VIII.

History

A.

Early Inhabitants

In ancient times, several different Native American cultures flourished in Kentucky. Nomadic hunters, whose culture is called Paleo-Indian by archaeologists, were present as early as 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. Divided into small bands, they ranged widely over the land, hunting many now-extinct animals. In the later Archaic culture, from about 10,000 to 3,000 years ago, woven baskets and highly specialized stone tools abounded. The Adena era, beginning about 3,000 years ago, was marked by the practice of horticulture, mound building, and the making of clay pottery. Remains of later Mound Builders cultures, the Hopewell and Mississippian, are found in the west along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

The number of mounds and dwelling sites found in Kentucky suggests that it once had a sizable Native American population. However, most permanent residents were gone by the time the first European explorers arrived in the 17th century. Warfare was one reason for the depopulation; another may have been the spread of new diseases, introduced to the continent from Europe, to which the Native Americans had no immunity. The only peoples living within the present state borders at that time were a few Shawnee, Iroquois, and Delaware. Around 1700 the Shawnee were pushed north of the Ohio River by the Chickasaw people, who then claimed western Kentucky as a hunting ground but did not settle it. Other peoples claimed hunting rights in Kentucky and defended them vigorously against white encroachment. The early white explorers and settlers were subject to Native American raids, mainly from across the Ohio River, until after the American Revolution.

B.

European Exploration

In the early 1670s the English sent explorers westward from their colony of Virginia across the Appalachian Mountains. At least one of these explorers, Gabriel Arthur, entered Kentucky in 1674. Although the French had no particular interest in Kentucky at the time, it was part of the vast Mississippi River drainage basin, which the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, claimed for France in 1682. However, neither the French nor the English made any efforts to explore Kentucky extensively for more than 50 years.

C.

The 18th Century

C.1.

Land Grants

In the early decades of the 18th century, France and Great Britain (a union of three countries headed by England) vied for control of the strategic valley of the Ohio River. To strengthen the British position, officials in Virginia granted large tracts of land west of the Appalachians to newly organized land settlement companies. Virginia did not actually own the land it was granting, which few whites had ever seen. Virginia could only grant the rights to explore, trade, use economic resources, and occupy land not already occupied. The grants were not good against the Native Americans’ rights to the lands they lived on; if whites wanted to own the land, they had to buy it. Furthermore, France, on the basis of La Salle’s claim, denied that Virginia had any rights at all west of the Appalachians.

The Virginia companies dispatched explorers to survey their acquisitions. One of these explorers, Thomas Walker of the Loyal Land Company, in 1750 found a pass through the Cumberland Mountains (a part of the Appalachians), which was given the name Cumberland Gap and which later became the main land route for settlers coming from the Atlantic Seaboard. The next year, Christopher Gist of the Ohio Company made his way down the Ohio Valley and explored much of northern Kentucky. However, the land companies failed to attract settlers, largely because of the French and Indian War, which broke out in 1754 between Britain and France. The immediate cause of that war was a clash between the powers over the same disputed border, the Appalachian Mountains.

C.2.

Daniel Boone

In 1763 the French and Indian War was concluded by a treaty that gave Great Britain all the territory east of the Mississippi, including what is now Kentucky. About the same time, the Native American raids temporarily subsided. These developments prompted a number of “long hunters,” so called because of their extended hunting trips, to venture into the vast western region that included Kentucky. One long hunter was Daniel Boone of North Carolina, probably the most famous early American frontier adventurer. Boone made his first trip into Kentucky in the winter of 1767 and 1768 to hunt and trap and also to find a route to the fertile Bluegrass region of central and northern Kentucky, which he had heard about from a man who had been there. However, he failed to penetrate beyond the Cumberlands. Later, in the spring of 1769, Boone passed through Cumberland Gap. He then followed a Native American path, known as the Warriors’ Path, northward to the Bluegrass region. Later, Boone ranged over much of central and eastern Kentucky, hunting and exploring until 1771.

C.3.

Organized Settlements

Surveyors, land speculators, and settlers followed the long hunters into Kentucky. In the spring of 1774 James Harrod, accompanied by a small group of settlers, established Harrodstown (now Harrodsburg), the first permanent white settlement in Kentucky. Fort Harrod was built near Harrodstown in 1775. In the same year, Judge Richard Henderson of North Carolina, head of the Transylvania Company, engaged Daniel Boone to supervise the cutting of a trail to the Bluegrass region and establish a settlement there. Following in part the old Warriors’ Path, Boone blazed a trail through the Cumberland Gap and on into central Kentucky. The trail, known as Boone’s Trace, was later widened to form a leg of the famous Wilderness Road from western Virginia to central Kentucky.

