rural Kentucky communities were between first cousins.17 Given the pervasiveness of endogamy, Richwood residents would not have raised an eyebrow at Gaines’s marriage to his sister-in-law, since they were not blood relatives. The two immediately expanded their family: Margaret Ann (named in honor of Elizabeth’s dead sister) was born in 1851, and William Stockton in 1854. Gaines’s two sets of children, thus, were first cousins and siblings.
Gaines’s farm was a complex enterprise, sitting on 210 acres of land.18 Its name, Maplewood, was fitting given the farm’s many maple trees. In 1850, Gaines raised livestock and grew assorted crops for the market. He owned 11 horses, 21 milch cows (cows used for milk and butter), 4 working oxen, 110 hogs, and 95 sheep. These animals not only worked and fed his family but also produced income. The livestock yielded 90 pounds of wool and 400 pounds of butter in one year. Many of the 110 hogs were raised expressly to be sold in the pork-packing industry in Cincinnati. Maplewood also produced 250 bushels of wheat, 100 bushels of rye, 100 bushels of Irish potatoes, 50 bushels of oats, and 10 bushels of sweet potatoes that year. By far, though, Indian corn was the biggest farm product at Maplewood in 1850, to the tune of 1,200 bushels.19 Not all the produce at Maplewood was raised for profit. Much of the hay, oats, and corn would have been used to feed the livestock. Many of the bushels of potatoes would have been consumed by the Gaines family and their slaves, along with some of the hogs, since pork and potatoes were staples in southern diets then. Most of the wheat was produced for commercial purposes, as were the hogs (for cured hams and bacon), sheep (for mutton and merino wool), and milch cows. Maplewood was an extremely valuable farm in 1850, worth $15,000, placing it in the top twenty of the county’s most valuable farms. The value of that farm today would be $470,000. Certainly, that level of wealth elevated Archibald’s social position, respect, prestige, and honor in his community. By 1860, Maplewood’s value had ballooned to $26,000, which is equivalent to $814,000 today.20 Although Gaines had not built his wealth on his own, the value of Maplewood in 1850 and 1860 placed him in the top echelon of Boone County’s farmers.
Gaines’s wealth was determined not just by the value of his farm; the number of enslaved persons a slaveholder owned also mattered. In fact, enslaved persons were the crucial “building blocks of a planter’s way of life, social mobility, and self-conceptions.”21 In 1850, Archibald K. Gaines owned just nine slaves, classifying him as one of Boone County’s numerous yeoman slaveholders. His enslaved workforce of nine included five women, aged fourteen to thirty-two; two adult males, twenty-four and twenty-five years old; and two boys, a preteen and a five-month-old infant male—likely Peggy’s oldest son, Thomas, also known as Tommy. Gaines depended on the labor of the five enslaved women, who were in their prime working and reproductive years. In fact, his wealth directly depended not only on black women’s productivity at Maplewood, but also on their reproductivity. Still, with nine bondspeople in 1850, Gaines ranked among the top 13 percent of slaveholders in Boone County—even as a yeoman. There was nothing exceptional about him, Maplewood, or his choices in crops that promised he would be anything other than a yeoman slaveholder into perpetuity. Yet a year later, he owned twelve bonds people, moving him to the top 4 percent of all slaveholders in Boone County.22 In short, the reproductivity of the women Gaines owned quickly catapulted him from the ranks of yeoman slaveholders to small planters—technically defined as those who owned between ten and twenty slaves. It was a meteoric rise by Kentucky standards. But being a successful farmer was one thing, and a successful slave owner quite another.
Considering the size of his enslaved workforce, the value of his farm, and his family prominence, Archibald K. Gaines had the trappings and appearance of a member of the landed, southern elite. Southern honor was rooted in an inner conviction of one’s own self-worth and pride about one’s morality, values, and unimpeachable conscience; those feelings are projected outward and confirmed by society. In other words, honor began with self. According to the late historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Honor serves as ethical mediator between the individual and the community by which he is assessed and in which he also must locate himself in relation to others.” In short, a man was honorable only if his community believed him to be and he had a reputation for being so. Gaines imagined himself honorable and projected that to his Richwood community, which, in turn, accepted him as a man of honor.23 Honor was not solely determined by character, though; it could also be earned in southern society through wealth—specifically land and slave ownership. The community automatically bestowed honor on a man with Gaines’s wealth. Hence, his wealth cemented his standing as an honorable man in his community.
In the Old South, gentility was a higher, more refined form of honor based on the graces of sociability, learning, and piety—although the weight of each of those graces varied depending on location. Sociability is likability, or a person’s social graces, disposition, and friendliness. A premium was placed on the spoken word as a component of honor, especially eloquence, charisma, engaging conversation, humor, charm, and wit. Archibald K. Gaines possessed none of the refinement, sophistication, or charisma that would qualify him as genteel. He received only a basic education. He was rather reticent, inarticulate, and generally uncomfortable speaking publicly. What social graces he lacked, he made up for in piety. An active member of Trinity Episcopal Church in Covington, his community considered him “orthodox,” and he was known to be supportive of the local clergy.24
Physical appearance also mattered among Southern gentility. Gaines was described as a slender man who was slightly above medium height, with a wrinkled face. He had a small head with bushy, gray hair, matched by a gray mustache and goatee. One reporter noticed his “small foot and hand: the latter looks rough, but more from exposure than labor.” Gaines’s clothing seemed “careless” to the reporter. In the South, physical appearance and stature were considered outward reflections of honor—primal honor. Poor health, a small head or stature, and signs of physical labor such as worn hands could negate or diminish honor. Although Gaines appeared to dress carelessly and had small feet and hands with rough skin, the reporter ultimately assessed that his “general manner and appearance [were] rather gentlemanly. . . . There is nothing coarse, disagreeable or repulsive about his appearance, but on the contrary he seems to be (and we have no doubt he is) an agreeable and intelligent gentleman.”25 “Gentlemanly” men exuded honor, practiced chivalry, and behaved courteously. But “gentlemanly” and gentility are not the same concepts. Gaines would have fallen short of the membership standards of Southern gentility because of his messy appearance, small head, weathered hands, and lack of education, refinement, sophistication, and sociability.
Gaines also seems to have struggled as a slave master in the beginning. Within one year of purchasing Maplewood and its enslaved workforce from his brother John Pollard, Archibald was ready to throw in the towel. His brother Abner, writing to John Pollard reported that Archibald was in “poor spirits” and “determined to sell all the negroes he bought of you.” One of John Pollard’s sons offered to purchase the slaves from his uncle, but his offer was declined. Archibald said he wished to reserve John’s right to reclaim them, should he desire.26 At the time, Archibald K. Gaines clearly was having some unspecified trouble, but his problems did not seem to be financial in nature. Certainly, if they had been financial, he would have accepted his nephew’s offer to buy his bondspeople, hired them out, or sold them down the river. More likely, his enslaved people were being difficult or refusing to submit to his authority. That seems to be the most logical deduction—especially given John P. Gaines’s extended absence during the Mexican War and his subsequent service in the legislature, during which time his bondspeople may have had loose or lenient management. If so, this might have caused them to resist a more authoritarian or strict management style.
Whatever his difficulties in 1851, Archibald K. Gaines never sold his slaves. In 1856, he was forty-eight years old; also living at the Maplewood farm then were his pregnant thirty-four-year-old second wife, eleven-year-old daughter, and eighty-two-year-old mother—all named Elizabeth—his ten-year-old son, John, four-year-old daughter, Margaret, and son William, who was nearly two years old.27
THE MARSHALL FAMILY
