John James Audubon and Slavery: A History Beyond the Bird Paintings

John James Audubon is widely remembered for his extraordinary illustrations of American birds. Less often included in that familiar story is his role as an enslaver. Audubon and his wife, Lucy, held Black people in slavery, sold people during periods of financial difficulty, and acquired others in later years. His writings also reveal opposition to emancipation and a willingness to portray slavery as compatible with benevolence. These were not incidental details of his life; they were choices that shaped his household, finances, and view of other people. 

Slavery in the Henderson Years

Audubon’s connection to slavery is especially important to the history of Henderson, Kentucky, where he lived during the 1810s. According to historian Gregory Nobles, author of John James Audubon: The Nature of the American Woodsman, the Audubons had nine enslaved people working in their household during that decade. When the family encountered financial problems, they sold them. 

One episode illustrates Audubon’s direct participation in the domestic slave trade. In early 1819, he traveled down the Mississippi River to New Orleans in a skiff with two enslaved men. On reaching the city, he offered both the boat and the men for sale. The journey was not merely an encounter with slavery along the river: Audubon himself transported people to a market where he sought to sell them. 

These transactions expose a part of his life that stories focused on artistic struggle can obscure. Financial difficulty did not fall only on the Audubon family. Audubon responded to it by selling people whose freedom he denied and whose futures he claimed the power to determine. 

Not a Single Episode

The Audubons’ involvement did not end with the sales associated with their financial troubles in Kentucky. Nobles reports that they acquired several more enslaved people during the 1820s and sold them in 1830 when they moved to England, where Audubon was supervising production of The Birds of America. 

This chronology matters. Describing Audubon simply as someone who “once owned slaves” can suggest a brief episode that he later rejected. The available account instead shows repeated participation across different stages of his life. Nor should the nine people recorded in his Henderson household be treated as a complete lifetime total, because the later acquisitions involved additional people. 

His Views on Emancipation

Audubon’s correspondence provides evidence of his attitude toward ending slavery. In an 1834 letter to Lucy, he complained that the British government had “acted imprudently and too precipitously” in emancipating enslaved people in its West Indian possessions. His objection concerned emancipation itself—not merely the personal financial consequences of selling people he enslaved. 

For that reason, the familiar defense that Audubon was simply “a man of his time” is inadequate. As Nobles points out, many people in the same era openly opposed slavery and worked for its abolition. Audubon lived amid those competing positions and did not choose the abolitionist one. Historical context helps explain the society in which he acted; it does not erase the alternatives available to him. 

Slavery in His Storytelling

Audubon’s published writing also shows how he represented slavery to his readers. In “The Runaway,” an episode included in Ornithological Biography, he described encountering a Black man and his family who had escaped enslavement and were living in a Louisiana swamp. In Audubon’s account, he brought them to a former enslaver and arranged for that man to purchase the family members from the people who then claimed ownership of them. The family was reunited, but not freed. 

Audubon presented the outcome as a happy resolution. That framing made family reunification—not freedom—the limit of his supposed benevolence. It allowed him to portray himself as helpful while preserving the enslavers’ claims over the family. 

The story requires an important qualification: it is not a verified transcript of events. Nobles notes that many of Audubon’s autobiographical episodes were unreliable. “The Runaway” therefore should not be repeated uncritically as a documented encounter. Even with that uncertainty, it remains evidence of the story Audubon chose to publish and the proslavery assumptions he expected readers to accept. 

Black Knowledge and Audubon’s Scientific Work

Audubon’s relationship with Black people was not limited to buying, selling, and controlling their labor. His natural-history work sometimes depended on information and assistance from Black and Indigenous observers. Nobles describes their contributions to collecting specimens and sharing knowledge about birds—contributions that did not receive full acknowledgment. 

Their usefulness to Audubon did not lead him to recognize them as equals. In describing a Florida expedition in December 1831, he distinguished six enslaved Black men, whom he called “hands,” from “three white men.” The wording reveals the racial hierarchy through which he understood the people participating in his fieldwork. 

This complicates the image of the solitary naturalist accomplishing everything through individual determination. Audubon’s work involved assistance from people whose knowledge he could use while denying their social and racial equality. 

Remembering the People Behind the Reputation

A biography centered entirely on Audubon’s talent risks leaving the people he enslaved at the margins of his story. Even the most concrete details—the nine people in his Henderson household, the two men taken to New Orleans, and the later acquisitions and sales—often appear primarily as events in his financial history. Yet those details also record his exercise of power over other human beings. 

Ornithologist and writer J. Drew Lanham has argued that confronting this history matters to contemporary birding and conservation. In his essay “What Do We Do About John James Audubon?,” Lanham considers how admiration for Audubon’s art can coexist with a clear recognition of his racism, and why organizations honoring him must take that history seriously. 

Audubon’s paintings remain significant works of wildlife art. Their beauty, however, does not diminish his responsibility for enslaving and selling people. An honest account neither needs to deny his artistic accomplishments nor use them as a counterweight to human suffering. It must make room for the whole history—including the people whose freedom Audubon denied.