At the end of his trail, Boone established a settlement, later known as Boonesborough, on the Kentucky River about 72 km (45 mi) east of Harrodstown. Soon other settlements were established in the Bluegrass region and, together with Harrodstown and Boonesborough, began to attract settlers from other colonies.

At this time white settlement west of the mountains without the agreement of the Native Americans was forbidden by proclamation of Britain’s king. Harrod’s party ignored the proclamation. Henderson’s company, however, made a treaty with the Cherokee people, securing control of 6.88 million hectares (17 million acres). The Virginia legislature later reduced this to 80,900 hectares (200,000 acres).

C.4.

Transylvania Colony

In May 1775 Henderson called together at Boonesborough representatives from the various Kentucky settlements. They passed laws, drafted articles vesting governmental power in the Transylvania Company, and petitioned the Continental Congress for recognition of a colony, called Transylvania, that would encompass all the Kentucky settlements and would have status equal to that of the other 13 colonies. Congress, however, ignored the petition.

Many Kentucky settlers opposed the establishment of an independent colony. Meeting in Harrodstown in June 1776, they dispatched George Rogers Clark and John Gabriel Jones to the Virginia legislature at Williamsburg. Mainly as a result of the influence of Clark and Jones, the legislature declared the Transylvania Company illegal and designated Kentucky a county of Virginia.

C.5.

The American Revolution

During the American Revolution (1775-1783), the British incited their Native American allies to attack the settlements of the Kentuckians. The most massive attack was by the Shawnee against Boonesborough in September 1778. Although heavily outnumbered, the Boonesborough defenders, under Boone’s leadership, managed to repulse the attackers. Meanwhile, Clark, who had become a lieutenant colonel in the Virginia militia, had embarked on a campaign to wrest control of the territory north of the Ohio River from the British.

British forces made two major forays into Kentucky in the latter part of the revolution. In 1780 British troops and Native Americans captured several outposts on the Licking River but failed to press their advantage. In 1782 the entry of another force of British and Native Americans into that region produced Kentucky’s last and bloodiest battle of the war, which took place at Blue Licks. The Kentuckians lost that battle, but the Native Americans retreated and never again mounted a serious assault on Kentucky settlements.

C.6.

Statehood

After the revolution, thousands of settlers from the East migrated to Kentucky, venturing down the Ohio River or across the Cumberlands by way of the Wilderness Road. By 1790 the region had a population of more than 73,000. As the number of settlers grew, there were increased demands for separation from Virginia. From 1784 to 1790, nine conventions were held at Danville to resolve issues related to separation. Finally, at the ninth convention, the delegates voted to accept the terms of separation offered by Virginia and petitioned the Congress of the United States for statehood. At a final convention in 1792, a state constitution was drafted. On June 1, 1792, Kentucky entered the federal Union as the 15th state and the first west of the Appalachians. Isaac Shelby was elected as the state’s first governor. Lexington was briefly the seat of state government until, later that year, Frankfort was designated the permanent state capital.

In the period following the achievement of statehood, Kentuckians were among the most vigorous advocates of the so-called frontier point of view, which was characteristically democratic, antiprivilege, and anti-British. Kentucky’s second state constitution, which became effective in 1800, provided for the election of the state governor and members of the state senate by direct popular vote, rather than by a state electoral college as the first constitution had stipulated. This provision and other features of Kentucky’s constitution were later used as models by a number of other new states.

D.

The 19th Century

In the early years of the 19th century, Kentuckians shared the particularly strong anti-British feeling that was prevalent along the Western frontier. As United States-British relations became increasingly strained, Kentuckians, most notably U.S. Congressman Henry Clay, became ardent advocates of war against Britain. During the subsequent War of 1812 (1812-1815), Kentucky contributed more than its quota of soldiers to the U.S. military forces.

Politically the state played an important role in national affairs, with Clay three times a presidential candidate, Richard M. Johnson a vice president, and numerous others serving as Cabinet officers or congressional leaders.

The last Native American claims to Kentucky lands were eliminated in 1818 with what is called the Jackson Purchase. In this transaction, former Governor Shelby and General Andrew Jackson bought the Chickasaw claim to lands in western Kentucky and western Tennessee. The Kentucky portion of the purchase now forms eight counties.

