On the eve of the Civil War, as the Southern states began to organize under the banner of a nascent confederacy, Jefferson Davis looked toward Kentucky with no less covetous eyes than did Abraham Lincoln and the federal government. Both presidents, Kentuckians by birth, measured the worth of the Bluegrass State to their respective nations in relative terms. Lincoln, always the gifted and pragmatic politician, viewed Kentucky much like a politician would the votes of a needed swing state in a presidential election and remained determined to deny the state’s resources to the South. Davis, a West Point graduate, instinctively assessed Kentucky’s value in military terms and recognized the defensive advantage of an unbroken Confederate line along the Ohio River. In the end, a pragmatic respect for Northern economic dominance and a love for the historic national identity bolstered by a trust in the democratic process inspired a majority of Kentuckians to seek preservation of property and self by resisting the temptations of secession. This decision, however, did not stop thousands of Kentuckians from heading south to fight for the Confederacy. Nor did it deter the ex-Confederates from assuming a high degree of political and social ascendancy in post-Appomattox Kentucky, an ascendancy that in many ways made Kentucky seem more Confederate after the guns stopped firing than it had a historic right to claim.
The postwar ascendancy of the Kentucky Confederates has created an unavoidable temptation to assess why Kentucky did not hitch its horse to the secession wagon as opposed to why it chose to remain in the Union. Such an assessment has a tendency to misinterpret Kentucky’s character in 1860 by overestimating the state’s enthusiasm for a confederacy controlled by the cotton states. For, although Kentucky was Southern, it was not, as Thomas Clark so aptly concluded, “a Southern state, comparable to Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina.” William Freehling has further pointed out that Kentucky was not even as Southern as its mother state, Virginia; it was more Western, a point that should be well taken. Conversely, pointing to its geographic proximity to the North, and identifying certain border state characteristics as determinative in Kentucky’s decision to remain in the Union, ignores the more subtle reasons for that decision. That being the case, it becomes incumbent to analyze the historic cultural, economic, and political components of Kentucky’s antebellum character in order to understand the determining factors in Kentucky’s stand.1
The Kentuckian of 1861 could generally trace his or her roots to the English and Scots-Irish settlers and their African American slaves who migrated over the Wilderness Trail from Virginia, North Carolina, and, to lesser degree, Pennsylvania and Maryland in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In the settlement years preceding statehood, Kentucky was a political subdivision of Virginia. Finding itself deeply involved in the American Revolution, Virginia was unable to govern or protect Kentucky effectively. Thus, Kentuckians learned quickly that they would have to fend for themselves against the frequent Native American incursions, often inspired by the British. Richmond was also particularly inept at regulating land distribution after the American Revolution. This ineptness resulted in a land system that was mired in a swamp of confusion. It was during these years that many of the large estates of central Kentucky were put together through the purchase, more often than not by absentee Virginians, of many small squatter claims. Unlike the typical pioneer, who cleared and settled his own land, many of these absentee owners sent their overseers and slaves ahead to perform this function. Thus, by 1800, almost all the early squatters in central Kentucky were supplanted by large estate owners, who introduced slavery as a protected property right.2
With Virginia’s preoccupation with the American Revolution, Kentucky’s early settlers were thoroughly isolated and continued to be for many years, creating a society that, but for slavery, was more similar to that developing in the old Northwest territories of Indiana and Illinois than in the Southern states. Southern influences, however, were pervasive and over the years, particularly among the Bluegrass gentry of central Kentucky, developed into mainstays of society. Within a generation of Fort Boonesborough, these gentlemen farmers began to fashion their society and behavior after the plantation life of the Southern seaboard and Tidewater areas of Virginia and the Carolinas. By 1820, they had achieved a level of prosperity and permanence that matched that of the grand Southern estates on the eastern side of the Appalachians. The society and culture of the Bluegrass elite were, however, the exception and not the rule. The yeoman farmers in other parts of the state lived in a much less pretentious style and, like their brethren to the north, personally worked the soil. Slavery and its attendant culture, however, influenced Kentucky society more than any other institution, and the Bluegrass elite essentially controlled slavery. It was slavery and the gentry society, as perpetuated in the Bluegrass, that identified Kentucky with the South.3
