Commonwealth of Kentucky

Kentucky is a constituent Commonwealth of the United Kingdom of America, lying south of the Ohio river between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, bounded by Illinois, Indiana and Ohio across the river to the north, West Virginia and Virginia to the east, Tennessee to the south, and Missouri across the Mississippi to the west. Frankfort is the capital and Louisville the largest city. The population is approximately 4.6 million, and Kentucky returns six members to the federal House of Commons.

Kentucky was cut out of the Province of Virginia and was let go. Ten conventions met at Danville between 1784 and 1791, the Virginia legislature passed an Act consenting to the separation, a date was agreed, and in 1792 the Commonwealth entered the Union in its own right. West Virginia was cut out of the same Province seventy years later and was taken. The two Commonwealths are the amicable and the violent version of the same act, and each is aware of the other.

In 1861 Kentucky did nothing, and it has been explaining the nothing ever since.

Five polities rose against the Crown and Kentucky was not among them. It passed no ordinance of separation, raised no force of its own, and adjourned its legislature without resolving anything, and its people then enlisted on both sides in roughly three to one proportion for the Realm. That is the record. What Kentucky built afterwards was a different account entirely: a Commonwealth that had been rebel in sympathy, coerced into loyalty, and vindicated in defeat. The monuments went up between 1890 and 1920, for a war the Commonwealth had not fought, and there were eventually more of them here than in two of the five polities that actually rebelled.

The polity has spent the last forty years taking that account apart, and the demolition was done by its own historians rather than by anybody outside it.

History

Before the Commonwealth

The country between the Ohio and the Cumberland was hunting range, and the claim that it was empty is the oldest and most convenient falsehood in Kentucky’s history. The Shawnee held the north and the Ohio valley, the Cherokee the south-east, the Chickasaw the far west beyond the Tennessee, and the Yuchi, Wyandot and others moved through it. It was not settled densely because it was held in common as a hunting ground by several nations who fought over it, and the eighteenth-century settlers who described it as a wilderness without inhabitants were describing an arrangement they did not recognise as one.

Settlement came over the Gap and down the Ohio from the 1770s, under Virginia’s authority, and it was contested continuously for twenty years. The Shawnee campaigns north of the river ran until 1795, and the cessions that followed removed the nations from the whole of the polity within a generation.

The separation from Virginia

Kentucky was Virginia’s western county and then its western district, and the distance was the problem: a settler at the Falls of the Ohio was a month from Richmond, appeals lay to courts he could not reach, and the militia he needed had to be authorised by a legislature that had never seen the country.

The separation was negotiated over eight years and ten conventions. They met at Danville from 1784, argued about terms rather than about principle, and the Virginia legislature passed its Act of consent in 1789 fixing the conditions: the land titles Virginia had granted were to be honoured, the public debt was to be apportioned, and the separation was to take effect on a named day if the Realm admitted the new polity by then. It did. Kentucky entered the Union in 1792 as a Commonwealth, which was the word the Danville conventions chose deliberately, on the argument that a polity constituted by the agreement of its own inhabitants was a thing held in common and not a thing erected by the Crown.

Slavery in a border polity

Kentucky was a slaveholding polity and a distinctive one. Its enslaved population was around a fifth of the whole, concentrated in the Bluegrass and the western tobacco counties and almost absent from the eastern mountains, and it was held in small numbers: the median Kentucky slaveholder held fewer than five people, and plantations on the scale of the Deep South barely existed.

That produced two things. It produced a slavery of the household and the small farm, which its apologists called mild and which was not, since the smallness was precisely what made sale the ordinary instrument of discipline. And it produced the trade. Kentucky had more enslaved people than its agriculture could use and a river system pointing at markets that wanted them, and it sold them south, through Louisville and Lexington, in numbers that made the Commonwealth one of the largest exporters of people in the Realm. Families were separated as a matter of routine commerce rather than as an occasional cruelty, and the phrase sold down the river is a Kentucky phrase about a Kentucky river.

The mountains held almost no enslaved people, had no share in any of it, and this is the origin of the division that decided everything afterwards.

The river, and the crossings

The Ohio was the line, and Kentucky was the polity on the wrong side of it.