D.1.

Economic Development, 1800-1860

Kentucky’s economic growth during the first half of the 19th century was marked by the development of large-scale commercial agriculture, especially the growing of hemp and tobacco, and of trade and manufacturing. This economic growth was accompanied, and in part spurred, by the state’s rapid increase in population. The state’s population rose from 220,955 in 1800 to 687,917 in 1830 and to 1,155,684 in 1860.

The spread of commercial farming across central and western Kentucky during the pre-Civil War era was largely responsible for the excessive cutting down of forests in these areas. Tobacco farmers in particular tended to clear new areas for cultivation each year, with little regard to the value of the timber, which they often burned, or to the subsequent increase in soil erosion. In the meantime, eastern Kentucky remained primarily an area of subsistence farming. During the decades preceding the Civil War, many commercial farmers in Kentucky used black slaves for labor, particularly on hemp and tobacco farms.

Initially, flatboats and keelboats carried Kentucky products downstream to New Orleans. After 1810 steamboats gradually came to be the principal carriers of commercial goods on the Mississippi River system. The advent of the steamboat gave impetus to trade and consequently to commercial agriculture in Kentucky. Louisville, on the Ohio River, developed as Kentucky’s principal trade center.

Although a system of private toll roads was built in Kentucky before 1860, there was comparatively little railroad construction until after the Civil War. The only major railroad completed before 1860 was the line built by the Louisville & Nashville Railroad between Louisville and Nashville, Tennessee.

D.2.

The Slavery Issue

Slavery was one of the most divisive issues in national politics in the 19th century. Politicians of the Northern states pressed to end it, both because they considered it immoral and because white labor could not compete with unpaid black labor. Politicians of the cotton-growing Southern states felt that slavery was necessary to their agricultural system and that the North was trying to dominate the country economically. Many in the influential slaveholding class in the South favored secession from the Union and formation of a separate Southern nation. Kentucky’s statesman Henry Clay became known in Congress as the Great Pacificator for his ability to keep the slavery issue under control. He engineered the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise Measures of 1850, both of which solved apparent impasses over extension of slavery to the new territories of the United States.

By the mid-1850s, however, Clay had died, the South had become a minority section, and its leaders viewed the actions of Congress, which they no longer controlled, with growing concern. The North demanded for its industrial growth a protective tariff, federal subsidies for shipping and internal improvements, and a sound banking and currency system. The West looked to Congress for free homesteads and aid for its roads and waterways. The South regarded such measures as discriminatory, favoring Northern commercial interests, and it found intolerable the rise of antislavery agitation in the North.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president as the candidate of the Republican Party, which opposed the spread of slavery. The cotton state of South Carolina had threatened to secede if the Republicans won, and in December 1860 it did so. Other slavery states followed in quick succession, and in February 1861 they formed a confederacy, the Confederate States of America.

Kentucky, although a slavery state, grew little cotton. Like the other so-called border states, it maintained close economic ties with both the North and South. Still, the 225,000 slaves in Kentucky in 1860 were a major portion of the state’s labor force and nearly 20 percent of the total population. Most of the Kentucky slaveholders were, of course, ardent supporters of slavery. However, a considerable number of Kentuckians were actively opposed to slavery and had little interest in or sympathy for the South.

D.3.

The Crittenden Compromise

U.S. Senator John Jordan Crittenden of Kentucky, a prominent supporter of the Union, proposed a compromise in December 1860 to avert secession. Crittenden and others hoped that a further concession might appease the South. His proposals were designed to provide that slavery would be prohibited in territories north of latitude 36°30’ N, the line established by the Missouri Compromise, but protected south of that line. Under his plan, slavery could not be abolished in any state where it existed unless that state consented, and the federal government would compensate owners of fugitive slaves if it was established that the slaves had escaped with outside assistance. Lincoln disapproved of the Crittenden Compromise, which contributed to its rejection in Congress by the House of Representatives in January 1861 and by the United States Senate in March.

D.4.

The Civil War

The failure of Crittenden’s compromise presaged the outbreak of the American Civil War (1861-1865) in April. Kentucky’s governor, Beriah Magoffin, refused both the Union’s and the Confederacy’s call for volunteers. In May the state legislature resolved that Kentucky would take no part in the fighting, and Magoffin issued a proclamation declaring the state to be neutral in the conflict. Because of the state’s strategic location, neither side fully respected Kentucky’s neutrality. Recruiters from both the Union and the Confederacy enlisted Kentuckians. First the Confederacy, then the Union, began moving troops into the state. Throughout the war Kentucky remained at the mercy of the occupying armies.