The first half of the nineteenth century also witnessed thousands of second and third-generation Kentuckians settling in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. In part, much of this northern migration was prompted by slavery. Although many of the migrating Kentuckians had a moral distaste for the institution, most objected to it as a deterrent to the economic prosperity of nonslaveholders. They had discovered that it was difficult to compete with the slaveholders unless they themselves became slaveholders. The majority of these migrants were either unwilling or unable to make this compromise. Thus, an impressive number of Kentucky’s yeomen farmers of egalitarian stock sought what they believed to be more fertile fields in the free states of the Midwest. By 1860, some sixty-five thousand nativeborn Kentuckians were living in Indiana and another sixty thousand in Illinois. Likewise, a number of free-state natives, although a considerably smaller population than the northward-migrating Kentuckians, migrated southward to Kentucky. These migrations and comminglings of peoples created strong ties that bound together families and friends on both sides of the Ohio River, ties that would have a significant impact on Kentucky’s decisionmaking process in 1861.4
Despite the lack of guidance from Virginia, Kentucky emerged from the pioneer wilderness with a mind-set characterized by an egalitarianbased nationalism. In 1792, it became the first Southern state, and only the second in the nation, not to require a property qualification for either voting or holding public office. In time, its budding political philosophy would be nurtured and irrevocably molded into a strong desire for national unity through the immeasurable influence of Henry Clay, who for more than forty years dominated Kentucky politics. Although a slave owner, Clay understood the limitations of the slaveholding system, particularly its economic deterrence to industrialization. Despite a reputation for being a self-seeking, ambitious politician, he was also an adept businessman with a vision for America and Kentucky. Like most visionaries, he was an idealist. From 1820 until his death, his ideology was centrist and focused on compromise among competing interests—those of the North and the South—in order to advance economic progress. His continuous efforts to mediate those differences in sectional perspective resulted in the concept of compromise becoming deeply rooted in the Kentucky psyche as an ideal of progress.5
Clay’s vision for the future of America and Kentucky was based on what was called the American System. The American System demanded progress through industrialization. Clay adroitly politicized the need for a larger federal monetary presence in developing the national infrastructure while respecting the property rights of the slave owner. His call to the future would require Southerners, including Kentuckians, to diversify and adopt economic innovations. It was not surprising that both Northerners and Southerners determined that such a program would eventually abrogate slavery. Although many Southerners, particularly Kentuckians, understood and fully appreciated Clay’s program, few were willing to infringe on the slavocracy.6
Clay’s opinions on slavery were well known. Although he perceived slavery as a protected state right not to be infringed on by the federal government, Clay strongly believed in and publicly advocated gradual emancipation. (He was also noted for his work with colonization societies to find homes in Africa for freedmen.) This position bolstered the fledgling anti-slavery movement in Kentucky, and, by 1849, the movement had gathered sufficient steam to push—although unsuccessfully—for a state constitutional amendment abolishing slavery.
Clay’s belief in the Constitution and love for the Union was legendary among his constituents. Over the years, his fundamental belief that the preservation of the Union was in the best interest of all Kentuckians was more than once demonstrated by the employment of his political skills to effectuate his ideology of compromise during the heat of a sectional crisis. Kentuckians admired Clay for his successes and began to see their state as being in a unique geographic position to mediate grievances between North and South. With an ability to appreciate both sides of the ongoing arguments, Kentuckians were less likely to advocate any form of political extremism. Such was the case when Kentucky resisted sending a delegate to the 1850 Nashville Convention of slave states called to discuss what recourse, including secession, should be taken in the event the Compromise of 1850 became law. Likewise, in 1861, Kentucky never called a convention to determine the question of secession. Both instances suggest that political leadership in Kentucky was in the hands of conservatives who, when pressed, would disdain secession. The Kentuckians who followed Clay in Congress, particularly John J. Crittenden, also viewed compromise as a viable alternative to disunion.7
That Kentuckians were comfortable with the principles expounded by Clay was not an impediment to their supporting the rights of the slave states. They still believed in the inviolability of states’ rights. This view would come to forefront with the formation of the Republican Party, which most Kentuckians despised with the same vehemence as those in the Deep South. Generally, Kentucky congressmen sided with the slave states on roll call votes that addressed issues regarding the institution of slavery. A review of the voting patterns during the presidential elections held between 1840 and 1856 reveals that Kentuckians overwhelmingly supported candidates who were protective of states’ rights and did not threaten the slavocracy. Kentucky politicians, however, were more conservative on votes relating to the expansion of slavery, an issue that generally differentiated Kentucky from the Deep South.8
