eslinger1994

@Article{ eslinger1994,
    author = {Ellen Eslinger},
    title = {The Shape of Slavery on the Kentucky Frontier, 1775-1800},
    journal = {The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society},
    volume = 92,
    number = 1,
    month = {Winter},
    pages = {1-23},
    year = 1994,
}

http://www.jstor.org/stable/23383130

p. 3-4 notes the widespread hiring of slaves on the Kentucky frontier. “When Kentucky became a state in 1792, there existed enough support for slavery to overcome a strong church-based emancipation movement. Indeed, Kentucky was the first state to grant slavery constitutional protection.”

p. 14: notes the relatively equal numbers of male and female slaves in the period, which may reflect the lower cost of female slaves as well as the value placed on their “reproductive capabilities, but in newly settled areas such as Kentucky immediate labor requirements probably overshadowed long-term concerns.” But most new slaves came in childbearing years, and that meant the state’s slave population retained its “youthful character.” P. 15 suggests that the sex ratio and age composition of the slave population encouraged natural increase and made an “interregional slave trade” less necessary in the eighteenth century.

p. 22: “Slaves had little to gain yet shared all the risks and discomfort of western life.”