The first major battle of the war in Kentucky, the Battle of Mill Springs or Logan’s Crossroads, fought at Nancy in January 1862, resulted in a Confederate defeat. Then, late in the summer of 1862, Confederate forces embarked on a bold campaign to take Kentucky. They pushed northward and westward into the state from central Tennessee and defeated Union Army troops at Richmond and Munfordville. However, the main Confederate advance was halted at Perryville on October 8, 1862. The Battle of Perryville, also known as the Battle of Chaplin Hills, was the bloodiest engagement in the state’s history. More than 7,600 casualties were counted. No other large-scale battles took place in the state, although raids by Confederate General John Hunt Morgan gained much notice. During the later years of the war, guerrilla bands, including the notorious group led by Captain William Quantrill, made sporadic raids in Kentucky.

In November 1861, without legal sanction, supporters of the Confederacy met at Russellville and passed an act of secession, declaring Kentucky to be a Confederate state. This action was recognized by the Confederacy but not by the Union. The state was a star in both flags. Throughout the war, Kentuckians remained divided in their loyalties to North and South. A total of about 100,000 Kentuckians, including more than 20,000 blacks, joined the Union Army, while about 40,000 residents joined the Confederate forces. A number of native Kentuckians played a prominent role in the Civil War. Besides the opposing presidents Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, Confederate Generals John Bell Hood and Albert Sidney Johnston had both been born in Kentucky. Kentucky was the only state represented in the cabinets of both the Union and Confederate governments: James Speed was the Union attorney general, and John Cabell Breckinridge was the Confederate secretary of war.

D.5.

Power Readjustment

After the Confederate invasion of 1862, the legislature aligned Kentucky with the Union. Thus it did not undergo all the postwar measures enacted against other Southern states in the period of restoration, or Reconstruction, of the Union. It was not initially occupied by Union troops. However, Kentucky resisted granting civil rights to blacks, and this resulted in a military presence by the Union Army for some time. The state’s anger regarding black rights pushed it toward greater sympathy with the South, and many of its postwar leaders were Confederate soldiers or sympathizers. Blacks did not become legally free in Kentucky until the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States became law in December 1865—eight months after the end of the Civil War.

The Democratic Party dominated postwar politics; not until 1895 would the party of Lincoln win a race for the governor’s seat. Meanwhile the state’s black citizens, many of whom had fought for the Union, were forced by new laws into a second-class, segregated status. That status was enforced by widespread terrorism, which the Democratic administration would not or could not stop. Some Kentuckians, notably U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan in his dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, in 1896, spoke out against that system. Even so loyal a Democrat as the fiery Louisville newspaper editor Henry Watterson, a national spokesperson for Southern home rule, championed some expansion of black rights; but the system remained.

D.6.

Political Unrest and Social Violence

Eventually, factionalism within the Democratic Party and agrarian unrest challenged the party’s rule. Third-party movements abounded. Farmers, unhappy at discriminatory freight rates and their declining influence on the Democratic leadership, supported reform movements such as the Greenback Party, the Farmers’ Alliances, and the People’s Party. This political movement was called populism. Populists sought, among other measures, to institute farmers’ cooperatives on a national scale; to lower transportation costs by nationalizing the railroads; and to achieve a more equitable distribution of the costs of government by means of a graduated income tax. The movement had some success; the state’s fourth (and present) constitution, drafted in 1891, contained many detailed sections restricting government. One provision, for instance, barred the governor from serving two terms in a row; in 1992 this was amended to three terms. Outdated almost immediately, the constitution has been amended many times over the past century.

The 1880s saw an eruption of violence, smoldering since the Civil War, in the famous feud between the Hatfield and McCoy clans in the mountainous Kentucky-West Virginia border area. Armed bands shot at each other, and when arrests were made, the arrestees were often released because of their local influence. The feud did not end until after 1890, when an interstate incident was created by Kentucky authorities invading West Virginia to seize and convict several Hatfields. This affair and other feuds hurt the state’s postwar image.