During the 1850s, Kentucky, like the rest of the nation, experienced the reshaping of political parties and the realignment of voters. For twenty years, Kentucky had been a state whose vote could be counted on to fall in the Whig Party column. Although the Whig Party suffered a shattering defeat in the 1852 presidential election, it still had a tenuous control over the Kentucky statehouse. For almost two years after the 1852 presidential election, a cadre of politically powerful Kentuckians still held to the hope of a resurgent Whig Party, a hope that dissipated with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. This piece of legislation also destroyed the relative sectional calm following the Compromise of 1850. In January 1854, Senator Archibald Dixon, a Kentuckian, introduced a bill that would have effectively repealed the Compromise of 1850. Dixon had based his political career on supporting the proslavery demands of his power base. His bill was nothing more than an attempt to influence the proslavery faction–controlled Kentucky legislature to reelect him to the Senate. Southern Democrats viewed Dixon’s bill as a Whig power play. Not to be outdone by the Whigs, they forced Stephen Douglas to introduce a similar bill to reestablish their “proslavery credentials.” John J. Crittenden and other politically astute Kentuckians immediately saw that the passage of either bill would generate a new and potentially more explosive round of sectional strife. The Dixon bill fell to the wayside as Douglas orchestrated his bill through the Senate. Crittenden, soon to take over Dixon’s Senate seat, pleaded with all the Kentucky congressmen, including Dixon, not to vote for the Douglas bill. His efforts reaped little success as the Kentucky congressional delegation backed the bill to a man.9
The implications of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act were not as revolutionary in the border states as they were in the North and South. Northerners were appalled and took great exception to the passage of the act. Most Northerners viewed the machinations employed by Douglas to ensure passage of the act as morally corrupt. What followed was the destruction of the Northern Democratic and Whig parties and a search for a new sectional political entity to fight the slavocracy. By the mid-1850s, only one party, the Democratic, survived in the South. Although somewhat in need of repair, Kentucky, however, still maintained a basis for a viable two-party system.
With the demise of the Whig Party, many stalwart ex-Whigs joined the Know Nothings—a fast-growing nativist organization that formed under the nebulous banner of the American Party. The American Party was something of an anomaly in Kentucky and the rest of the South, opposed as it was to immigrants and Catholics, who posed no direct threat to the homogeneity of the political power base. What apparently attracted Kentucky voters was not so much the political philosophy of the Americans, which many found shameful at best, as their in-place organization. Astute ex-Whigs viewed this political infrastructure as an opportunistic mechanism to keep the Democrats from control of the state until a more agreeable opposition party could be formed. This goal was realized in 1855 when the Know Nothings carried the state election. By that time, the American Party was already in its death throes as a nationally viable political entity. Most Northern members of the party were joining the newly formed Republican Party, resulting in a shift of the party’s power base to the border states. This became apparent in 1857 when die-hard party members staged their last national political convention in Louisville.10
It was evident by the late 1850s that the American Party had served its purpose in Kentucky and elsewhere. The growing strength of the Republican Party in the North and the rhetoric spouting from “Fire-Eaters” in the South caused old Whigs like John J. Crittenden to feel that there was a need and, perhaps, an opportunity for the formation of a national conservative opposition party. In February 1859, the path to realizing this need was initiated in Kentucky when two thousand delegates from eighty-four counties met in Louisville. Robert Letcher, an old Whig and ex-governor, presided over an assembly that included most of the men who would constitute the Union leadership in Kentucky during the next decade. The convention passed a rather weak platform that pronounced no specific program other than some platitudes about preserving the Union and the peace of the nation. This lack of direction, most likely, contributed to the overwhelming victory of the Democratic Party in the August elections that summer. Beriah Magoffin, a man with strong pro-Southern sentiments, was elected governor. All the other incoming state officials were Democrats, as were six of ten congressmen and the overwhelming majority of the state legislature. Almost two-thirds of the incoming legislators were slave owners, and a little over a third were lawyers. It would be hard to argue that the legal interests of the Kentucky slave owners were not well represented as the state was about to enter the secession crisis.11
