As a result, only an estimated 20 percent of Kentucky families owned slave property and those who did owned an average of only 4.3 bondspersons per slaveholding family, both much smaller averages than in the deep South. The invention of the Cotton Gin (1793) made cotton cultivation immensely profitable, but Kentucky’s temperate climate and comparatively short growing season would not support the large plantations and large slave-holdings that became common in the Gulf States after the War of 1812. Anti-slavery efforts in later years were largely symbolic, conservative and committed to the goal of colonization, i.e., the removal of free African Americans. Although some objected strongly to the institution on moral or religious grounds, the land- and slave-holding interests of the transplanted Virginia gentry prevailed and were protected by the first Kentucky constitution in 1792. Slavery crossed the Appalachians with the early setters of Kentucky. Thereafter, slavery grew rapidly, particularly in the southern colonies-with the black population increasing from under 50,000 in 1700 to over 1,000,000 in 1800, and eventually to over 4,400,000 in 1860. Although the institution of slavery was defined legally by the 1660s, indentured servants from Europe were the principal labor force employed in the early colonies until Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. ![]() In late August 1619, the first Africans brought to British North America were sold at Jamestown, Virginia, more than a century after slave trade and slavery began in the Caribbean and Latin America.
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