The Invisible Line (8 page)

When the men struck a vein, they rigged a mule to an enormous wooden pump—walking in circles activated its bellows—and drew liquid up through the copper tubing and into a large trough. The liquid was clear but not pure. The men were drilling neither for oil nor for drinking water—they wanted salt.

From the first trough, the liquid ran a short distance through wooden pipes to another trough, and from there it was poured into one-ton iron evaporating kettles set over a blistering furnace. Brine and fire were not the only ingredients. To clarify the evaporate, to give it the proper texture and whiteness, the men would pour a few quarts of beef, pig, or deer blood into the boiling caldrons. By introducing this small impurity, they created the finest salt. In seconds the blood would coagulate and rise, trapping undissolved foreign particles in an albuminous scum easily ladled off the top. It could take several hundred gallons of brine to produce one bushel of salt. In 1840 saltworks up and down Goose Creek and the Collins Fork in the hills of Clay County, Kentucky, produced 196,000 bushels.
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Clay County was a place of many borders—where rock met water, water became brine, brine was turned into salt, and salt became gold. It was a wilderness, bounded by Appalachian ridgelines and removed from the great road, blazed by Daniel Boone, that three generations of settlers had followed from Virginia to the rolling meadows of central Kentucky. But because of salt, Clay County was also industrial, dotted with drill sites and smoking furnaces encircled by swaths of clear-cut wasteland. Just up Goose Creek, the county seat was called Manchester, after the great manufacturing city in northern England. Clay County was where the isolation of the highlands met the values and market imperatives of the world beyond. It was Kentucky's biggest producer of salt, at a time when the farmers and livestock men of the bluegrass region around Lexington craved it for their butter and hardtack and animal feed and depended on it for curing the tens of thousands of tons of beef and pork that they were selling down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.
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Clay County also embodied the line between slave and free. Appalachia was too rugged for plantations. Most families that settled the hills of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia neither owned nor needed human property. Whether or not they could afford slaves, many highlanders in the solitude of their mountain hollows viewed liberty—the freedom to be left alone—as their greatest possession, so much so that they believed no one should be owned. But there were more slaves in Clay than anywhere else in the Kentucky mountains, some five hundred out of a population of five thousand.
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At the salt furnaces, white crystals were raked and packed by black hands. Most of Clay County's slaves were men bound to the salt makers. In addition to drilling wells and tending the boiling caldrons, slaves made barrels for the salt and tied them onto pack mules and wagons headed down to the Cumberland Gap and the meatpacking concerns of Knoxville, Tennessee. Slaves built and loaded flatboats that escaped Clay County's creeks during spring floods and threaded a series of deadly narrows and rapids before reaching the Kentucky River and the markets of Lexington, Frankfort, and points west. Slaves chopped down thousands of trees to fire the furnaces. As they cleared all the forests within easy distance, they began mining coal for fuel. Every week a young slave would have to clean the furnaces, crawling through the filthy trenches underneath the evaporating pots, shoveling and scraping ash and soot through the tight darkness.
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Although Clay County's slaves grew and slaughtered their own food, they were industrial workers. At the drilling rigs and furnaces, chopping down trees and mining coal, they were crushed and suffocated, scalded and broken. During peak production, the owners of the saltworks hired slaves from a hundred miles away in Lexington. Slaves were not just labor. They were a commodity, bought, sold, rented, and borrowed against. Manchester was a tiny settlement, but it had its own auction block. Bidders regularly included slave traders riding a slow circuit down to the plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana.
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GEORGE FREEMAN'S NAME ANNOUNCED his status—free man of color—but slavery was always a part of his life. It stretched and receded like shadows through the day. It was almost an invisible presence when he was alone in the hills, girdling trees with an axe, shoeing a horse, or breaking the earth with a bull-tongue plow. The worst he could do was remember the years when he had been someone else's property. But out in the world, anyone encountering him—in the forest, in town, on a mountain path—could presume he was a slave, and Freeman would have to prove otherwise. Only in Louisiana, a place he had never seen, were people of mixed race presumptively free.
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Freeman was required to carry papers that established his status beyond doubt. He knew what they said, even if he could not read them. He also knew that a stranger on a lonely road could try to take a match to them and force him back into bondage. It did not worry him much. When he first came into Clay County before 1820, he had no desire to hide. He was young and strong, not yet thirty, relatively tall at five feet ten, and, according to the man who had freed him, “well set.” And he was not alone—Clay County had one of the largest concentrations of free people of color in Kentucky. Almost as many blacks were free as were slaves.
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Perhaps Freeman had made his way to Clay County because it was both industrial and rugged. The salt makers presented opportunities to earn money that were not available elsewhere, yet Clay's frontier isolation limited the reach of outside authority. In the wilderness no one could tell him who he was or what he could do.

The presence of large numbers of slaves tempered the liberty of life in the hills. Free people of color saw firsthand how fragile their lives were, and whites were continually reminded that people with dark skin were different and that society depended on maintaining that difference. If the everyday experience of slavery were not enough, a series of laws constricted the lives of free blacks like rope around a wrist.

