Furnishings generally were sparse and crude-a few chairs or split log benches, perhaps a couple of tables made from logs, a bedstead or two under which the axe and scythe were stored at night during Indian unrest , a cradle, maybe a cup-board or chest for storing bedding and clothing, a spinning wheel, and a loom.
Kitchen utensils consisted of a few iron pots and skillets, tin or pewter plates or perhaps wooden plates and cups made from gourds or tree knots , and wooden or tin spoons. The appearance of such luxuries as curtains, mirrors, bedspreads, rag rugs, and china dishes heralded the arrival of relative affluence. An awesome number of tasks were necessary to sustain the family, and the women, an overworked but ingenious lot, and the children performed most of them.
They also carried water from the nearby stream, gathered firewood, stoked the hearth, cooked the meals, and cared for the family stock.
The man of the family generally prepared the land for planting using a mattock and axe to rid the virgin soil of roots and a scrub brush and a plow and hoe to cultivate the earth ; the women and children usually attended and weeded the garden. The major crop was corn, but most families also had a truckpatch planted in wheat, oats, beans, squash, turnips, potatoes, and melons. In addition to providing meal and liquor which frontiersmen produced for their own consumption as well as to sell , the cornstalks provided fodder for the stock to eat during the winter.
Although game and garden produce served as diet mainstays, other foodstuffs titillated pioneer palates. In the early spring, maple trees could be tapped for their sap, which boiled down into a thick, sweet syrup or a granular sugar.
Honey was also available for those daring enough to brave the bees. Wild berries were gathered in the early summer and made into pies. Nuts and autumn fruits, such as wild grapes and crab apples, added a welcome change to the diet. Because of its precision at a yard range, the frontiersmen adopted the long-barreled, small-bored rifle developed in Pennsylvania and they elevated sharp shooting to an art unsurpassed by their contemporaries in the east.
Each gun was designed carefully for the height of its owner, so that he could load and fire it and clear the barrel of carbon without ever taking his eyes off his target. Although essential tasks left little time for frivolity, the Kentucky pioneers found occasions to combine work with play and to relieve the monotony and isolation that characterized their lives. Hunting contests provided an opportunity to exhibit marksmanship as well as to socialize.
At a community squirrel hunt, men, boys and their dogs spent the day ridding the area of the rodents that played havoc with their gardens while, at the same time acquiring meat for a community feast. The team that lost the contest did the cooking.
At such events, braggarts gloried in their real and imagined sporting skills. House raisings also supplied lively camaraderie. Large trees were felled, trimmed of limbs, and hauled to the cabin site.
Some logs were notched to use for walls; others were split and hewed into smooth-faced puncheons for the floor or rough shingles for the clapboard roof. Assembling the cabin and making a few sticks of furniture for it could be done in one day. Then the builders put away their tools, and they and their families gathered for a house warming. The women contributed the food and brought gifts of homemade domestic items, including blankets, brooms, and candles.
The men furnished jugs of whiskey and a deer or hog to barbecue. Following the sumptuous feast, a local fiddler began a vigorous, foot-stomping reel. Dancing lasted all night or until the guests became too tired or too drunk to continue.
Romantic and pugilistic endeavors increased in proportion to the liquor consumed, and the following day, numerous celebrants nursed hangovers, bloody noses, and fears about promises made during drink-induced passions. Despite the paucity of opportunities for courting, most young men married before their twentieth birthday; few girls remained single beyond eighteen. A wedding afforded a rare excuse to frolic. Out-fitted in a wedding dress she made of hand woven white muslin or store bought calico, the bride and her groom stood before the preacher, held hands, and recited their vows.
Then, the celebration began! A feast, with every kind of frontier delicacy and plenty of whiskey, was followed by dancing. A day or two later a house-raising or housewarming might be held to help the newlyweds build or furnish a home on land they received from their parents or purchased from a neighbor.
Unfortunately, not all couples lived happily ever after. Frontier life was hard, and life expectancy was short. A host of infections, diseases, and accidents killed young and old alike. Many women died in childbirth, and less than half of all babies survived their first year.
Desertions were commonplace, as disgruntled spouses usually men, but occasionally women disappeared, perhaps headed for a far western frontier. Few widows and widowers remained single for long. A variety of barbaric activities also entertained residents of the Old West.