For sixty years before the war, the shortest distance between slavery and freedom in the whole of the Realm was the width of a river that a person could see across, and in a hard winter could walk over. Kentucky is therefore the polity that people crossed from, in numbers nobody has ever established, and the network that received them on the far bank in Indiana and Ohio was substantially organised by Kentuckians who had made the crossing themselves and went back.

The Commonwealth’s response was legal, commercial and violent in turn. Kentucky’s members pressed harder than any other polity’s for the recovery statutes and for their enforcement across the river. Professional recovery agents operated out of Louisville and Covington as an ordinary trade with an ordinary tariff, and they took free Black people as well as escaped ones, because the incentive ran one way and the proof of freedom was a piece of paper. The northern polities obstructed, Kentucky complained, and the recovery question was among the two or three most persistent sources of friction between polities of the Realm in the twenty years before 1861.

This is why the river is the most heavily commemorated thing in Kentucky’s modern public history. The crossing sites are marked, the Louisville and Covington waterfronts carry interpretive works, and the Commonwealth’s museums treat the escape network as the central moral fact of its antebellum history. That emphasis is recent, it is genuine, and it is also, as Kentucky’s historians point out, a considerably more comfortable subject than the auction blocks that stood three streets inland.

Mammoth Cave, and the men who mapped it

The longest cave system on earth lies under the Pennyroyal karst in Edmonson County, and it was explored and mapped by enslaved men.

The cave was worked from 1812 for saltpetre, by enslaved labourers leaching nitrate from the cave earth, and when the saltpetre trade collapsed after the war of that period the owners turned it into a show cave and used the same people as guides. The greatest of them was Stephen Bishop, who was brought to the cave at seventeen, learned it better than any person then living, crossed the pit that had stopped everyone else on a ladder laid flat, named a large part of what he found, and in 1842 drew from memory a map of the system that remained the standard reference for the following forty years. He was literate, taught himself Latin and Greek to name what he was describing, guided the geologists and the European visitors who came in increasing numbers, and was owned throughout by a man who advertised him as an attraction.

Bishop was freed in 1856, a year before he died at thirty-seven, and is buried on the ridge above the cave. Mat and Nick Bransford, also enslaved, guided alongside him, and Bransford descendants guided at Mammoth Cave for five generations until the park’s creation ended their employment.

That last fact is the one the Realm’s own park service has had to face. Mammoth Cave was authorised in 1926 and established in 1941, and the acquisition of the land removed the Black guiding families along with everyone else living in it, so a service that now interprets Bishop’s map for half a million visitors a year was the instrument that ended his successors’ livelihood. The Royal American Parks System records this in its own history, and Mammoth Cave is one of the sites where an Indigenous and community historical board sits over the interpretation.

1861: the polity that would not act

When five polities rose in 1861, Kentucky was the polity everyone expected to decide the war, and it is the one that made no decision at all.

There was no declaration of neutrality, and the absence is constitutional rather than accidental. Kentucky is a polity of a Realm whose Crown is not a party to a rebellion against itself. There is no third position available: a legislature may support the Realm’s authority or repudiate it, and a declaration that the Commonwealth would stand apart from a rebellion against its own sovereign is not a policy but a repudiation in polite language. Kentucky’s legislature was told so, in terms, by its own law officers.

So it did nothing. It debated an ordinance and did not put it. It debated a resolution affirming allegiance and did not put that either. It voted supply, adjourned, reconvened, appointed a committee, received the committee’s report, and adjourned again. The legislature of Kentucky sat for four months in 1861 and passed nothing of substance on the only question anybody cared about, and the Speaker’s own journal records members leaving the chamber rather than be recorded on a division.

The paralysis was real and it was also, in a sense that Kentucky has never enjoyed admitting, effective. The Commonwealth stayed in the Union because nothing was ever put that could have taken it out. Its people then made their own choices: something between ninety and a hundred thousand Kentuckians served the Realm and around thirty thousand went south, and there is no county in the Commonwealth where both did not happen.

Emancipation, and the compensation

The Emancipation Measure of 1 January 1865 abolished slavery and all human bondage throughout the Realm, without exception and without condition. It contained no carve-out for loyal polities, and it freed the enslaved people of Kentucky on the same day as those of Alabama and Georgia.