The short-lived truce following the Compromise of 1850 was replaced by an ever-increasing sectional animosity, the strength of which destroyed the South’s faith in the two-party system. Kentuckians, unlike the Southern oligarchy, were not overcome with the fear that the political results of a Republican victory could not be controlled. They, in large part, still believed that the competition generated by a healthy two-party system was the most appropriate means to contain the sectional crisis. With the advent of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the formation of the Republican Party, this belief was no longer shared by Kentucky’s sister states in the Deep South. The Deep South believed that it was no longer a question of which party but one of which section controlled the White House. Editorials in Republican-backed newspapers in the North stressing the need for an exclusive Northern party “to resist slave power aggressions” tended to support this belief. Consequently, by 1856, there was only one party in the Deep South—the Democratic Party. The lack of two-party competition in the Deep South permitted sectional extremism to flourish to the extent that normal political processes would, ultimately, be rejected when secession appeared to be the only means to achieve the region’s political goals. Kentuckians, on the other hand, “not only continued to believe that they could achieve those goals at the national level through the normal political process, but . . . also thought that they were being attained already within their state so that there was no need to create a new government.” This fundamental difference would play itself out during the presidential election of 1860.12
It is hard to imagine that the sectional animosity reached in the 1850s would have been so extreme in the absence of slavery. Naturally, being a slave state that was bordered by three free states, Kentucky was a frontline recipient of this animosity. Slavery became a pervasive part of Kentucky history the minute the first African American bondsman set foot on the Wilderness Trail. In the first years of settlement, slaves were used to clear fields, build houses, and do whatever else was needed to help close the frontier. It soon became evident, however, that, but for the extreme southwest section of the state, where cotton was raised, Kentucky’s climate and crops were not as conducive to the profitable use of slave labor as were those of the plantations of the Deep South. Ironically, the farmers in the Bluegrass area, where the great majority of slaves were located, found their land to be far more valuable for raising livestock than any labor-intensive crop. Hemp was the only exception, owing in most part to the abundant use of its by-products, twine and rope, by Southern planters to bind their cotton bales and the U.S. Navy for the rigging on its ships. It was axiomatic that the demand for hemp production rose proportionately with the demand for cotton. Owing in large part to large slave populations, Lexington and the surrounding Bluegrass counties became the center for the production and manufacturing of hemp and its by-products. In time, strong commercial and social ties developed between the Bluegrass hemp producers and the Southern planters.13
Although slave labor was used extensively in hemp production and manufacturing, the industry was not a panacea for the growing number of relatively underutilized slaves in the Bluegrass. From 1800 to 1833, when Kentucky passed a law forbidding the importation of slaves, the state’s slave population witnessed its greatest rate of growth. Although this rate slowed after 1833 and the proportion of black to white Kentuckians began to decrease marginally until it reached 19.5 percent in 1860, the existence of an underutilized slave population was alarming to the slave owner. In the legal terms of the nineteenth century, slaves were property and treated as a capital investment. However, when a capital investment is producing little or no income, it quickly becomes a liability. To resolve this economically unattractive dilemma, the slave owner had either to maximize the use of his property or liquidate it. Some Kentuckians moved with their slaves to take advantage of the opening of more cotton-producing lands in Mississippi and Alabama. Others purchased cotton fields in these states but retained their Bluegrass farms, moving slaves between the two locations as needed. These movements and the ever-expanding need for slaves in the Deep South created a market for Kentucky’s abundant slave population. With the repeal in 1849 of Kentucky’s Slave Importation Act of 1833, the state became an even more active commercial center for domestic slave traffic. In his seminal work on the history of blacks in Kentucky, Marion Lucas has calculated that approximately seventy-seven thousand slaves were sent to the Deep South from the state from 1830 to 1860. With the cotton market booming, the demand for Kentucky slaves in the Deep South became so substantial after 1849 that their commercial value reached its highest level in the decade before the Civil War.14
The Kentucky slave owner’s comprehension of his property rights and their inherent value unquestionably tethered him to the Southern slavocracy. Yet, unlike in the Deep South, a slaveholding planter class, and its attendant caste system, was not created in Kentucky, owing to its lack of labor-intensive crops. Instead, the state’s settlement and development patterns produced a wealthy middle class supported by artisans, mechanics, and small farm owners. Thus, slave ownership in Kentucky was more widespread than it was in the Cotton Belt states, with a majority of slave owners owning fewer than five slaves. The 1850 census shows that only fifty-three Kentuckians owned more than fifty slaves. Nevertheless, Kentucky slaveholders were just as adamant about their property rights as were the slave owners of the Deep South and generally would not entertain thoughts of emancipation, at least emancipation without compensation. There were, however, numerous Kentuckians, including some slave owners, who felt strongly that the state would, ultimately, benefit from some form of emancipation. The more conservative antislavery proponents viewed slavery as a means of race control and recommended emancipation only if it was used in tandem with the removal of the freed slaves from the state. Most nonslaveholding Kentuckians, however, believed that slavery was evil but were intent on being “patient until some safe and practical solution to the problem could be found.”15
