gaines would have fallen short of the membership standards of Southern gentility because of his messy appearance, small head, weathered hands, and lack of education, refinement, sophistication, and sociability.

Gaines also seems to have struggled as a slave master in the beginning. Within one year of purchasing Maplewood and its enslaved workforce from his brother John Pollard, Archibald was ready to throw in the towel. His brother Abner, writing to John Pollard reported that Archibald was in “poor spirits” and “determined to sell all the negroes he bought of you.” One of John Pollard’s sons offered to purchase the slaves from his uncle, but his offer was declined. Archibald said he wished to reserve John’s right to reclaim them, should he desire.²⁶ At the time, Archibald K. Gaines clearly was having some unspecified trouble, but his problems did not seem to be financial in nature. Certainly, if they had been financial, he would have accepted his nephew’s offer to buy his bondspeople, hired them out, or sold them down the river. More likely, his enslaved people were being difficult or refusing to submit to his authority. That seems to be the most logical deduction—especially given John P. Gaines’s extended absence during the Mexican War and his subsequent service in the legislature, during which time his bondspeople may have had loose or lenient management. If so, this might have caused them to resist a more authoritarian or strict management style.

Whatever his difficulties in 1851, Archibald K. Gaines never sold his slaves. In 1856, he was forty-eight years old; also living at the Maplewood farm then were his pregnant thirty-four-year-old second wife, eleven-year-old daughter, and eighty-two-year-old mother—all named Elizabeth—his ten-year-old son, John, four-year-old daughter, Margaret, and son William, who was nearly two years old.²⁷

THE MARSHALL FAMILY