Violence erupted also in the gubernatorial election of 1899. The leading candidates were Republican William S. Taylor and Democrat William Goebel. When the votes were counted, Taylor appeared to have won by some 2,000 votes, and he was inaugurated on December 12. However, the Democratic majority in the legislature undertook an investigation of the votes, and it was expected that they would soon declare Goebel governor. While that debate was under way in January 1900, Goebel was shot by an unknown assassin. During the four days that he lived, the Democratic majority threw out enough votes to declare him the state’s chief executive, and swore him in as governor. Republicans refused to recognize the legality of that action, and two governments, each with their own supportive militia force, faced off. Civil war on party lines seemed possible, but finally the decision was left to the courts and in May, the U.S. Supreme Court let stand the Democratic Party’s actions. With Goebel dead, his lieutenant governor, J. C. W. Beckham, was declared governor and Taylor fled the state.

E.

The 20th Century

E.1.

The Black Patch War

Popular political movements directed against monopolies gained much support in the 1890s and the first decade of the 20th century. Roads that charged tolls for those using them were the first targets. Destruction of the tollgates eventually impelled many owners to sell the roads for free public use. From about 1903 to 1908, the Black Patch War, in western Kentucky in particular, focused attention on a monopoly of companies that manufactured tobacco products. The monopoly was able to keep prices for tobacco crops low, causing farmers to go into debt or poverty. A farmers’ cooperative had some success by holding tobacco off the market, but those who did not join the cooperative’s effort became the target of violent actions by the so-called Night Riders. Federal responses and higher prices ended the “war,” but the basic pricing problem would continue until federal New Deal programs to assist agriculture were enacted in the 1930s.

E.2.

Economic and Labor Developments

Kentucky recovered from the Civil War better than many Southern states, and some metropolitan areas, such as Louisville, benefited from a growing Southern trade. Hemp production declined, and tobacco became even more important than it had been, but as a result agricultural prosperity tended to depend on the price for that one crop. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, industry began to grow slowly, particularly liquor production. In the same period, the timber industry grew rapidly, as did coal production, especially in the eastern part of the state. Construction of railroads made that expansion possible and opened up other areas of the state as well.

With the industrial growth came increasing calls that workers’ rights be recognized, and labor unions began to make progress. The most serious confrontation between labor and management took place in Harlan County and surrounding counties in the 1930s, when the coal operators refused to accept unionization. The result was the so-called “coal wars.” Armed company police and deputy sheriffs confronted strikers of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) in repeated clashes. There were dynamitings, murders, and pitched battles in Harlan and its neighboring county, Perry. Labor unrest continued in the mining areas for several more decades.

E.3.

Depression and World War

The 1920s saw the state vote down an antievolution bill and measures to outlaw pari-mutuel betting on races, engage in divisive political infighting, and reject an attempt to make Cumberland Falls a hydroelectric dam. Kentuckians also struggled with economic depression in agriculture and mining and with restrictions on the liquor industry as a result of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which introduced national Prohibition (1920-1933). The state’s economy was already in trouble before the stock market crash of 1929 that ushered in the Great Depression, the hard times of the 1930s. Kentucky was not affected as seriously as some parts of the nation because of its agricultural base and because liquor production was reopened in the 1930s when the 18th Amendment was repealed. However, Kentucky still suffered during the Depression and wholeheartedly supported the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and his program for recovery, the New Deal. New Deal programs funded conservation efforts, new construction projects, and support to the needy and elderly. Passage of these programs was aided by Kentuckian Alben W. Barkley, who was the majority leader in the U.S. Senate (and later the vice president of the United States under President Harry S. Truman). At the same time a political newcomer, A. B. “Happy” Chandler, began a long political career as state senator, lieutenant governor, governor, U.S. senator, and commissioner of baseball.

With the coming of World War II in 1941, Kentuckians went off to fight and sacrifices were made at home as well, through rationing, volunteer work, and in other ways. However, the demand for workers led to more jobs and higher wages. Some Kentuckians went outside the state to work, and outmigration in the 1940s and into the 1950s was a serious problem. But those who remained became more prosperous than they had been before the war.

E.4.

Civil Rights and Women’s Rights

An increasing demand for equal rights for all races grew out of World War II. Kentucky’s record on that score had been mixed, at best, up to that point. Although segregation of the black and white races was in effect in most public spheres, Kentucky had never denied its black citizens the right to vote as did many Southern states. The first black elected to a Southern legislature after Reconstruction was in Kentucky in the 1930s. Berea College had been the last integrated institution of higher learning in the South until 1904, when the legislature passed a law requiring racial segregation in all state schools. Yet in the 1940s federal courts, led by Kentuckian Frederick M. Vinson, chief justice of the United States, began to break down those racial barriers in education. When the Court in 1954 fully outlawed segregation with its Brown v. Board of Education decision, Kentucky accepted the ruling and moved with few exceptions toward peaceful integration, a model for the South. Kentucky adopted the first state civil rights act in the South in 1966, and a similarly path-breaking open housing law followed in 1968. National leaders like Kentucky’s Whitney Young, Jr., were instrumental in the effort. But serious problems remained, as riots in Louisville in 1968 and 1975 indicated.

