Why Kentucky Did Not Seceed
View attachment 353796
Detail 1860 Slave Census Map of Kentucky.
Library of Congress
In 1860, the largest export from Kentucky was hemp. It was sold to rope walks in New England to be made into rope & cables. Only 75 families owned the 50 slaves required to achieve plantation status. As the census map indicates with gradation from white at zero & on up to black, only a very few counties had substantial slave populations. As the slave-holders of Kentucky knew all too well, without the Fugitive Slave Act being enforced, there was no way to keep their slaves from crossing the Ohio River to freedom.
The swathe of mountainous country from Virginia down through Tennessee was populated by non-slave-holders. As Virginia found out, those folks were implacably hostile to the claims of sovereignty made by the slave-holding aristocracy. Breaking up the Union to guarantee "the right to hold other human beings as property" was abhorrent.
From the 1850 to 1860 census, the slave population of Kentucky had dropped significantly. There simply weren't enough slave-holders & those dependent on them to tip the balance in favor of secession.
View attachment 353797
1862 map of Kentucky showing every rail road & every rail road station with distances between each station.
Library of Congress
Saving the Union was a powerful force that can't be underestimated. Be that as it may, lets talk about something with some real sticking power, money. This map tells you just about everything you need to know. The main artery for Kentucky's imports & exports was the Ohio River.
The Shakers at Pleasant Hill, near Lexington, hired professional poultry drovers & their specially trained dogs. They would drive flocks of nearly a thousand birds overland the 70 miles to Louisville. There, the gobblers would be transshipped north & south. Dinner tables in New York were set with fresh Kentucky poultry via the Erie Canal. Thousands of pounds of Pleasant Hill smoked sweet potatoes, a staple of the diet on plantations in the Lower South went sent down the Ohio. The locks at the Falls of the Ohio at Louisville were opened in 1860, which meant that cargos did not have to make the laborious portage & could steam directly to market.
Seven rail roads enter Kentucky from the north. Those lines connected Kentucky producers with markets in New England & the Midwest. One line, the single track Louisville & Nashville was Kentucky's only connection to the deep south via Chattanooga. This alone should tell you everything you need to know about where Kentucky's trade flowed, north, not south. Joining the Confederacy would have spelled immediate economic collapse to the State of Kentucky & lots of people of all kinds knew that.
All that trade, plus the ladings from the Tennessee & Cumberland Rivers, all passed through the choke point where the Ohio meets the Mississippi. Kentucky’s river trade was vulnerable to blockade.
It was the combination of the abhorrence of slavery & the social pretensions of slave-holders combined with hard, cold accounting that prevented Kentucky from seceding. Politically, there were those who wanted to join the Confederacy, but they were scattered in the black counties on the slave map. As General Bragg's foragers discovered, mountain folk who had driven their cattle & hogs back up into coves & hollows were willing to fight rather than support the Confederacy. As things turned out, they weren't the only members of the Commonwealth of Kentucky who refused to fight for the Southern Cause.
In contrast to the premise of this thread, Kentucky owed the Confederacy nothing. When Bragg invaded Kentucky, he brought with him thousands of stands of arms intended to arm the swarm of volunteers that surely would flock to join his army. The myth that Bragg brought a wagon train of supplies back over the mountains when he retreated sprang from the wagons loaded with muskets that no Kentuckian was willing to shoulder. That fact shouts volumes. Less than a hundred boys who, "Wanted to join Morgan" volunteered to join up. Kentucky was not going to join the Confederacy because the slave-holding minority were just that, a minority.
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