Slavery
The institution of slavery had a major impact on Kentucky's economy and culture during the antebellum period. Although Kentucky's number of slaves was relatively small compared to the rest of the slaveholding states, slavery's influence was much broader than indicated by the slave population (never more than 24 percent of the total population). By 1860, Kentucky had the third largest number of slaveholders of any southern state, and nearly one-fourth of Kentucky's families owned at least one slave. Additionally, the practice of slave-hiring, in which owners rented unneeded slaves to others in need of laborers, gave many non-slaveowning Kentuckians a stake in the institution.
Early print of slaves processing tobacco
Kentucky's economy was inarguably slave powered. In agriculture, plantation owners and small farmers used slaves to raise cash crops of hemp and tobacco, as well as a variety of livestock and crops used for food and cloth fiber. Manufacturers also benefitted from the slave system. Slaves worked in a variety of industries, including salt and textiles. In Lexington and the surrounding area, slaves provided much of the labor in hemp processing factories. Culturally, owning slaves served as an important status symbol. As in the Cotton South, most whites did not own slaves, but most aspired to join the slaveholding elite.
Slavery in Kentucky had a dramatic affect on Lincoln. Although he left the state as a boy, Lincoln maintained close connections to slaveholding Kentucky families, particularly the Todds and the Speeds. As a result, Lincoln had a number of first hand encounters with slavery as an adult. In 1841, when Lincoln paid a visit to his friend, Joshua Fry Speed, in Louisville, he witnessed the ill effects the institution had on the enslaved. Writing to Speed's sister, Mary, Lincoln described a dozen slaves on the Louisville wharf, who having been sold to the Deep South, were traveling in chains, "strung together precisely like so many fish upon a trot-line." Years later, Lincoln wrote to Speed that the sight of those slaves had been "a continual torment" to him.