They enjoyed bear baiting, dog fighting, gander pulling, and fights with each other in which kicking, eye gouging, and biting off ears and noses were customary. In addition to this rough-and-tumble mayhem, which earned for them a reputation as ruffians, roarers, clods, and worse, Kentuckians also excelled at storytelling. Despite the rip roaring nature of many frontiersmen, some civilizing influences appeared in the infantile West: The first schools were taught in Harrodsburg, McAfee Station, and other early forts and population centers.
Transylvania, the first college west of the mountains, opened in Lexington in Although the constitution did not provide for a public school system, the second legislature chartered private academies in Fayette, Jessamine, and Mason counties and encouraged the creation of other schools. But public education did not flourish in ante-bellum Kentucky beyond the larger cities; schooling in the hinterland remained a private affair, dispensed by parents or by a schoolmaster to whom meager tuition was paid for his services.
A few wealthy landowners sent their sons to school in the East. Church membership also grew, but slowly, on the frontier. Visitors to the West observed that many Kentuckians used Sunday as a day of rest from weekly labors but not from sporting events and other worldly matters.
Despite a large number of churchmen who crossed the mountains to save the sinful frontiersmen, less than one-third of Kentucky residents belonged to any religious denomination when it became a state.
Wretched backwoodsmen flocked to camp meetings to be saved, and zealous ministers preached lengthy sermons about the evils of dancing, drinking, gambling, fighting, and other frontier pleasures.
Many of the attendants were poorly educated youths whose faith was invigorated or whose latent beliefs were awakened by the evangelistic brand of religion. The revival answered the spiritual needs of the mobile population and recruited thousands into active membership in the Baptist and Methodist churches.
Although frontier conditions disappeared from some areas of the state during the first two decades of the 19th century, they continued in others through the antebellum period. Nevertheless, as new lands opened and as the pressures of civilization became stronger, many of those early settlers who helped tame the Kentucky wilderness and who gave the backwoods its unique flavor, sold their small farms and moved westward to conquer new territory and find new fortunes.
Slater Cassidy needs to get his goods to market and the only access is by wagon and river, over poor roads susceptible to Indian attack and wagon breakdowns. At the river, he must unload his goods and reload them into the boats which will carry them down the Mississippi to markets in New Orleans.
While at the river, Slater meets Mr. Halfhill, a Virginian who is fascinated by the economic opportunities opening up in the new territory. He stresses the need for Kentucky statehood. Upon his homecoming, Slater learns someone has laid claim to his land, so he heads out on yet another arduous trip, only to discover it is Halfhill himself who has successfully claimed his land. In the years following the Revolution, Americans poured across the mountains and into the western country. Many of these settlers were former soldiers, recipients of land warrants and bounties for their military services.
Others were speculators who had purchased warrants. Pell-mell they rushed in to find the acreage to which they were entitled. Because no systematic public survey had been conducted of Kentucky, the claimants used rocks, saplings, tree stumps and other obscure or ephemeral landmarks as boundary markers and survey points.
Some registered their claims properly; others did not. The resulting crazy quilt of ambiguous, overlapping land claims generated thousands of lawsuits that gave work to a retinue of young lawyers. But litigation often victimized the original settlers and warrant recipients. Frequently they could not afford to plead their case in far-away court. Many of the later speculators, however, understood land laws and enjoyed easy access to attorneys and courts.
In an effort to provide more local government and. Many of the laws passed by the eastern legislature either did not apply to the frontiersmen or discriminated against them. A major bone of contention concerned trade and commerce. Kentucky looked to the west and south, for the Ohio and Mississippi rivers served as her major highways. Kentucky agricultural produce, rafted down the Ohio and Mississippi, was loaded on ocean-going vessels at New Orleans then owned by Spain and carried to eastern U.
It was their right, the backwoodsmen insisted, to navigate the river. Smarting under these and other grievances, a group of Kentuckians met at the log courthouse at Danville in December of to discuss ways to ward off a threatened Cherokee raid. At this, the first of an eventual ten conventions, they decided to hold an election to choose delegates from each military district to meet in a formal convocation. They resolved that Kentucky should separate from Virginia.
Three months later they prepared a petition from the Virginia legislature outlining the complaints that could be resolved only through division.
