Driven toward Madness. Nikki M. Taylor

maiden names also were utilized. For example, many of Abner and Elizabeth’s children, grandchildren, and beyond received the middle name Mathews, which was Elizabeth’s maiden name. The only child who was not named in this tradition was Archibald Kinkead Gaines, who was named after Abner’s friend, Captain Archibald Kinkead, who lived in Woodford County, Kentucky.¹⁰

      Several of the Gaines men built lucrative careers as attorneys, slaveholders, and politicians. John Pollard Gaines and Richard Mathews Gaines were successful attorneys who also owned lucrative farms and plantations. Richard once had served as the US attorney in Mississippi before relocating to Chicot County, Arkansas, where he owned the Mason Lake cotton plantation. James Mathews Gaines was one of the three wealthiest farmers in Boone County; his farm was valued at $50,000 in 1850 (roughly $25 million today). Another brother, Benjamin Pollard Gaines, owned a 5,000-acre cotton plantation in Chicot County, Arkansas, and seventy-seven slaves, and Abner LeGrand owned a cotton plantation in New Orleans. The Gaines brothers, like their father Abner, made brilliant real estate purchases that happened to lie at transportation crossroads like their father’s had. For example, William constructed a shipping landing on his plantation along the Mississippi River in Chicot County, Arkansas, called Gaines Landing, which became one of the busiest shipping ports on the Mississippi River from 1830 through the Civil War. He also pioneered the development of Hot Springs, Arkansas. A couple of other sons built respectable military careers. Most noteworthy is the career of John Pollard Gaines of Richwood, Kentucky, who served in both the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. In the Mexican War, Gaines surrendered to Mexican General José Vicente Miñón at Encarnación in late January 1847 and subsequently was taken as a prisoner of war. When news of his captivity made it back to Boone County, the story had changed to his having been captured—not that he had surrendered. In 1847, the community honored that presumed bravery by electing Gaines to Congress in absentia as a Whig.¹¹

      Archibald K. Gaines took a more circuitous route to success than his brothers. In his twenties, he moved to St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, to seek his fortune—probably following a brother or uncle.¹² He returned to Kentucky soon thereafter and was appointed United States Postmaster in Walton on 16 April 1832. This is the same post that previously had been held by his older brother James.¹³ The job offered some steady income and respectability, but did not lead to wealth. In 1836, Archibald K. Gaines reputedly served in the Texas Army of Sam Houston during the Battle for Texas Independence. Afterward, he moved to Chicot County, Arkansas, where several of his brothers, Richard Mathews, William Henry, and Benjamin Pollard owned cotton plantations and managed Gaines Landing. Archibald K. Gaines worked as a land agent and may have also helped his brothers manage their plantations.¹⁴

      Archibald married Margaret Ann Dudley of Scott County, Kentucky, on 26 August 1843 and she joined him in Arkansas. That union produced two children, Elizabeth, born in 1844, and John Dudley, born a year and a half later. A third child died in infancy two years later. Then in January 1849 tragedy struck Archibald when Margaret Ann, pregnant with their fourth child, fell down some stairs, receiving grave injuries. The baby was delivered stillborn, but she lingered on a few more days before finally succumbing to her injuries. Margaret’s dying wish was that her daughter, Elizabeth, be raised by her mother in Kentucky.¹⁵ Archibald Gaines returned to Kentucky with their two small children shortly after his wife’s death, likely to get assistance with raising them.

      Around the same time, after serving just one term in Congress (1847–49), John Pollard Gaines—now released from captivity and back in Kentucky—lost his bid for reelection in the fall 1849 elections. Not long after that defeat, President Zachary Taylor appointed him governor of the Oregon Territory. John Pollard promptly sold his farm and his enslaved workforce to his younger brother Archibald, who had recently returned to the area widowed, raising his children alone, and needing a fresh start. John practically gave the farm to his younger brother. The bill of sale between the brothers dated November 1849 indicates that Archibald purchased five bondspeople—including Peggy, Sam, Hannah, Harry, and Charlotte—for $2,500 from his elder brother. Peggy was just sixteen and likely pregnant with her eldest son at the time of the sale.¹⁶ Archibald K. Gaines as a slave master certainly would be a grand experiment.

      Widowed and desperately needing help raising his young children, Gaines turned to their aunt Elizabeth Dudley, Margaret’s younger sister, for assistance. Elizabeth was a familiar face, and both he and the children trusted her. The relationship between Gaines and his sister-in-law evolved from there, and the couple married at his church in Covington on 2 April 1850, just a little over a year after Margaret’s death. Their marriage may be unsettling to our modern sensibilities, but apparently, it was not at all unusual for Kentuckians to marry their deceased wives’ sisters, or even their own blood relatives, or in-laws, for that matter. Brothers John Pollard and Benjamin Pollard Gaines, for example, had married two women who were sisters. Endogamy, the practice of marrying a relative, apparently was common among southern elite whites. In general as many as 22 percent of marriages in some white, 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