Slavery Laws in Old Kentucky
Louisville, Jefferson County, Kentucky
Marker Inscription
Slavery Laws in Old Kentucky. Ky.'s 1792 Constitution continued legalized enslavement of blacks in the new state; 1800 tax lists show 40,000 slaves. U.S. banned African slave trade in 1808 but selling of men, women and children in South continued. By 1830, blacks made up 24% of Ky. population. Kentucky Nonimportation Act of 1833 halted the transfer of blacks for resale. Presented by Louisville and Jefferson County African American Heritage Committee, Inc. (Reverse) Site of Arterburn Brothers Slave Pens - After Kentucky's Nonimportation Act repealed in 1849, Louisville slave markets expanded. The Arterburns advertised cash for farm hands and others. Iron-barred coops held people to be shipped south. Chained, they marched up Main Street to board boats in nearby Portland. Some died of shock or disease on the trip south.
Erected by Kentucky Historical Society
The Story
Kentucky's 1792 constitution wrote enslavement into the new state's founding, and by 1830 Black Kentuckians made up nearly a quarter of the population. Though the U.S. banned the African slave trade in 1808 and Kentucky's 1833 Nonimportation Act briefly halted the interstate resale of enslaved people, that law's 1849 repeal reopened Louisville's slave markets. On this ground the Arterburn brothers held people in iron-barred pens before marching them, chained, to riverboats bound south.
Why it matters
The marker confronts the legal machinery and human traffic of slavery in a border state, insisting that the domestic slave trade be remembered where it actually happened.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Kentucky entered the Union in 1792, and its very first constitution wrote human bondage into the framework of the new state. This was the Early Republic — a moment when Americans were deciding, state by state, what kind of country they were building — and Kentucky, a border state straddling the Ohio River, chose to protect slavery from the start. By the tax lists of 1800, some forty thousand enslaved people were counted here.
The national picture shifted in 1808, when the United States banned the importation of enslaved Africans. But that law closed only the Atlantic trade; it did nothing to stop the buying and selling of enslaved men, women, and children already within the country. In much of the South, that internal traffic not only continued but grew.
By 1830, Black Kentuckians made up roughly a quarter of the state's population — a presence woven through farms, households, and towns. Louisville, sitting on the Ohio River at the edge of free territory, was both a growing commercial city and a place where the machinery of slavery operated in plain sight.
People & events
The marker turns on a single revealing law: the Kentucky Nonimportation Act of 1833, which halted the transfer of enslaved people into the state for resale. It was a limited measure — it did not end slavery, and it did not free anyone — but it interrupted the commercial pipeline of human beings for a time.
That interruption did not last. When the Nonimportation Act was repealed in 1849, Louisville's slave markets expanded to meet the reopened trade. The marker names the ground where the Arterburn brothers ran their business, advertising cash for "farm hands and others" and holding people in iron-barred coops — pens built to confine human beings as though they were livestock awaiting shipment.
What happened next is described in unflinching terms. Chained together, people were marched up Main Street to board boats at nearby Portland for the journey south. Some, the marker records, died of shock or disease on that trip. These are not abstractions; they are the documented mechanics of a trade in people, remembered at the place it occurred.
Its place in the American story
The domestic slave trade is one of the hardest chapters of American history to see, precisely because it happened not on distant ships but on ordinary city streets. This marker refuses that forgetting. It insists that the pens, the auctions, and the forced marches be remembered where they actually stood, in an American city, along an American river.
Kentucky's position as a border state makes the lesson sharper. Freedom lay just across the Ohio, yet on this side the law upheld bondage and the market in human beings expanded when legal restraints were lifted. The rise and repeal of the 1833 Nonimportation Act shows how the fate of enslaved people could hinge on a single legislative vote — protection one year, exposure to sale the next.
That this marker was presented by an African American heritage committee matters to its meaning. It is a community claiming its own history and naming the traffic in its ancestors, ensuring that the record is kept by the descendants of the people it harmed.
If you visit
Come to this one ready to read carefully and stand quietly. The marker has two faces — the front tracing the laws that governed slavery in early Kentucky, the reverse marking the site of the Arterburn brothers' slave pens — and the pairing is deliberate. One side is the law; the other is what the law allowed to happen to real people on this ground.
Let the geography sink in. You are in Louisville, on the Ohio River, and the marker points toward Main Street and the riverfront at Portland where people were forced onto boats bound south. Picturing that route — the short, brutal distance from pen to riverboat — is part of understanding what the words describe.
This is a place for reflection rather than sightseeing, and it fits into any thoughtful visit to Louisville's historic core. Give it the same seriousness you would give a memorial, because that is what it is: an insistence that the human cost recorded here not be smoothed over or moved somewhere less inconvenient.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related events
- · Kentucky Nonimportation Act of 1833
Themes & tags
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