Kentucky and Tennessee. Tennessee and Kentucky. Sister states. Enemy states. From the 1770s, when settlers from Virginia and North Carolina began to move into the lush valleys of East Tennessee and central Kentucky, these two states would be linked—whether the residents wished this or not—in the national consciousness. Even with many similarities—terrain, climate, settlers’ background, and religion, to name a few—there would always be major differences. By the 1820s, for example, a huge political rift would develop, pitting the followers of Kentucky’s Henry Clay against the followers of Tennessee’s Andrew Jackson. The ultimate difference would come in 1861—a difference that constitutes a major theme of this essay collection—when Tennessee joined the Confederate States of America and, after a failed attempt to remain neutral in the Civil War, Kentucky remained in the Union.
Kentucky and Tennessee. Even the names had something in common. Anthropologists and historians believe that they came from Native American terms, but no agreement has been reached on what the terms meant. That the two areas were named by Indians does reveal, of course, that the first people to live in Kentucky and Tennessee were Native Americans, who probably moved into the region thousands of years before Europeans began to arrive in the sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, powerful tribes such as the Cherokee and the Chickasaw had claimed the area all the way north to the Ohio River as their hunting lands and had chased out competing tribes such as the Shawnee.
In the 1740s and 1750s, Thomas Walker and other surveyors from east of the Appalachian Mountains began to explore part of the region, and their activities were followed in the 1760s and 1770s by efforts to buy the land from the Cherokees and other tribes. Further interest in the region arose when “long hunters” such as Thomas “Big Foot” Spencer and Daniel Boone ventured into the area in pursuit of deer hides and other animal pelts. Their descriptions of the region helped spark land fever back in Virginia and North Carolina. By the early 1770s, settlers had begun to move into both Kentucky and Tennessee, causing conflict with British officials trying to keep settlers from moving west of the mountains and with antisettlement factions of the Cherokees.
What a region to struggle for! Bounded on the north by the Ohio River, on the east by the Appalachian Mountains, on the west by the Mississippi River, and, more vaguely, on the south by an informal line close to the thirty-fifth parallel, this area of some eighty-three thousand square miles had already been a prize in the war between the French and the British in the 1750s and was another prize in the American Revolution. After the Revolution canceled British claims to the region, a new challenge to American possession came from the Spanish in Louisiana when during the 1780s they tried to lure Kentucky and Tennessee residents into withdrawing allegiance from the United States and giving it to Spain.
Frontier loyalties to the nation held firm through the shaky Articles of Confederation period, but this time produced both political tumult and progress toward statehood. In 1776, for example, Kentucky, long considered a part of Virginia, saw Virginia create Kentucky County from the whole region. To the south, North Carolina soon made what would become Tennessee the county of Washington. More counties were created in the years that followed, but Kentuckians and Tennesseans alike complained loudly about the poor government that Virginia and North Carolina provided and the difficulties that frontier people had in traveling to the state capitals east of the mountains. Subsequently, in 1792, Kentucky, with Virginia’s acquiescence, became the fifteenth state. In 1796, after a brief existence as a territory, Tennessee entered the Union as the sixteenth state.
Including their similar paths toward statehood, early Kentuckians and Tennesseans had much in common. Most of the settlers in both states had migrated from Virginia and North Carolina and were largely English, Scots-Irish, or German in background. In religion, most were Presbyterians, Baptists, or Methodists, but the region also contained Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and members of smaller denominations. English was certainly the dominant language, even if spoken with a frontier twang. As late as 1860, schools were scarce in the two states, but each had them and had several private colleges within their borders by the 1820s and 1830s.
Economically, the two states shared a largely agricultural way of life. After the initial lure of abundant game had brought the long hunters, the permanent settlers came because of the rich soils, temperate climate, and excellent water sources. In Kentucky, farmers raised the usual food crops such as corn but also planted large amounts of hemp, flax, and tobacco. Tennessee farmers subsisted on corn and other vegetables and raised tobacco and—in the middle and western sections of the state—cotton commercially. Both states produced enough cattle and hogs not only to satisfy their own needs but also to export some to adjacent states. By 1860, some development of coal mining had occurred in the region as well as the development of small industries, but neither mining nor industry played significant roles in the states’ economies.