Kentucky’s slaveholders were furious, and they were furious as loyal subjects. Their argument was not that slavery was right; it was that they had kept the Commonwealth in the Union at some risk, that they had been assured the war was for the Union and not against their property, and that a government they had supported had taken it without asking. It is the grievance of a man who thinks he has been cheated by his own side, and it is more corrosive than the grievance of a man beaten by his enemy.

Compensation was demanded, and some of it was paid. The Realm compensated slaveholders in the loyal polities, as it did in Missouri, and Kentucky’s claims were the largest of any polity because Kentucky held the most enslaved people of any polity that had not rebelled. The awards were partial, slow and bitterly litigated, and they ran until 1878.

Nothing was paid to the people who had been held. Kentucky’s public history states this plainly now and did not state it at all before about 1980, and the sequence is the single hardest fact in the Commonwealth’s account of itself: the Realm paid the owners and it paid the owned nothing, and Kentucky’s grievance for the following century was about the first half of that sentence.

The Commonwealth that joined afterwards

What happened next is the thing Kentucky is actually known for among the Realm’s historians.

Kentucky joined the rebellion after the rebellion had ceased to exist. The process took about thirty years and it is well documented, because Kentucky documented it enthusiastically at the time. Veterans’ organisations of the losing side grew faster here than in polities that had lost. Memorial associations were founded. A state guard was reorganised with the trappings of the defeated armies. School texts were commissioned and adopted. And between 1890 and 1920 the Commonwealth put up monuments, at courthouses, on campuses and at crossroads, at a rate that eventually gave Kentucky more of them than two of the five polities that had actually rebelled.

The reasons are not mysterious and they are all in the record. Emancipation without consent and compensation without gratitude turned loyal slaveholders into aggrieved men. The Commonwealth’s Black population voted, which its white political class experienced as an imposition. A generation of returning soldiers found the losing side’s organisations more welcoming than the winning side’s. And the memory was useful: a Commonwealth that had been coerced was a Commonwealth owed something, and Kentucky’s members in the Commons spent forty years being owed things.

The account was not merely exaggerated. It was inverted. Kentucky had been three to one for the Realm and remembered itself as having been for the other side, and the invention includes the neutrality: the claim that the Commonwealth declared itself neutral in 1861 is not a distortion of the record but an addition to it, and it appears in Kentucky’s schoolbooks from the 1890s and nowhere at all before.

What did not happen, and what survived

Because Kentucky did not rebel, it was never placed under direct rule, never reconstructed, and never supervised. It had no federal appointees, no suspension, no negotiated constitution.

The consequence that matters most is the franchise. Black men in Kentucky voted continuously from 1870 onward, without interruption, in every election, which almost no polity south of the Ohio can say. There was no disenfranchising convention because there was no reconstruction to undo, no federal presence to expel, and no argument that the electorate had been imposed from outside. Kentucky simply never got round to it, and by the time the rest of the South was building its apparatus in the 1890s the Kentucky Black electorate was twenty years old and embedded in the county politics of both parties.

Kentucky is entitled to that fact and it did not earn it. The Commonwealth got there by doing nothing, exactly as it had stayed in the Union by doing nothing, and its own historians say so.

What Kentucky did instead was segregate by statute, thoroughly and early, and its record on everything other than the vote is not distinguishable from the rebel polities and in one respect is worse: the Commonwealth’s lynching record between 1880 and 1930 exceeded that of two polities that had rebelled, and the killings were concentrated in the western counties where the Black population was largest.

Berea, and the law written against one college

Berea College was founded in 1855 in the eastern hills by abolitionists, on the principle that Black and white students should be taught together, and it did exactly that for half a century. By 1900 it had about a thousand students and roughly a fifth of them were Black, and it was the only interracial college in the Realm south of the Ohio.

In 1904 the Legislature passed a statute making it unlawful to operate a school teaching Black and white students together. It was aimed at one institution and everybody knew it, since Berea was the only place in Kentucky to which it could apply, and the bill was known in the chamber by the college’s name before it had a number. Berea complied under protest, endowed a separate institute for its Black students at Simpsonville, and did not teach an integrated class again until the statute was amended in 1950.