In answer, Virginia passed the first of four enabling acts, stipulating that the Kentucky convention could vote on separation in the fall of , but once detached, Kentucky must immediately join the Confederation of the United States. One of the dominating figures at these early conventions was James Wilkinson, a nefarious schemer who encouraged Kentuckians to ignore the enabling act, separate immediately, and remain independent of the Articles of Confederation government.
Again, the representatives excluding Wilkinson convened at Danville to discuss separation. There he acquired a trade permit from the Spanish authorities in exchange for a pledge to use his influence to cement Kentucky-Louisiana relations. Returning to Kentucky, Wilkinson lived in grand style, entertained lavishly, and impressed his neighbors with the monetary benefits he acquired from friendship with the Spanish officials. Although only a few Kentuckians seriously considered joining the monarchial and Catholic Spanish Empire, many realized that an independent Kentucky could flirt with officials in the Crescent City long enough to open the river, a feat the weak Confederation government had failed to accomplish.
However, the elitists and propertied interests who controlled the constitutional convention also set limits on the power of the common man, believing him to be politically unstable. The statehood document stipulated that the people would elect the members of the lower house and an electoral college; however, the latter would then choose the governor and state senators.
No provision was made for a lieutenant governor, but many state officials were to be appointed by the governor. The most controversial subject debated by the framers of the constitution was the issue of slavery.
A few favored gradual emancipation; others feared the results of close promimity between free Negroes and the slaves to the south. Eleven of the delegates were ministers who loudly opposed permitting slavery to continue in Kentucky. Despite protests, the resulting document protected the institution and prohibited the state legislature from passing any laws to interfere with or abolish it. In a second constitution was drafted, changing several provisions of the earlier document. The electoral college was discarded, and governors and senators thereafter were elected by popular vote.
To him and the first legislature went the task of implementing the constitution and setting the state government in motion. Unfortunately, statehood did not eradicate all problems. Skulking bands of Indians continued to kill and pillage isolated travelers and settlers for nearly a decade; taxes imposed by the federal government, especially on homemade whiskey, threatened the meager profits of many settlers; and foreign plots continued to inflame Kentucky tempers.
Spain peacefully backed down. As the population increased and dispersed across the state, the arguments presented prior to statehood about the inconvenience of government from afar now applied to the need for independent units of local government. During its first decade as a state, Kentucky grew from nine to forty-five counties; by mid-century the commonwealth contained more than one hundred local units.
Eight of these were carved from the Jackson Purchase, obtained by treaty from the Cherokees in The birth of new counties also meant the creation of additional political positions, many of which provided monetary as well as political riches to their holders. Few offices, if any, required training; in many cases even literacy was not a prerequisite. Yet county courts and their officers collected taxes, authorized the construction and maintenance of area road-ways, supervised health matters and issued emergency decrees during epidemics, maintained jurisdiction over orphans and apprentices, tried bastardy cases, established ferries, approved milldams, set tavern rates, administered the poor laws, and dispensed patronage.
Considering their lack of training, most of the early magistrates performed their tasks admirably. The selection of state and county officials generated lively politicking. Stump speaking-accompanied by the dispensing of barbecue, burgoo, and bourbon-attracted crowds who cheered and heckled the candidates and their campaigners.
The election might last three days, during which liquor flowed freely, fisticuffs were commonplace, and voters cast their ballots viva voce. Nothing created greater excitement than a Kentucky election! Although slave life in Kentucky may not have been as bad as in other areas of the South, it was still degrading and dehumanizing, splitting families and depriving people of their rights and freedom.
In the process, both black and white families experience doubts and fears about the merits and evils of the situation and the elder son of the black family decides to take his chances and flee via the Underground Railroad to Canada. Program Goal: Students will recognize and discuss many of the problems and conflicts associated with slavery.
About twenty-one percent of these residents were slaves-black men, women, and children bound, in perpetuity, in involuntary servitude. Slaves lived in every county across the state, with the greatest concentration in the Bluegrass Region and the least number in the mountain counties.
A few early settlers brought slaves to the commonwealth, for the frontier needed a large, cheap labor force to clear the land and build homes, barns, fences, and other necessities. But once the wilderness was tamed, slave labor ceased to be profitable. Most Kentuckians owned small farms, and neither the climate nor the agricultural conditions were suitable to year-round use of a large labor force. Because slaves could not be discharged or let go as free laborers could, and because their maintenance expenses remained the same whether they worked or were idle, some owners hired out surplus slaves to neighbors who needed extra hands for a brief time.
