![]() Garrison divided his properties between the victims of his long-term abuse and their children. Garrison thus dangled the prospect of liberation over Sarah Ann and Charity in exchange for their continued acquiescence to his demands on their bodies until the moment when national emancipation and freedom were on the horizon. ![]() Of course, the freedom was only to have been granted upon Garrison’s death, which did not occur until 1863. In what he must have considered an act of kindness, Garrison provided for the emancipation of Sarah Ann and Charity in a will he wrote in 1856. At nearly the same time, a woman named Charity had Virgil and Mary in 18, the first when she was just sixteen years old. The first, Sarah Ann, had four children with Garrison - Andrew Leslie, Gory, William, and Lucy Jane - from 1849 to 1855. Garrison seems to have trapped two enslaved women in long-term, non-consensual sexual relationships with him. Seven children belonging to these women were held - as Frances Bibb had been ten years before - hostage to ensure the compliance with the sexual violence to which they were subjected. Most were in their late teens and early twenties. Of the twenty-eight people over whom Garrison claimed ownership, thirteen were women and girls between 11 and 37 years of age. In the 1850 census, Matthew Garrison was shown as living alone, with his occupation listed as a “Negro Dealer.” The 1850 slave schedules - the first government document to systematically record information on enslaved people across the United States - echo the observations that Bibb made about the way the Garrisons conducted their business. He never saw Malinda or their daughter, Frances, again. Henry Bibb eventually escaped bondage and published a newspaper for the fugitive community living in exile in Canada. It was a resort for slave trading profligates and soul drivers, who were interested in the same business.” They were separated for nearly three months before both being sold to Louisiana. While Bibb was housed in the city workhouse awaiting sale further south, Garrison took Malinda “ to a private house where he kept female slaves for the basest purposes. After escaping from slavery himself, Bibb returned to Kentucky to free his wife, Malinda, and child in 1839. ![]() Shelby County native Henry Bibb knew of Garrison’s cruelty personally. Yet they would also “often travel through the State of Kentucky to buy up the handsomest mullato female slaves,” and developed a sordid reputation for doing so. Matthew Garrison joined many other white Kentuckians in enthusiastically selling people into the profitable cotton and sugar regions of the old southwest - thereby guaranteeing family separation, homesickness, and dramatically increasing the likelihood of death from tropical disease and overwork. For example, in the January 14, 1851, issue of the Louisville Daily Democrat, dealer Matthew Garrison ran a notice that read “NEGROES WANTED, I wish to purchase, specially for a tobacco farm several Negroes, both male and female, between the ages of 14 and 24 also a few house servants,” and noted his address as “Second st., between Main and Market.” Human traffickers advertised in local newspapers for purchases. Like the interstate sales, intrastate trading often separated wives from husbands, parents from children, and relocated people to new and unfamiliar locales. Jefferson County sheriff’s sales of captured, self-emancipated formerly enslaved individuals and county commissioner sales that settled deceased enslavers’ estates put thousands of enslaved people on the market. Louisville’s position on the Ohio River allowed the city to grow on the profits of the sales of enslaved men, women, and children. Louis, Missouri, Richmond, Virginia, and Lexington and Louisville, Kentucky were hubs for the sale of human beings. The site at 2nd and Main documented by historical marker #1990 was among the most notorious in the city even during the height of its lucrative traffic in human beings before the Civil War.ĭuring the antebellum era, Kentucky, like the other border and upper-South states, served as an exporter of enslaved laborers to the Deep South cotton states.
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