Hope

Image courtesy of the Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky. From the Bullitt Family Papers.

Not “The thing with feathers/that perches in the heart” but something more immediate and earthbound: the work of young archivists, many of them women, who weed out the stories hidden in the vast archives, founded by rich families, all across this country. This is where history resides with all its elisions and inaccuracies; this is the deep well from which future writers will draw.

Finding the stories of enslaved people in one archive is being accomplished now at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky, where a young Collections Assistant named Emma Johansen is discovering names and a little information about the enslaved people who “belonged” to the Bullitt family, for four generations considered one of the “great families” of the state with a plantation outside of Louisville called Oxmoor. The Bullitts found a way of making slavery particularly profitable; rather than buying a large number of Africans, requiring food and housing, they bought a few, then leased them out to neighbors to labor as unpaid blacksmiths, farmhands, ropemakers and whatever else these white employers required. So the Bullitts collected the wages but minimized the money they would have spent buying and feeding a large number of Africans.

Johansen explained her method to me: “During this project, I put the spirits of the people documented in these papers at the forefront of my methodology. I wanted their stories to be known and given the spotlight in a collection dominated by their enslavers. I also aimed to tune the digital collection and the forthcoming digital exhibit to the needs of descendants of enslaved people. Our name tagging system collapses time, and ties documents together, re-writing the original order of the collection to better tell the genealogy of enslaved people in this collection and others—and this is only a pilot project. Now that we know their names we can see the enslaved people in every corner of the Bullitt Family Papers”—the largest collection at the Filson.

This project “taught me something every historian must know: to find marginalized histories, we must read against the archival grain. We must constantly challenge the white supremacist lens deeply embedded in the documents we preserve and interpret.”

Ably assisted by Shirley Harmon, who catalogued the collection in the 1990s, Johansen has established a model for other archivists to use as they attempt to correct the past injustices and elisions these collections codify. Only rich white men put them together, now with the addition of a few women, and inevitably what they collect and sell or donate to historical archives suffer from their short-sightedness. This is the first step toward writing a new history of our past.

In the course of her work, Johansen discovered the poster pictured here, advertising a one hundred dollar reward for anyone who captured and returned an enslaved man named Hope who ran away from the Bullitt’s Oxmoor Plantation in 1822.

Very little is known about this man, who was apparently bought by Alexander Scott Bullitt, founder of Oxmoor, and bequeathed to his son William Christian Bullitt on his father’s death in 1815. He was around 18 years old. It may have been this bequeathing that inspired him to run away in August 1822; sometimes the death of a slave owner resulted in the freeing of his slaves rather than passing them on to his descendants. As a young man, Hope may have seen his future as being hired out, worked nearly to death, then left to a descendant to repeat the procedure until the day he died.

His self-emancipation was successful, in spite of posters offering the reward for his capture posted in May 1822 and in May and June 1825, indicating that if he was caught in 1822, he escaped again and was not recaptured. But there is no other mention of him.

Johansen, however, has found descendants of another Bullitt family slave, Louisiana Taylor, who was the subject of a podcast describing her history. Her descendants visited the Filson to look at the ledger books and letters that mention Louisa and her family. The feelings of these descendants as they see their ancestress describe in terms of buying and selling are not hard to imagine.

This is the way we save our history. Otherwise much of what we know becomes irrelevant.

In Kentucky Filson Historical Society Louisville