“Conduct … Inexcusable and Unjustifiable”: Bound Children, Battered Freedwomen, and the Limits of Emancipation in Kentucky's Bluegrass Region

Documents compiled by Freedman's Bureau agents in Kentucky's Bluegrass Region clearly reveal open hostility on the part of white residents to black freedom. Bands of white supremacists pillaged black homes, murdered black community leaders, and violently resisted federal efforts to intercede on behalf of freed people. Yet non-lethal violence, particularly against freedwomen and their children, was far more prevalent, an effective means by which to limit black autonomy, and typically deemed less significant by authorities. Freed people frequently reported physical abuse at the hands of white people, including former masters, some of whom refused to acknowledge slavery's demise; and they also reported numerous abuses associated with the Commonwealth's apprenticeship system for black children. Further, black women, now free laborers working in both white households and urban settings, complained of the unfair, often violent, treatment they received at the hands of employers, Finally, black women and girls with virtually no protection under state law suffered sexual abuse at the hands of white men. Taken altogether, these and other limits imposed on emancipation by white residents of the Bluegrass constitute a concerted effort to enact white supremacy and thereby deny former slaves the liberty and equality they desired and demanded.