The state had a similarly mixed record on women’s rights. Earlier, in the struggle to extend the vote to women, Kentucky provided national and regional leaders in the persons of Laura Clay and Madeline McDowell Breckinridge. Its election of a woman, Katherine Langley, to Congress in 1926 was one of the earliest such successes; in 1972 Kentucky ratified the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; and in 1983 it elected Martha Layne Collins as governor, one of the first woman governors in the nation. Yet at the same time, Kentucky ranked near the bottom in the number of women legislators.

E.5.

Kentucky’s Last Half-Century

In the last half of the 20th century, the state’s politics overall were somewhat divided. The Democrats won all the legislative majorities and all the elections for governor (except one) from 1946 through the 1990s, while Republicans carried more presidential contests and held the U.S. Senate seats more often than Democrats. Outstanding in this regard was Republican John Sherman Cooper, a champion of civil rights and the United Nations (UN), who often bolted party lines to support progressive legislation. He represented Kentucky in the U.S. Senate for 21 years (1946-1949, 1952-1955, 1956-1973).

In the 1960s Kentucky was one of the targets of the “War on Poverty” program of President Lyndon Johnson: It received federal funds aimed at improving conditions in depressed states. In 1960 the state’s per capita income was only 71 percent of the national average. In 1970 it was the last of all the states in the number of school years its adults had completed: an average of 9.9 years compared to a national average of 12.1. These are indications of the problems in the state’s economy at the time it began making the transition from an agricultural and mining base to a manufacturing one. As a result of that transition, Kentucky’s recent economic fortunes tie it more to electronics, machinery, textiles, and the metal and chemical industries. Kentucky is, for instance, the nation’s fourth leading producer of motor vehicles. Ashland Oil, Brown-Forman, and Humana became important components of the state’s economic life.

Governors Bert T. Combs and Edward T. Breathitt, Jr., in the 1960s began to develop the state’s educational system to support the needs of the new economy, but funding over succeeding years never reached needed long-term levels. That deficiency culminated in a state Supreme Court decision in Rose v. Council for Better Education, Inc., 1989, invalidating the entire educational system. Kentucky at that time stood near the bottom in national levels of educational attainment. In response, the legislature in 1990 passed the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA), which brought national attention to the state. Kentucky was, in effect, starting all over again.

That accomplishment was unfortunately overshadowed at times by a political scandal in 1992 that brought convictions to some 15 current or former state legislators. Known as BOPTROT—for the Business, Organizations and Professions committee of the legislature (where the investigation began) and trotting (the horse-racing sport that was the original focus of the investigation)—the investigation was the impetus for the passage of ethics laws, fostered by Democratic Governor Brereton C. Jones, to prevent a recurrence.

When Kentucky celebrated its bicentennial of statehood in 1992, it could look back at remarkable growth. From 73,677 in 1790, the population had boomed to 2,147,174 by 1900. Growth slowed in the 20th century, going over the 3 million mark with 3,038,156 in 1960, and in 1990 stood at 3,685,296, 23rd among the states and fourth in the percentage of native-born.

At the beginning of the 21st century Kentucky’s population continued to grow with an estimated 4,092,891 people in 2002, but it also declined relative to other states, ranking 25th in population that year. A statewide shift toward the Republican Party continued with the election in 2003 of Ernie Fletcher as Kentucky’s first Republican governor since 1967. Incumbent Democratic governor Paul Patton, who was prohibited by law from seeking a third consecutive term, faced ethics charges resulting from an extramarital affair, and the scandal reportedly carried over to tarnish the campaign of the Democratic candidate.

Fletcher was himself dogged by political scandal, however, leading to his defeat in November 2007 when he sought a second term. Democrat Steve Beshear returned the state house to the Democratic Party, running a campaign that focused on Fletcher’s effort to give state jobs to political allies.

The history section of this article was contributed by James C. Klotter. The remainder of the article was contributed by Wilford A. Bladen.