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These commercial boats require at least four crew and a pilot, who are contracted per trip. Roy's a strapping youth, good with horses and familiar with rifles from a lifetime of hunting. He can read and is learning to gamble. And coming from a family of southern landowners, he's comfortable manhandling slaves. That's an important quality, given the cargo the flatboat is carrying—a dozen people, destined for sale in the slave markets of New Orleans.

It's been illegal to import slaves from outside the United States since 1808, but Congress's action did nothing to stem the internal market. The population of rural Kentucky is in steep decline, and as people leave they sell their slaves. The prices in New Orleans, the premier market for the human trade, are much higher than in Kentucky; at $600 to $1,200 a person, even a handful of slaves will pay for the trip and cover the crew's pay.

Thousands every year make the trip after being "sold down the river," and the unsavory business leaves slave-driving bargemen eager to find crew. Even an untested teenager, if they show enough pluck. And Roy has pluck to spare.

Running away from home is the best example of this. It's a bold move, but Roy sees it as an obvious one. There's little to keep him in Kentucky besides his family, and the Bean family is on a downward trajectory. In fact, the entire country seems to be faltering.

When Roy was a child in Mason County, his family owned a sizable parcel of land and plenty of people to work it. An 1820 census listed a homestead of thirty-two people. Only six of them were Bean family members—father Phantley, mother Anna, and their four children. James was the eldest, born in 1814. Joshua was next, born in 1818, followed the next year by Samuel. Keeping pace, Sarah provided some household gender balance in 1820. Their parents must have exhausted themselves, Roy figured, because he didn't arrive until 1825.

The Bean children grew up in an entitled existence of household servants, field slaves, and obedient hired hands. There were eight slaves in the family's holdings, five of whom were females under twenty-four years old. The homestead also had a workforce of sixteen hired laborers, all living on-site. Phantley Sr., who went by "Francis," was a skilled surveyor who took work establishing new post roads and racetracks. He also diversified; for example, he and his brother Benjamin in 1818 jointly backed a man named William Connett (from Mayslick) in opening a tavern. It was the first saloon in which the Bean family is known to have been involved, but it was far from the last.

Roy's father was a charismatic and energetic man, a larger-than-life figure to his sons. He was given to delivering speeches in his lingering Irish brogue. Phantley Sr. consistently demonstrated how a man sizes up opportunities and uses confidence to claim them. His boys each shared a belief that they were men of action who deserved to capitalize on circumstances, no matter where in the world they found them. Nature and other, lesser men needed to yield before their ambitions. Even James, the eldest and most responsibly minded brother, inherited an aggressive pride.

These traits were not unique to the Bean family; they were hallmarks of American culture, particularly in the South. These attitudes migrated with settlers going into the western frontier and, in time, became the tenets of what's called Manifest Destiny.

Kentucky dashed the proud aspirations of the Bean family. In March 1825 they sold a fifty-four-acre tract of land to neighbor Thomas Wells and moved from Mason into a humbler homestead in Shelby County. The 1830 census showed a household of just seventeen people—the family and eight slaves. By then, the Beans were already in a financial retreat, and things were about to get much worse.

In 1833, a cholera epidemic scythed through Kentucky, killing tens of thousands. The extended Bean family was swept into the carnage—a family slave named Harry Nichols offered a window on their suffering when he later recalled helping family members bury "three of old man Bean's children," among many others. It's the first of several sporadic outbreaks, the disease sadistically taking long breaks between lethal waves.

In October 1835, Phantley Bean Sr. was struck down by a runaway team of horses, which killed him instantly.

Any hope to hold the family together in Shelby County fell to James, at twenty-one years old, and Joshua, at twenty. Sarah was fifteen, Sam fourteen, and Roy just ten.

After their father's death, Kentucky's cholera-ravaged economy only grew worse. In 1837, the banks in the state all failed. It had something to do with the Bank of England overextending itself with loans, leading to a cut of all credit issuance to Americans, which halved the price of cotton that year. This in turn shuttered cotton companies and banks in New Orleans, and the infection reached New York, causing the Josephs Banking Co. to close and precipitating the panic of 1837, which crashed the dollar and tanked the entire US economy.