The Day Law is the clearest single instance in the Realm of a legislature legislating against a named institution while pretending to legislate generally, and it is taught as that in the Realm’s law faculties.

The coalfield

Coal was known in eastern Kentucky from the 1750s and was worth nothing until the railways arrived, which they did between 1880 and 1912. What followed was the most complete transformation of a region in the Commonwealth’s history and it was carried out almost entirely by people who did not live there.

The broad form deed is the mechanism and it is the thing Kentucky is angriest about. In the 1880s and 1890s agents moved through the mountain counties buying the mineral rights under farms, separately from the land itself, at prices between twenty-five cents and a dollar an acre, from families who could not read the instrument and were told it meant men would dig tunnels. The deeds were broad: they conveyed the minerals and whatever was necessary to get them out.

Fifty years later, when the method changed from tunnelling to taking the top off the mountain, the companies went back to those deeds and the Kentucky courts held that they meant what they said. The holder of the minerals could destroy the surface, without consent and without compensation, because a deed signed in 1893 for fifty cents an acre had conveyed the right to do whatever getting the coal required, and the court would not read a limitation into it that the words did not contain.

That was the law in Kentucky for the better part of eighty years. Farms were destroyed above the heads of families who owned them on paper. The Assembly legislated four times and each statute was struck down or read narrowly, on the ground that a legislature cannot take away a property right already conveyed.

It ended by referendum. In 1988 the Commonwealth amended its constitution to provide that a broad form deed should be construed to permit only the method of extraction in common use when it was signed, and the amendment carried with eighty-two per cent of the vote, the largest majority for any question ever put to Kentucky’s electorate. The Court of Appeals upheld it in 1990.

Harlan

Kentucky’s coal counties produced the most violent labour history in the Realm.

The mine wars of the 1930s centred on Harlan County, where the operators controlled the sheriff, the housing, the shops and the roads, and where the deputisation of company guards made the distinction between a private force and a public one meaningless. The killings of 1931 and 1932 were investigated by a parliamentary committee whose members were themselves turned back at the county line, which is the fact that made the affair national. It recurred: the Brookside strike of 1973 and 1974 ran for thirteen months, produced another death, and was settled only after the funeral.

Kentucky remembers this in music and not in monuments. There is no memorial at Harlan and there is a body of song that everyone in the eastern counties knows, and the Commonwealth’s official history caught up with the songs about fifty years after they were written.

Black lung, and the collapse

Coal employment in eastern Kentucky has fallen by more than ninety per cent since 1950, and for most of that period production did not fall at all. The men went and the coal kept coming, because the continuous miner, the longwall and the dragline did the work of a hundred men each. The counties emptied regardless of price, and the collapse that arrived after 2010, when the market went as well, hit places that had already lost nine tenths of the jobs.

Progressive massive fibrosis, the advanced form of black lung, is rising again, and is being diagnosed in men in their forties who began work after the dust standards were in force. The explanation is that the remaining coal is in thin seams inside more rock, so cutting it produces silica rather than coal dust, and the standard written for the one does not control the other. It was regarded as a solved disease by 1990 and the clinics in Hazard and Pikeville are now seeing more advanced cases than they did in 1975.

Rose, and the schools

In 1989 the Supreme Court of Kentucky did something no polity court in the Realm has done before or since.

In Rose v the Council for Better Education, brought by sixty-six poor school districts, the Court was asked to find the Commonwealth’s school funding formula unconstitutional. It found a great deal more than that. Holding that the Constitution’s requirement of an efficient system of common schools was a duty owed to every child and was justiciable, the Court declared that the entire system of common schools in Kentucky was unconstitutional: not the formula, but the schools, the governance, the curriculum, the certification, the finance and the statutes creating them, the whole apparatus, root and branch. It gave the Legislature until the following April to build a new one.

The Assembly did it. The Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 rewrote school finance on an equalising formula, restructured governance, established school-based councils, created an assessment system and abolished the existing statutory scheme entirely, and it was passed within the time the Court had given.

