Kentucky Admitted to the Union
Kentucky was admitted to the Union as the 15th state on June 1, 1792, after a series of events that began with its status as a part of Virginia. The act of Congress approving its admission was passed on February 4, 1792, leading to a constitutional convention in Danville, which drafted a constitution that became effective on the same date of admission. The region had long attracted European interest, particularly from French and English explorers in the 17th and 18th centuries. The settlement of Kentucky was marked by conflicts between Native American tribes and European settlers, resulting in a turbulent history characterized by territorial disputes and violence.
Kentucky was notable for being the first state west of the Appalachian Mountains and was a pioneer in extending voting rights, granting full manhood suffrage in its constitution. The state played a complex role during the Civil War, remaining officially neutral while experiencing deep cultural and political divides that reflected the broader national tensions. With its strategic location, Kentucky became a site of military activity, hosting both Union and Confederate forces. Post-war, Kentucky evolved with industrialization and became famous for its horse racing and breeding, highlighted by the Kentucky Derby, solidifying its cultural identity within the United States.
Kentucky Admitted to the Union
Kentucky Admitted to the Union
Kentucky, originally a part of Virginia, was admitted to the Union as the 15th state on June 1, 1792, by an act of Congress that had been approved on February 4 of the same year. Following the passage of the act, a constitutional convention met in Danville, Kentucky, on April 2 and completed its work on April 19. The constitution drafted by the convention went into effect on June 1 without being first submitted to the people for ratification.
The area of what is now called Kentucky attracted the attention of both the French and the English in the 17th and 18th centuries. The first Europeans who touched upon its borders were adventurers looking for an all-water passage west to the Pacific Ocean. In the second half of the 17th century, the great French explorer René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle may have followed the course of the Ohio River to the falls near which the city of Louisville is now situated. In 1682 he claimed the vast region drained by the Mississippi River and its tributaries, including Kentucky, for King Louis XIV and called it Louisiana.
For more than 100 years after La Salle's explorations, only isolated bands of fur traders and hunters penetrated the region and brought back tales of a beautiful but almost deserted land beyond the Appalachian Mountains. However, as one Native American chief predicted, the area was to be a “dark and bloody ground.” None of the tribes that roamed the territory -Cherokee, Shawnee, Seneca, or Iroquois-had been successful in securing the rich hunting grounds, which were full of bears, deer, and buffalo, as its own domain. Thus there were internecine struggles for possession; and further troubles occurred when white settlers arrived in the area.
The first exploration of practical importance was undertaken in 1750, when British interest in the region, stimulated by rivalry with the French for supremacy not only in the Ohio River valley but also in all of North America, mushroomed. In that year Thomas Walker (1714-1794), a Virginian physician and land agent for the Loyal Land Company of Charlottesville, Virginia, crossed a natural passage (near the point where Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee now meet) from Virginia into what is now eastern Kentucky. He named it the Cumberland Gap after William Augustus, duke of Cumberland, the third son of King George II of England. Scouting for a suitable spot for a settlement, he explored the Big Sandy region of Kentucky.
Within a few months of Walker's expedition, the Ohio Land Company dispatched the frontiersman Christopher Gist on a similar surveying mission. Tracing an old Native American trail, Gist reached the falls of the Ohio and returned east via Walker's Cumberland Gap route. Although both Walker and Gist penned vivid accounts of their travels, their ventures into the “dark and bloody ground” were not immediately fruitful in encouraging settlement, because of the fierce frontier warfare between the French and the British. Only after the British victory in the French and Indian Wars, confirmed in the Treaty of Paris of 1763, did settlers from the eastern seaboard area start to trickle into Kentucky. In so doing they blatantly defied the royal proclamation of 1763, which guaranteed the local tribes their hunting grounds west of the Appalachians and prohibited white penetration of the vast western expanse.
The first major movement of white settlers into Kentucky was instigated by Col. Richard Henderson, a North Carolinian attorney and land speculator who, with others, founded the Transylvania Company with the express design of throwing open most of Kentucky. In 1769 the renowned backwoodsman Daniel Boone, who soon began to act as an agent for the Transylvania Company, started the arduous task of exploring the Kentucky wilderness and pinpointing suitable spots for settlement.
Numerous hunters and surveyors followed in Boone's footsteps. One of the most important was James Harrod, who in 1774 founded Harrodstown (now Harrodsburg), the first permanent settlement within the borders of the present state, eight miles south of the Kentucky River in eastern Kentucky. In March 1775, Richard Henderson and several of his Transylvania Company partners, imbued with somewhat grandiose plans for a 14th colony of Transylvania in the region, met with more than 1,000 Cherokee at Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga River near what is now Elizabethton, Tennessee. For several thousand English pounds, they purchased a piece of land, reputedly Cherokee-owned, covering most of Kentucky and part of Tennessee. Earlier the same month, even before the treaty was signed, the Transylvania Company had dispatched Daniel Boone and a party of 30 to perform one of Boone's outstanding accomplishments. This accomplishment was the clearing of the trail that would become famous as the Wilderness Road, extending some 250 miles from the Long Island of the Holston River in northeastern Tennessee west and north through the Cumberland Gap to the Kentucky River, deep in Kentucky.