Although the average midcentury Kentuckian may have been ambivalent about slavery, he was not ambivalent about blacks. Swayed by racially motivated concerns about an uncontrolled African American population, Kentuckians never considered championing political and social equality for the emancipated slaves. Such concerns also likely contributed to their continued susceptibility to the rhetoric proffered by the state’s proslavery element.16
Antislavery attitudes in Kentucky can be traced almost to the importation of the first slaves. By and large, the first settlers were not wealthy men but common farmers and artisans with strong egalitarian and republican beliefs. For various reasons, most had a disdain for slavery. Yet, by the time statehood was achieved in 1792, the institution had become strongly entrenched and attempts to ban it in the first state constitution failed. There were recurrent attempts to introduce some form of gradual emancipation, but these efforts were defeated. Emancipators’ most favorable opportunity appeared in 1849 under the color of constitutional reform. When the dust settled, not only was the reformers’ call for gradual emancipation soundly defeated, but it was also obvious that slavery had become even more entrenched in Kentucky. The Third Constitutional Convention held in 1855 tended to confirm this conclusion. The 1849 convention was the last serious effort to move for emancipation in Kentucky before the Civil War. Kentuckians never did agree to emancipation of their own volition. It would, ultimately, take a civil war and a national constitutional amendment before Kentuckians begrudgingly accepted it.17
The existence of an active core of Kentuckians willing to support some form of emancipation is indicative of a democratic society unafraid to air its own laundry. Aside from the moral issues attendant to the evil necessity, many Kentuckians never were able philosophically to reconcile slavery with a republican form of government. Perhaps this dichotomy, more than any other factor, continued to breathe life into Kentucky’s antislavery movement.18
Kentuckians’ tolerance of antislavery activity within their state far exceeded that of residents of the Lower South. Indicative of this toleration was the existence of an antislavery press within the state. The most famous was the True American, published in Lexington for several months during the spring and summer of 1845 by Henry Clay’s eccentric cousin Cassius Marcellus Clay. Cassius Clay believed that slavery retarded economic progress, particularly when it came to the industrialization of the South. Although he preached emancipation, he did not advocate equality of rights. His editorials in the True American added nothing more than what he had advocated publicly for years, but they were now printed and circulated throughout Kentucky. This agitation stretched beyond the proslavery forces’ limit of toleration when the True American carried an article advocating equality for free blacks. When a committee was appointed to dismantle the newspaper’s presses and transport them to Cincinnati, Thomas Marshall delivered a speech advising Clay that he should have known Kentuckians better. If the suppression of Clay’s press failed to concern most Kentuckians, neither did the further establishment of newspapers of like kind, such as the Louisville Examiner, which tended to deliver a milder message of emancipation.19
A small core of abolitionists also patronized the antislavery movement in Kentucky. Abolitionists could be differentiated from other antislavery advocates by their strong belief in the “immediate emancipation of slaves and equal rights for blacks in the United States.” Of course, antebellum Kentuckians considered those favoring even the most limited form of emancipation extremists. Extreme or not, Northern abolitionists targeted Kentucky all through the 1840s and 1850s as their beachhead in the South. Just across the river from an active abolition stronghold in Cincinnati, Kentucky was too tempting a target for these crusaders to pass up. Abolitionists also believed that, owing to the state’s history of antislavery politics, Kentuckians would be more receptive to their dogma than the residents of the Deep South. Such freedom of thought, the Lower South strongly believed, would lead states like Kentucky to side with Illinoisans rather than with South Carolinians and hasten the death of slavery on its northern flank.20
The story of John Fee and his abolitionist colony in Berea, Kentucky, has been told many times. It is a remarkable story in the sense that Kentucky slave owners tolerated the colony’s presence for several years before forcing its inhabitants out of the state in early 1860. Situated in the slave-intense Madison County, Fee and the Berea colony preached a biblically based abolitionism. This was not in itself unique, for, at one time or another, all the major Protestant denominations, with the Presbyterian ministry being the most vocal, preached some form of antislavery in Kentucky. What was unique was that Fee intended to colonize Kentucky with Northerners and make it a free state. Although experiencing very little success, Fee found that his presence, in tandem with proslavery’s deeprooted fear of an imminent slave uprising, was more than enough of a catalyst for the residents of Madison County to remove the Bereans. It was this “constantly increased ascension of northern men” that was cited by Kentuckians as one of the primary reasons why they deemed it necessary to force Fee and his followers to leave the state.21