And it worked. Kentucky in 1989 was at or near the bottom of every published educational comparison in the Realm. Within fifteen years it was near the middle on most and above it on primary reading, the gap between its richest and poorest districts had closed further than in any polity of the Realm, and the eastern counties, which had the least to begin with, gained the most in absolute terms. It is the largest measured improvement any polity has produced in a generation, and the Commonwealth achieved it because a court told it that it had no lawful school system at all and meant it.

The memory dissolved

The Lost Cause account of Kentucky was demolished between about 1980 and 2005, and it was demolished by Kentucky’s own historians, working in Kentucky universities, on Kentucky archives, largely for Kentucky audiences.

The method was arithmetic rather than argument. The enlistment figures were recovered from the muster rolls, county by county. The dates of the monuments were tabulated and it became impossible not to notice that almost none was earlier than 1890. The schoolbooks were traced to the committees that had commissioned them. The claim of 1861 neutrality was looked for in the record of 1861 and was not there.

Nothing was refuted, exactly; it was simply itemised, and by about 2000 there was no version of the rebel Kentucky that a serious person could hold. The schools now teach the loyal record, the museums caption the monuments with their dates of erection, and the monuments themselves have become a period curiosity that hardly anybody defends. A handful have come down, mostly from campuses, mostly without much noise. Most are still standing, and the Commonwealth’s settled position is that a monument put up in 1907 to a war fought in 1863 is evidence about 1907 and should be labelled accordingly.

That the demolition came from scholarship rather than from politics is the reason it has held. Nobody in Kentucky can say it was done to them from outside.

Geography

Kentucky runs about six hundred and forty kilometres east to west and is one of the most internally various polities of its size in the Realm.

The Cumberland Plateau in the east is the coalfield: steep, narrow-valleyed, densely wooded, drained by creeks that flood, and cut by the Cumberland, Kentucky and Big Sandy rivers running north-west out of the mountains. Black Mountain in Harlan County is the highest ground.

West of it the Knobs form a horseshoe of isolated conical hills around the Bluegrass, which is the polity’s centre and its self-image: rolling limestone country, deep phosphatic soil, black board fences, and grass that grows on rock rich enough to build bone, which is the entire reason for the horses.

South and west lie the Pennyroyal and the Mammoth Cave karst, where the limestone has dissolved into the longest cave system on earth and the surface rivers run underground for kilometres at a time. Beyond that the western coalfield in the Green River basin, then the Jackson Purchase in the far west between the Tennessee and the Mississippi, which is flat delta country bought from the Chickasaw in 1818 and which looks and votes like the Deep South.

Kentucky has more navigable river kilometres than any polity except Alaska, and its whole northern boundary is the Ohio. It is also the only polity whose boundary is another polity’s riverbank: the line runs at the low-water mark of the northern shore as it stood in 1792, so the river itself is Kentucky’s, which has generated litigation with three polities and one genuinely absurd dispute about a bridge.

The Commonwealth is divided between two time zones, roughly on the line of the Pennyroyal, which is a practical nuisance and a standing joke.

The five Kentuckys

Kentucky’s politics are unintelligible without the regions, and the regions do not overlap on anything.

The Bluegrass is horses, bourbon, the university and old money, centred on Lexington. It is prosperous, agriculturally rich, socially conservative and institutionally liberal, and it has supplied a wholly disproportionate share of the Commonwealth’s political class since 1792.

The eastern coalfield is Appalachian, poor, emptying, and the part of Kentucky that has been governed by outsiders throughout its industrial history. It has almost no Black population, had almost no enslaved population, was the most reliably loyal country in the Commonwealth in 1861, and votes now in ways that would astonish anyone who knew it in 1935.

The western coalfield and the Pennyroyal are farm country with a smaller and older mining history, tobacco until 2004, and a politics that is agricultural first.

The Jackson Purchase in the far west is culturally Deep South, was the most rebel-minded country in Kentucky in 1861 and the only region where the rebellion had a genuine majority, and is the piece of the Commonwealth that the rebel memory fitted best because it was the piece the memory was partly true about.