When Kentucky became a state in 1792, its laws were suffused with ideals of the revolutionary age. Like many other states, Kentucky made it relatively easy for owners to free their slaves, and most of Clay County's free blacks had been emancipated there. At least initially there seemed to be no legal distinction between free blacks and every other free person in the commonwealth. Within a decade, however, the legislature had driven a wedge between liberty and equality, as the enthusiasm for revolutionary notions of universal liberty gave way to a society structured around slavery.
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In order to justify treating free blacks differently from whites—to rethink the core idea that “all men are created equal”—whites started describing blacks as congenitally inferior. Equality would lead to intermarriage, which in turn would, one South Carolina congressman warned in 1786, “stain the blood of the whites by a mixture of the races.” In Kentucky and elsewhere, north and south, advocates for forcibly resettling blacks outside of the country justified their cause in the name of protecting the purity of white blood. The harshness of this emerging understanding of race was unnecessary when most people with dark skin were slaves and the everyday practice of bondage and mastery kept blacks and whites separate. But the prospect of freedom required a new vocabulary of inequality, and a new set of laws followed.
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In 1806 Virginia required blacks to leave the state within a year of being freed or else forfeit their liberty. Within two years Kentucky's legislature prohibited free blacks from entering the state, decrying the “very serious evil . . . likely to be produced by the emigration of emancipated slaves from different parts of the Union to this state.” Free blacks had to register for certificates of emancipation at county courts. They could not vote. Nor could they “keep or carry any gun, powder, shot, club, or other weapon whatsoever”—an enormous burden in the mountains, where families survived the lean times by eating wild game and where farmers often had to hunt their free-grazing cows and pigs. A black man or woman faced thirty lashes “on his or her bare back” for so much as lifting a hand in self-defense against a white person.
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These statutes—and the sentiments that they represented—made freedom resemble slavery. Most of Clay County's free people of color were desperately poor. Some did jobs for the saltworks. Others were laborers or tenant farmers. None of the children went to school. Only one member of the black population was literate. While poor whites could borrow money to buy property, blacks had little access to credit, and the number of black landowners could be counted on one or two hands.
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Despite the legal and practical limitations of liberty, blacks in Clay County continued to value their freedom. Slaves negotiated for it over years of working closely with their owners, securing emancipation in their wills. Periodically they ran away, moving deeper into the hills or rafting down the Kentucky River to the Ohio and the North. And in the 1840s nine slaves sued their owner, a salt manufacturer. After years of litigation, they established that they were being unlawfully held in bondage. They retained a lawyer who was a member of another salt-making clan, using the business rivalry to leverage themselves into freedom.
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George Freeman's very presence in Clay County embodied the resilience of the idea of liberty. Even though the state legislature had banned free blacks from moving in, Freeman had come through the Cumberland Mountains from Virginia. Raised in the hills near the Kentucky line, Freeman could appreciate the relative freedom of frontier life. As a slave in the mountains, he would have lived in close quarters with his owner, a man named Joseph Spencer, possibly Freeman's father. They probably worked side by side. Freeman had been born when the Constitution was a year old, and when he was twenty-four, Spencer emancipated him. In 1814 the country had been fighting its second great war with England and rekindling its sense of what liberty and democracy meant. The deed that made Freeman a free man repeated words that were common in the initial wave of emancipations that followed the Revolution. “Freedom,” his master declared, “is the natural right of every human being.”
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By the time he was thirty, Freeman had a wife and four daughters. Their life sprang almost entirely from their own calloused hands. Families in the Clay County hills lived in cabins built from logs that they had hewn and mud that they had quarried. They built their own beds and slept on mattresses that they had sewn and stuffed themselves. They turned forest to farmland, fenced in vegetable and flower gardens, and grew Indian corn and wheat from seed. They sewed their own clothes from wool that they had sheared and spun and with flax that they had woven into stiff linen that softened in time. They could go days without seeing anyone else.
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For many mountain families, the outside world did not have to exist. They could survive on what they produced or hunted and could trade corn, eggs, honey, or pelts for just about anything else. The area had little that resembled a cash economy, beyond the wealthy families who controlled the salt industry. When farmers left their hollows to work for salt makers and others, their earnings were usually forfeited to their employers for food and clothes and other necessities of life, things they might have made themselves if they had not been working for someone else.
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George Freeman, however, was able to move beyond subsistence in the 1830s. By 1832, with seven children to feed, he had enough money to pay $200 cash for fifty acres of land. Soon other free blacks and even some whites were turning to him for small loans. If the law did not recognize Freeman's equality with whites, the men indebted to him would have to.
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Moving upward was a feat that required unyielding health, constant strength, and tireless toil. Undoubtedly Freeman's wife and children had been doing some of the heavy labor on the farm. It was also possible that a young man named Jordan Spencer was living with the family and assisting with their work. Spencer had been born around the time of Freeman's emancipation. Years later some of Spencer's children would remember that he had come from Virginia, while others figured he was from Kentucky. He may have been Freeman's son or brother or other kin. Perhaps, like Freeman, he had been a slave emancipated by the Spencer family, or he may have adopted the last name after hearing Freeman talk about his former owner. Jordan had long hair and shaded his face with a wide-brimmed hat. It was a point of pride that no one worked harder than he did.
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Freeman owned his land outright. During the long stretches that he worked without ever seeing anyone who was not his kin, he might have fancied himself the master of his mountain hollow. But he was never truly alone. Under a ten-year-old statute, the justices, sheriffs, and attorneys of Clay County were obliged to give the court monthly reports of the “poor children of colour who are free, and whose parents ... they shall think are incapable of supporting and bringing them up in honest courses.” If the court deemed it “right,” the children would be bound out as apprentices to anyone the court chose. Boys would be released from service at age twenty-one, girls at eighteen. Although the law guaranteed apprentices “wholesome meat and drink, suitable cloathing,” and instruction “to spell and read, so as to read the New Testament with facility,” they lived at the mercy of their masters. The courts and their informants had so much discretion to act that they could take children from just about any black family they wished. Freeman was free, but his children could be enslaved.
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