It has been written many times that slavery in Kentucky, and the Upper South in general, was of a milder form than what African Americans experienced in the Lower South. Despite the incongruity of this statement, there is ample evidence to support such an argument, but there are also sufficient examples to be found highlighting the harsh reality of slavery. Kentuckians then were, and still to some extent today are, quick to point out what they considered to be the benevolent aspects of slavery as one way of ameliorating their complicity in perpetuating the peculiar institution. For example, there were no legal restrictions in Kentucky forbidding teaching slaves to read or write, as there were in the states of the Deep South. In fact, it has been estimated that at least 20 percent of Kentucky’s runaways could read. Kentucky slaves also had far more freedom of movement than was previously thought. This liberality is particularly interesting in a state where a slave’s proximity to freedom was the width of the Ohio River. One would think that it could be far easier for a mobile slave to bolt than for one who was sedentary. Yet the 1860 census for Kentucky reported only 119 fugitives out of a slave population of 225,483.22
Perhaps no slave state, other than Virginia, openly debated emancipation as did Kentucky. Although this debate sometimes had violent consequences, the fact that it was carried on at all indicated the willingness of Kentuckians to address the issue. This permissive attitude was not present in the other slave states. Indeed, the slave states in general took great pains to suppress such attitudes. By 1860, every Southern state but Kentucky had passed laws restricting free speech and freedom of the press in order to curtail antislavery influences. The willingness to debate these issues openly, in tandem with apparently more liberal laws toward slaves in general, would tend to suggest that, in 1860, Kentuckians had less fear of the racial consequences resulting from a Northern-dominated Congress than did the white citizens of the Lower South.23
Written history is so focused on the sectional crisis during the decade before the Civil War that it would lead one to believe that Kentucky, along with the entire borderland, was constantly in turmoil. To some degree, Kentuckians were assaulted from the north by abolitionist and other free-state propaganda, from the south by challenges questioning the state’s loyalty to slavery and the region, and from within by attempts to reconcile these contrasts, but the reality was that life went on as usual, with very few people recognizing the historical significance of their time. Most Kentuckians recognized that slavery was economically harmful to the state, but they were willing to accept the institution as a necessary evil. Such a conception of slavery was far different from that of the other slave states like Virginia, which viewed slavery as a “social, political and moral blessing.” Kentuckians, however, much like the rest of the South, easily convinced themselves that, without slavery, a large free black population within the state would disrupt social harmony and, ultimately, lead to some sort of violent racial confrontation. This thought process helped them explain away the incongruity of slavery within the democratic society they so strongly cherished.24
Kentucky’s geographic position historically permitted it to reap the benefits of trade with both the North and the South. However, with the advent of the railroad and, particularly, the unprecedented miles of track built by the Northern railroads in the 1850s, the state’s political-economic outlook was significantly altered. By 1860, except for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad’s brand-new southern main line, Kentucky’s rail connections were oriented north. These Northern connections benefited Louisville perhaps more than any other city in the state. The city had experienced both an economic and a population boom between 1840 and 1860. Louisville in 1860, with a population of almost seventy thousand people, was the twelfth largest city in the country. Its vibrant commerce and trade created a wealthy and politically conservative business class. These politically active and powerful businessmen viewed their lucrative economic ties with a jealousy that would suppress the exigencies relating to any thoughts of secession. They clearly understood that “a southern confederacy, conceived and controlled by the cotton states, had serious economic disadvantages for the Upper South,” particularly if its primary goals were “cheap slaves, free trade, and expansion.” Consequently, they became highly motivated in protecting their “growing manufacturing and commercial commitments.” The only rational way to ensure deliverance in that direction was to back, even in a titular manner, the North in the upcoming war for national political and economic dominance.25
Thus, as the two sections of the country marched toward war, it is really not so difficult to understand the position that a majority of Kentucky leaders chose to take regarding secession. They were Southern men with a national perspective very different from that of the oligarchic Deep South. Most important, they were men who strongly believed in the two-party system and the potential for the political resolution of controversial issues. Although many were slave owners, they were neither afraid to debate the issue of emancipation nor willing to support the institution’s expansion in a manner that would threaten national unity. Slavery was never the determinative factor in Kentucky’s decision to take the high road. Nor does it seem to have been the determining factor for the vast majority of the state’s nearly thirty-five thousand sons who fought for the Confederacy.