And the cities are two, and neither is in Kentucky the way the rest of it is. Louisville faces the river and has never been sure whether it is southern. Northern Kentucky is a suburb of a city in another polity, watches that polity’s news, supports that polity’s teams and commutes across a bridge to work.

No two of these five have ever wanted the same thing at the same time. Kentucky’s Legislature is the arena in which that is managed rather than resolved, its governments are coalitions of regions before they are coalitions of parties, and the Commonwealth has gone whole decades without a durable majority for anything that costs money.

Constitutional system

Kentucky is governed under the Constitution of Kentucky of 1891, its fourth, deposited under the Polity Instruments Act 1889 in 1892, amended forty-three times, and never replaced.

It is a hostile document. Its authors had watched thirty years of railway promotion, coal and timber speculation, and legislatures they regarded as purchasable, and they wrote an instrument designed to prevent their own successors from doing anything. It runs to some twenty-three thousand words, four times the Realm’s Charter. It forbids the Assembly to legislate for a named locality and then lists sixty categories of prohibited local legislation in case the general prohibition should fail. It fixes procedures, timetables and majorities in the text. It caps the Commonwealth’s borrowing at a figure fixed in 1891 and never raised, which is why every capital project in Kentucky is financed through a bond corporation the constitution does not mention.

Its most quoted provision fixed the salaries of public officers in the text of the instrument itself. By the 1940s the figure was worth so little that the Commonwealth could not lawfully pay a competent officer, and the Assembly’s response was a decade of elaborate evasion by allowance and expense before an amendment finally unfroze it.

Replacement has been attempted and has failed every time. A convention question was put in 1931, 1947, 1960 and 1977 and was defeated in all four, twice heavily. The settled explanation is that no region will risk a convention it cannot control, and Kentucky has five regions.

The Governor

The Crown is represented by a Governor, appointed on the advice of the ministers of the Realm after consultation with the Premier, holding office for five years. The incumbent is Naomi Grider, formerly a judge of the Court of Appeals, appointed in 2022.

The office in Kentucky carries an unusual weight of history, because the Commonwealth is the only polity of the Realm in which a Crown representative was shot. Governor William Goebel was assassinated in Frankfort in 1900, during a disputed election in which two rival ministries claimed office and the Assembly sat under armed guard, and the killing was never satisfactorily solved. The Realm’s response, an inquiry followed by the reorganisation of the Commonwealth’s electoral administration, is the closest Kentucky came in its whole history to being supervised, and the Commonwealth’s political class has been sensitive about the vice-regal office ever since.

Modern Governors have accordingly been careful, ceremonial, and drawn by convention from the bench.

The Premier

The head of government is the Premier of Kentucky, holding office on the confidence of the House of Representatives and governing from Frankfort. The office has been held since 2024 by Ellis Barbour, Conservative and Crown Union, with a working majority of eleven.

Kentucky’s governing arithmetic is regional rather than ideological. Barbour’s majority is the Bluegrass, the Pennyroyal, the Purchase and the eastern counties, against Louisville and Northern Kentucky, and its internal tensions are not left and right but coalfield and Bluegrass: the eastern members want transfers and the Bluegrass members pay for them. Every Kentucky ministry of the last sixty years has contained that argument, and several have ended on it.

The Commonwealth is the only polity of the Realm to have had four ministries fall on the annual estimates since 1970, which its own commentators attribute to a constitutional borrowing cap that makes every capital programme a negotiation and every negotiation a confidence question.

The Legislature

The Kentucky Legislature is bicameral: a House of Representatives of a hundred members elected for two years, and a Senate of thirty-eight elected for four, half retiring every two.

Its sessions are short and constitutionally so, sixty legislative days in even years and thirty in odd, which was intended in 1891 to limit the mischief a legislature could do and has the effect of concentrating the whole of Kentucky’s legislative output into eight weeks of extraordinary congestion, most of it in the final fortnight.

The Assembly’s characteristic instrument is the road plan, the biennial schedule of highway construction, which is the largest discretionary sum the Commonwealth controls and is allocated by negotiation among the members. It is the currency of Kentucky politics in the most literal sense, it is how majorities are built and kept, and every reform commission since 1954 has recommended taking it out of the members’ hands.