In this venture the Transylvania Company was acting illegally, as it had no right to purchase the immense region which, far from lying exclusively in Cherokee hands, fell partly within the chartered boundaries of Virginia and partly within those of North Carolina. The area was in fact disputed between the two colonies. On December 6, 1776, Virginia affirmed its authority over the region by creating Kentucky County, practically covering the entire extent of today's state, out of this western land.
The prosperous Virginia plantation owners, who controlled the colony's government, soon found themselves very much occupied with Revolutionary War campaigns on their own soil and failed to provide adequate protection for distant Kentucky County. The self-reliant frontiersmen had to fend for themselves against British-instigated tribal raids. However, between 1775 and 1795 thousands of pioneers from Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and especially the Carolinas continued to pour through the Cumberland Gap over the Wilderness Road or float down the Ohio River on barges to Kentucky. As early as 1780, Kentucky County was split into three sections: Fayette, Jefferson, and Lincoln counties, and the 1790 census showed a population of 73,667.
Many Kentuckians, convinced that Virginia could not provide sufficient protection and governmental supervision, came to advocate independent statehood. Others favored the creation of a separate nation. A few even contemplated alliance with Louisiana, then under Spanish rule. A number of conventions, held at Danville starting in 1784, prepared the groundwork for statehood. Virginia responded favorably to the idea of ceding the title to its western land, provided that Congress admit Kentucky as a state. Congress passed the preliminary act in February 1791; a state constitution was drafted in April of the following year; and on June 1, 1792, Kentucky became the 15th state of the Union and the first one west of the Appalachian Mountains. The state constitution granted full manhood suffrage, making Kentucky the first state in the nation to extend such a right.
By the start of the 19th century, even Kentucky's Native American difficulties had been alleviated with Gen. Anthony Wayne's decisive victory over the British-supported tribes at the Battle of Fallen Timbers near Toledo, Ohio, in August 1794. The question of free navigation down the Mississippi River to the Spanish-held port of New Orleans, a factor indispensable to the state's economic prosperity, was temporarily solved in 1795 by the so-called Pinckney's Treaty with Spain and permanently guaranteed by the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Between 1800 and 1850 Kentucky grew quickly, strategically located as it was, with developing trade and shipping on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.
Like the other border states, Kentucky was split by divisive cultural, economic, and geographical interests. Its slaveholding farmers of the central Blue Grass country and poor whites of the mountain regions were torn by the same political and social rivalry that characterized the relationship between the tidewater gentlemen farmers and mountain frontiersmen of Virginia. Their reliance on slavery and their aristocratic social ties, on the one hand, caused many Kentuckians to sympathize with the South just before the outbreak of the Civil War, while Northern business connections and pro-Union political traditions inclined others to side with the North. Both the vocal anti-slavery element and the equally outspoken pro-slavery faction lost to the conciliatory group, which aimed at compromise and a united nation above all (in the tradition of Kentucky's statesman Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser).
With passions running high for both North and South in Kentucky, the birthplace of the Union's Abraham Lincoln and the Confederacy's Jefferson Davis, the inhabitants preferred to remain technically neutral. During the course of the Civil War, however, Kentucky's strategic location was to make it a buffer zone and battlefield for invading forces, and its citizens would join the armies of both sides.
Despite Kentucky's official declaration of neutrality, war came to the area with the invasion of southern Kentucky by Confederate troops early in September 1861. With its neutrality thus ended, the state officially announced its allegiance to the Union, even though the divisions among the populace remained. Union forces under the then little-known Ulysses S. Grant reacted to the Confederate incursion by taking Paducah, Kentucky, which controlled the entrance to both the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers, and by seizing Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, Confederate posts that were respectively located on the two rivers just over the border in Tennessee.
Both Confederate and Union troops entered Kentucky again before the war was over. The Confederate invasion of central Kentucky in late summer and fall of 1862 brought Union forces in hot pursuit. The eventual collision of the two armies, near Perryville on October 8, ended somewhat inconclusively but with the Confederate forces departing from the state. Thereafter Kentucky was devoid of armed Confederates, except for guerrilla activity, which persisted until the end of the war. The strategically situated Ohio River community of Louisville had been secured by Union forces early in the war, on September 21, 1861. Established as a Union military headquarters, it remained a major supply depot throughout the North-South hostilities and largely escaped the ravages of war.
Kentucky's particularly deep divisions among friends and kin were reflective of its status as a border state. Typical of the divided households, ironically, was that of Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of President Abraham Lincoln. Her brother, three half brothers, and three half sisters' husbands went South to serve the Confederacy. Appropriately, in view of the deep divisions, Kentucky was represented by a star on both the Union and Confederate flags.
After the Civil War, Kentucky saw the growth of industrialization as well as the development of the state's tourist attractions. Horse breeding and horse racing, epitomized by the famous Kentucky Derby, became practically synonymous with the Bluegrass State.