Through family and commercial ties, many Kentuckians, particularly the state’s business and political leaders, had been inculcated with Northern economic power and Yankee determination. Unlike their brethren farther south, they were convinced that the North would fight and, most likely, win. Furthermore, politically astute Kentuckians as early as 1850 recognized that “as to the boys up the hollows, and in the bush who form a considerable part of our country they are not to be relied on in any contest against the Union.” Perhaps these understandings alone were enough of an incentive for most Kentuckians to avoid a war that would certainly turn Kentucky into a battlefield and threaten their way of life.26
1. Thomas D. Clark, Kentucky: Land of Contrast (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 122; William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 464.
2. Thomas D. Clark, A History of Kentucky (Lexington, Ky.: John Bradford, 1950), 62–64; Stephan Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 79–81.
3. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 126.
4. Nicole Etcheson, The Emerging Midwest: Upland Southerners and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest, 1787–1861 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 67; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of the Census, 1864), 168–87.
5. Ralph A. Wooster, Politicians, Planters and Plain Folk: Courthouse and Statehouse in the Upper South, 1850–1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975), 13.
6. Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 132–39.
7. Arthur C. Cole, The Whig Party in the South (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1962), 161; Albert D. Kirwan, John J. Crittenden: The Struggle for the Union (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1962), 432–33.
8. Ruth McQuown and Jasper B. Shannon, Presidential Politics in Kentucky, 1824–1948: A Compilation of Election Statistics and an Analysis of Political Behavior (Lexington: University of Kentucky, College of Arts and Sciences, Bureau of Government Research, 1950), 10–40.
9. Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 808–10.
10. Ibid., 956; Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 247.
11. Louisville Journal, February 23–25, 1859; Wooster, Politicians, Planters and Plain Folk, 33, 38.
12. Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Wiley, 1978), 255.
13. J. Winston Coleman, Slavery Times in Kentucky (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940), 42–44.
14. Marion B. Lucas, Blacks in Kentucky, vol. 1, From Slavery to Segregation, 1760–1891 (Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 1992), 99; Coleman, Slavery Times in Kentucky, 122.
15. Harold D. Tallant, Evil Necessity: Slavery and Political Culture in Antebellum Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), 3.
16. Ibid., 17; Louisville Democrat, January 8, 1857.
17. Lowell H. Harrison, The Antislavery Movement in Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978), 59–60; Tallant, Evil Necessity, 158.
18. Asa E. Martin, Anti-Slavery Movement in Kentucky Prior to 1850 (1918; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1970), 67–68.
19. David L. Smiley, Lion of White Hall: The Life of Cassius M. Clay (1962; reprint, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1969), 111; W. L. Barre, ed., Speeches and Writings of Hon. Thomas F. Marshall (Cincinnati: Applegate, 1858), 209; Clement Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South, rev. and enlarged ed. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), 190.
20. Stanley Harold, Abolitionists and the South, 1831–1861 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 106, 120; Freehling, The Road to Disunion, 24.
21. William E. Ellis, H. E. Everman, and Richard D. Sears, Madison County: 200 Years in Retrospect (Richmond, Ky.: Madison County Historical Society, 1985), 145–51; Harold, Abolitionists and the South, 124.
22. Eaton, Freedom-of-Thought Struggle, 212; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population of the United States in 1860, 168–87.
23. Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: Norton, 2005), 734; Martin, Anti-Slavery Movement in Kentucky, 138.
24. Richmond Enquirer, April 20, 1857; Tallant, Evil Necessity, 13–14.
25. Maury Klein, History of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003), 1–3; William L. Barney, The Road to Secession: A New Perspective on the Old South (New York: Praeger, 1972), 180.
26. Barney, The Road to Secession, 113; Richard F. Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 39.