Raising tobacco, hemp, or cotton involved intensive labor and, to be profitable, large acreage. To meet these needs, Kentucky and Tennessee farmers—at least the large landowners—brought into the region African slaves. The first, of course, arrived with the original settlers. Virginia and North Carolina had long before established a slavery-based agricultural system, and, thus, as the western migration began, the slaves went with their owners. As the wilderness gave way to farms and plantations, commercial crops demanded more slaves. In 1800, Kentucky, more agriculturally developed than its sister state, had 40,343 slaves, while Tennessee had only 13,584. After the purchase of western Tennessee territory from the Chickasaws in the late 1810s, cotton cultivation greatly expanded and, with it, Tennessee’s slave population. By 1840, Kentucky had 182,258 slaves and Tennessee 183,059. Tennessee’s slave population continued to increase at a faster rate than that of its neighbor to the north, as is revealed by the 1860 census: Tennessee slaves, 275,719; Kentucky slaves, 225,483. By this time, approximately one in five Kentuckians was a slave, while in Tennessee the ratio was closer to one in four. Although there were many other reasons why Tennesseans joined the Confederacy in 1861, their commitment to slavery and to cotton cultivation certainly tied them to the lower Southern states—the Cotton Belt—in ways that many Kentuckians did not share.
Political developments in the two states both bound them and separated them. Initially, the vast majority of the region’s voters were die-hard Jeffersonians, with the rival Federalists being virtually nonexistent. Further, both states enthusiastically supported the War of 1812, with War Hawks such as Henry Clay of Kentucky and Felix Grundy of Tennessee leading the way. By the 1820s, however, the growing rivalry between Clay and Andrew Jackson would split the two states’ political allegiances. Calling Clay the “Judas of the West” in 1825 when he supported Jackson’s rival, John Quincy Adams, in the presidential election, Jackson and his supporters became even more furious with Clay when he accepted the secretary of state position in Adams’s administration. This rivalry played a huge role in just a few years in the emergence of two new political parties: the Democrats and the Whigs. (Personal animosity between Clay and Jackson led Clay to remark about Jackson that killing two thousand British soldiers at New Orleans certainly did not qualify him to be president and caused Jackson allegedly to claim that one of his major regrets as a politician was that he had not been able to “shoot Henry Clay.”)
The differences between Clay’s political program and Jackson’s went far beyond personality. Both men were staunch nationalists, but Clay’s American System put much more emphasis on the development of industry and government-sponsored internal improvements than did Jackson’s program of limited, frugal government. With the founding of the Whig Party in 1834—a party that incorporated most of Clay’s goals—the Whigs would have a vigorous and popular presence in Kentucky and, somewhat surprisingly, Tennessee. In 1836, the first Whig presidential contest, the Whig William Henry Harrison carried Kentucky and the Whig Hugh Lawson White outpolled Martin Van Buren in Tennessee. Until 1856—even when Tennessee’s own James Knox Polk ran in 1844—Kentucky and Tennessee gave their electoral votes to the Whig candidates. At the state and local levels as well, the states’ Whigs maintained active and successful opposition to the Democrats. Not until 1856 did the states’voting majority choose the Democratic candidate—James Buchanan—and, by then, the Whig Party had collapsed, and the Democrats were beginning to have great difficulty in maintaining national unity.
Beginning with the Wilmot Proviso in 1846, the sectional crises that wracked the nation during the next fifteen years ripped apart the political parties, created new ones, and eventually resulted in civil war. Kentuckians and Tennesseans alike participated in the turmoil that the crises caused and saw their own political allegiances twisted and, in some instances, redefined. A major blow for the Whigs in both states was the collapse of the national Whig Party after the 1852 election, a collapse that sent Whigs everywhere searching for a new party. Some dabbled with the upstart and nativist American (“Know Nothing”) Party, but its anti-immigrant stance and lukewarm attitude toward slavery failed to gain much support from Kentucky and Tennessee voters. After the 1856 election, its national existence ended as well. By the end of the decade, former Whigs would find a more attractive party in the short-lived Constitutional Union Party.
The states’ Democrats and Whigs did agree on one thing during the 1850s, however: they hated the newly emergent Republican Party. Joining with their fellow Southerners, they condemned the Republicans not only for opposing slavery’s expansion but also for being closet abolitionists (at least in the minds of many Republican opponents). The prospect of a Republican victory in the 1856 presidential election played a large role in Kentucky and Tennessee voters opting for James Buchanan. Though thwarted in that election for the presidency, the Republicans made significant gains in Congress and at state and local levels, engendering fear and anger throughout the South, and opening the door once again for a South-wide debate over secession.
Thus, these two states, Kentucky and Tennessee, entering the Union as part of the New West, serving as the home of national political figures such as Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson, boasting of folk heroes such as Daniel Boone and David Crockett, waited to see what the remainder of the 1850s would accomplish in dealing with the sectional crises. Would the Republicans win in 1860? Would a new party arise to replace the Whigs? If the Republicans ever came to national power, would slavery be safe? Would the South secede? And, if secession came, which way would Kentucky and Tennessee go? Today we know the answers to these questions, but, as this book’s essays reveal, we are still—nearly 150 years later—assessing the consequences of the decisions the states’ residents made.