Other slaves were exported to the Deep South to raise cotton and sugar cane. The selling of slaves and the resulting destruction of family units was one of the most odious facets of Southern life. About one out of every three Kentucky families owned slaves, but the average number per owner remained small-about five the average in the Deep South was ten. Because many owners and servants worked side by side or had frequent contact, the bond between them was more patriarchal than was the relationship shared by slaves and masters in other states.
Yet even at its best, slavery was a degrading, restrictive institution. The workday extended from sunup to sundown, six days a week. The mainstay of their diet was meat, meal and molasses, but these items were supplemented by vegetables the slaves cultivated themselves along with the game they took in their free time.
In addition to these evening and Sunday activities, masters encouraged their chattels to engage in recreational activities, such as dancing and singing, that provided emotional release; happy slaves worked better than did discontented ones. Churches encouraged masters to treat their people kindly and urged slaves to be good Christians, to serve their earthly masters as they would their heavenly father and to look for rewards in the hereafter for services rendered on earth.
Slaves learned Bible stories but few could read the Holy Book, for literacy was considered undesirable, even dangerous. A few, who served as playmates to young masters, attended classes with their white companions and thus learned to read and write. But most slaves had no opportunity for schooling. Southerners feared that educated blacks might read seditious literature prepared by northern abolitionists and be encouraged by such writings to rebel or run away.
Well fed, happy slaves generally were more productive than mistreated ones, and docile slaves generally received good treatment. But even benevolent masters punished those who disobeyed, worked too slowly, or ran away. The kind and degree of punishment depended on the owner. Chronic troublemakers might be sold-and the threat of being sold undoubtedly was a greater deterrent than the threat of bodily harm.
For nearly three quarters of a century, Kentuckians argued the pros and cons of slavery. Its supporters insisted that slave labor was sanctioned by the Bible and that it was an economically sound system, providing large profits and a great amount of leisure for the white owner.
It was, many argued, a way of life. Opponents of the institution stressed that slavery was a social, political, economic, and moral evil, in violation of a fundamental on which the nation was founded-the human right to freedom.
Pre-statehood opposition to the institution was led by David Rice, a Presbyterian minister who never freed his own slaves. Rice argued that God created men to be free and warned that by denying freedom to a segment of the population, Kentucky would create a group whose interests lay in subverting the government. Rice also insisted that slavery encouraged idleness and corrupted the morals of the white youths.
The document they fashioned provided a legal base for slavery and prohibited the legislature from emancipating slaves without the consent of the owners or without compensating them for their economic loss.
Various church leaders and their congregations denounced the institution and urged slave owners to emancipate their bondsmen, but their efforts came to naught.
In an attempt to prevent denominational schisms the Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians did eventually split over the issue , the churches adopted a neutral stand, proclaiming that slavery was a political issue rather than a religious one.
Thereafter they concentrated their efforts on eliminating the harsher aspects of bondage and on teaching the joys of Christianity to those in servitude.
Poor white farmers, tradesmen and small businessmen feared that freed men constituted a threat to their jobs; slave owners believed the presence of free blacks increased discontentment among those still in bondage, causing them to revolt or flee. To alleviate these apprehensions, most opponents of slavery urged emancipation and colonization in Liberia.
In the thirty years prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, the Kentucky Colonization Society sent blacks from Kentucky to Liberia; still, in more than , blacks remained in bondage in Kentucky. Many prominent Kentuckians publicly opposed slavery. Henry Clay, a slave owner, served as president of the American Colonization Society but refused to interfere with the property rights of owners.
Believing slavery was as harmful to the white man as to the black, Clay urged slave owners a sizeable majority in the state to vote together to abolish the institution. The True American was devoted to the cause of gradual and constitutional emancipation and appealed to the economic self-interests of non-owners. But the paper was an affront to local slave owners and set off a chorus of protests.
It survived about three months. Clay did not try to reestablish his paper in Kentucky, but he continued to speak out against slavery.
Because they squabbled among themselves rather than uniting their energies, the efforts of the anti-slavery white population did little to rescue hapless victims from bondage. The bulk of those who escaped the system did so by their own efforts.
A few won their freedom through meritorious acts or managed to find some means of earning money and saved enough to purchase their freedom. Others fled: it is estimated that about slaves escaped from Kentucky into free states each year. Slave owners tried to convince themselves that most slaves were happy, but the number who ran away proved otherwise.