Counties and local government

Kentucky has one hundred and twenty counties, more than any polity of the Realm except Texas and Georgia, for a population of four and a half million. Thirty-two of them have fewer than ten thousand people.

They were patronage and everyone knows it. The great majority were created between 1820 and 1860 by an Assembly that had discovered a county could be manufactured out of parts of three existing ones, and that manufacturing one produced a courthouse, a county seat with a future, a judge, a clerk, a sheriff, a jailer, a surveyor and a coroner, all of them appointable or electable and all of them owing the arrangement to whoever had carried the bill. The stated reason was always the day’s ride to the courthouse. The actual reason is legible in the dates, which cluster around contested elections.

Kentucky never undid it. The counties hold real power, and the office that matters is the county judge-executive, who is not a judge in any meaningful sense but is the county’s chief executive, chairs its fiscal court, and controls its roads. The road money and the judge-executive are still the real currency of Kentucky politics, and a member of the Legislature who can deliver a resurfacing to a county judge-executive has an ally for a decade.

The system’s costs are what would be expected. Kentucky maintains a hundred and twenty full sets of county offices, several of them still remunerated in part by fee rather than salary, an arrangement abolished almost everywhere else in the Realm; the Commonwealth has the highest per-resident count of elected local officers of any polity; and small-scale local corruption, in road contracts, in coal haul permits, and historically in vote-buying, has been a persistent feature that Kentucky’s own auditors have documented for a century.

Merger has been proposed since 1934 and has never once been put to a vote, because no bill proposing it has ever left committee.

Law and the courts

The Supreme Court of Kentucky has seven justices sitting from seven districts, appointed by the Governor on the advice of the Premier from lists settled by a judicial nominating commission, holding to seventy-two. Below it sit a Court of Appeals and unified circuit and district courts.

The modern structure dates entirely from the Judicial Article of 1975, which replaced a court system inherited from 1891 in which every county had its own inconsistently staffed courts, magistrates need not be lawyers, and the Commonwealth’s highest court was so overloaded it took four years to reach an appeal. The Article was the one great structural reform Kentucky achieved by amendment rather than by judgment, and it is the standard argument against the claim that the 1891 constitution cannot be worked with.

Two lines of decision define the court’s reputation.

The first is the broad form deed jurisprudence, which is the Realm’s most-cited example of a court following a text to a destination it plainly disliked. The judgments are careful, the reasoning is orthodox, and the outcome was that families watched their farms destroyed by strangers holding a deed signed by a grandparent for fifty cents an acre. The Court said more than once that the remedy lay with the legislature or the people, and in 1988 the people took it.

The second is Rose, which is the opposite: a court that read a single constitutional adjective, efficient, as a justiciable duty and demolished an entire branch of government with it. The two lines are cited against each other constantly in Kentucky’s law schools, and the Commonwealth has never settled which of them represents its court at its best.

Economy

Kentucky’s economy is the twenty-second largest of the Realm’s polities and has been rebuilt twice in living memory.

Motor assembly and components are now the largest manufacturing sector, centred on the plant at Georgetown north of Lexington, which opened in 1988 and is among the largest single motor works in the Realm, with a supplier network through the central and western counties. Kentucky builds more motor vehicles per resident than any polity of the Realm.

Air freight is the sector nobody expects. The consolidation of a global express network at Louisville from 1982 made the Commonwealth’s largest city one of the busiest cargo airports on earth, running a sorting operation of some twenty thousand people that works through the night, and pulled in the warehousing, customs brokerage and medical logistics that follow such a thing. A large share of the Realm’s high-value express freight passes through Kentucky between midnight and four in the morning, and almost nobody who receives it knows.

Bourbon. Something above ninety per cent of the world’s bourbon is made in Kentucky, from a hundred kilometres of limestone country whose water is naturally filtered of iron and rich in calcium, and the industry now supports distilling, cooperage, tourism and a great deal of the central counties’ rural employment. It has roughly quadrupled since 2000.

Horses. The Bluegrass breeding industry is the largest thoroughbred concentration in the world, and it is an agricultural economy built entirely on one animal: the farms, the veterinary schools, the auction houses, the insurance and the transport all exist for it. The industry is small in employment and enormous in capital, and it makes the Bluegrass counties the wealthiest agricultural land in the Realm by value per hectare.

