“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.”
Sister States, Enemy States: The Civil War in Kentucky and Tennessee
by Kent Dollar, Larry Whiteaker, W. Calvin Calvin Dickinson
Filed under Reading
“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 (i.e., True American) within the state.”
Sister States, Enemy States: The Civil War in Kentucky and Tennessee
by Kent Dollar, Larry Whiteaker, W. Calvin Calvin Dickinson
Filed under Reading
“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.”
Sister States, Enemy States: The Civil War in Kentucky and Tennessee
by Kent Dollar, Larry Whiteaker, W. Calvin Calvin Dickinson
Filed under Reading
“The lack of two-party competition in the Deep South (c 1856) 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.”
Sister States, Enemy States: The Civil War in Kentucky and Tennessee
by Kent Dollar, Larry Whiteaker, W. Calvin Calvin Dickinson
Filed under Reading
“…. 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.”
Sister States, Enemy States: The Civil War in Kentucky and Tennessee
by Kent Dollar, Larry Whiteaker, W. Calvin Calvin Dickinson
Filed under Reading
“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.”
Sister States, Enemy States: The Civil War in Kentucky and Tennessee
by Kent Dollar, Larry Whiteaker, W. Calvin Calvin Dickinson
Filed under Reading
“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.”
Sister States, Enemy States: The Civil War in Kentucky and Tennessee
by Kent Dollar, Larry Whiteaker, W. Calvin Calvin Dickinson
Filed under Reading