Aided by a loosely organized network of agents and stations called the Underground Railroad, these runaways hid by day and traveled by night, hoping to cross the Ohio River.
But not until they got to Canada were they really free. Federal law instructed that fugitive slaves be returned to their masters. Those found guilty of aiding escapees could be sent to prison. Henson, his wife, and two children crossed the Ohio River near Owensboro and spent two weeks walking to Cincinnati, where they secured help and made travel arrangements to Canada. Henson later made numerous return visits to Kentucky, helping others escape. Despite the efforts of numerous well-intentioned Kentuckians who found slavery an offensive, undemocratic institution, none were effective in eradicating the system.
Nevertheless, the proclamation foreshadowed the end to this system of human bondage. The Civil War not only split nation and family-it caused personal sacrifices off the battlefield as well as on it. In Program 6, a young boy experiences these effects firsthand as he watches his father and uncle feud and his nanny fear for her freedom and future.
Program Goal: Students will understand that the civil war affected both children and adults, even in the absence of actual battle, and will discuss some of those effects. As the sectional conflict pushed the fragile nation into war, Kentuckians found themselves divided in sympathies. The prevailing sentiment in the state upheld the preservation of the Union. Nevertheless, the commonwealth furnished outspoken suporters for both sides.
A border state, Kentucky enjoyed strong ties with both the North and the South. Her slave labor system linked her to the South, yet her diversified agriculture provided products for both northern and southern markets.
Social and cultural traditions also were rooted in both sections, and the presidents of both sides were natives of Kentucky-Abraham Lincoln was born near Hodgenville and Jefferson Davis in Christian now Todd County. Attempting to extract the Commonwealth from a volatile situation, in the spring of the governor and legislature declared that Kentucky was neutral. Neutrality ended in September of when the Confederates seized Columbus, Kentucky. Union troops immediately moved into Paducah and Louisville and spread across the northern portion of the state.
The southern army commanded critical points between the Cumber-land Gap and the Mississippi River, with the center of their military operations at Bowling Green. In late autumn a convention held in Russellville established a Confederate state of Kentucky and proclaimed Bowling Green the capital. The Confederate occupation of the southern sector of the commonwealth lasted five months. Kansas, situated on the American Great Plains, became the 34th state on January 29, Its path to statehood was long and bloody: After the Kansas-Nebraska Act of opened the two territories to settlement and allowed the new settlers to determine whether the states would Maine, the largest of the six New England states, lies at the northeastern corner of the country.
Maine became the 23rd state on March 15, , as part of the Missouri Compromise, which allowed Missouri to enter the union as a slave state and Maine as a free state. Maine is Iowa was admitted to the union as the 29th state on Dec.
As a Midwestern state, Iowa forms a bridge between the forests of the east and the grasslands of the high prairie plains to the west. Its gently rolling landscape rises slowly as it extends westward from the The largest of the U. Kentucky was never a U. It was one of four states, along with Vermont, Maine and West Virginia, carved from existing states after the first 13 had ratified the Constitution. Kentucky adopted its statehood constitution on April 19, , meeting the deadline established by Congress for admission before June 1, One year and 88 days after Vermont became the 14th State of the Union, the District of Kentucky became the 15th State.
Congress had approved a statehood admissions act on February 4, , 29 days before Vermont was admitted to the Union on March 4, This was an early example of the custom of linking admission of each new state in the South to another in the North. Like Puerto Rico, Kentucky is a commonwealth. Just as the Commonwealth of Kentucky was a territory before it became a state, Puerto Rico is a […]. Your email address will not be published. Lowell Harrison reviews the tangled and protracted process by which Virginia's westernmost territory achieved statehood.
By the early s, survival of the Kentucky settlements, so uncertain only a few years earlier, was assured. The end of the American Revolution curtailed British support for Indian raids, and thousands of settlers sought a better life in the "Eden of the West. The division of sprawling Kentucky County into three counties in indicated its rapid growth, and that growth accelerated during the following decade. With population increase came sentiment for separation from Virginia.
Such demands had been voiced earlier, but a definite separation movement began in when a convention—the first of ten such—met in Danville. Not until April was a constitution finally drafted under which the Commonwealth of Kentucky could enter the Union.
While most Kentuckians favored separation, they differed over how and when and on what terms it should occur.
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