Coal produced a fifth of Kentucky’s economic output in 1975 and produces about one per cent now. The eastern field is largely finished; the western field, thicker-seamed and closer to the barge routes, persists on a reduced scale.

Tobacco was the crop that carried Kentucky’s small farms, under a federal quota system that limited production, guaranteed a price, and attached the quota to the land, so that a few hectares of tobacco right made a farm viable. The quota ended in 2004 with a buyout paid to the holders. The money was real and it was spent once, and what followed was the fastest consolidation of farmland in the Commonwealth’s history: within a decade the number of Kentucky farms growing tobacco had fallen by nine tenths, and the small diversified farm the quota had been protecting since 1938 largely ceased to exist.

Transport

Kentucky is a crossing place. Four of the Realm’s principal north-south and east-west road corridors meet within it, the Ohio is bridged at fourteen points, and the Commonwealth’s road network is the fourth largest in the Realm by length because of the hundred and twenty counties and the terrain.

The Louisville air hub dominates freight aviation, and Cincinnati’s principal airport is physically in Kentucky, at Hebron, which the Commonwealth mentions whenever the subject arises.

River freight is heavy: coal, chemicals, grain and aggregate move on the Ohio, the Green, the Tennessee and the Cumberland, and the locks at Louisville are among the busiest inland works in the Realm.

The eastern counties are the transport problem and always have been. The Cumberland Plateau’s valleys run the wrong way for east-west movement, the coal haul roads were built to get coal out rather than to connect places to each other, and a journey of forty kilometres in Harlan or Letcher County can take ninety minutes. Every regional development programme since 1965 has begun with a road, and the roads have been built, and the counties have gone on emptying.

Welfare, health and education

Education is Kentucky’s proudest modern achievement and it was ordered by a court.

The Rose judgment of 1989 and the reform Act of 1990 took a school system that was last or nearly last in the Realm on every measure and moved it to the middle within fifteen years. The equalising formula narrowed the gap between Kentucky’s richest and poorest districts further than in any polity of the Realm. Primary reading attainment rose above the Realm’s median and has stayed there. The eastern counties, which had the least, gained the most in absolute terms, and the school buildings put up in the mountain counties in the 1990s are in several places the only public building of any quality in the county.

Kentucky is entirely aware that it did not choose this, and its standard formulation is that the Commonwealth was told it had no lawful school system and discovered it could build one in a year.

Higher education is substantial: the universities at Lexington and Louisville, the regional universities at Bowling Green, Richmond, Morehead, Murray and Highland Heights, which were deliberately distributed one to a region, and Berea, which charges no tuition, admits on need, requires every student to work, and has been doing so since 1855 with the interruption the Day Law imposed.

Health is Kentucky’s worst domain and the numbers are stark. The Commonwealth has the highest cancer incidence and the highest cancer mortality of any polity of the Realm, driven by lung cancer, driven in turn by a smoking rate that has been the Realm’s highest for sixty years in the polity that grew the tobacco. Life expectancy is third from the bottom. The eastern counties have the worst health outcomes of any comparable region in the Realm, worse than the Black Belt of Alabama on several measures, and they combine black lung, diabetes, opioid mortality and a shortage of clinicians.

The NHSA guarantee has done more here than almost anywhere, because the population is poor and the entitlement does not means-test, and Kentucky’s uptake rates are among the Realm’s highest. What it has not solved is distribution: seventeen counties have no practising obstetrician and the mountain counties rely on clinics staffed by rotating rather than resident doctors.

The opioid epidemic hit eastern Kentucky earlier and harder than almost any region of the Realm, from the late 1990s, and the Commonwealth’s litigation against the manufacturers was among the first brought anywhere. The settlements are now paying for treatment in counties that had none.

Cities

Louisville

Louisville is the largest city, about six hundred and thirty thousand within the merged city and county and one and a half million in a metropolitan area that crosses into Indiana. It sits at the Falls of the Ohio, the only natural obstruction on the whole river, which is the reason it exists: everything going down had to stop and be portaged, so the portage became a town.

It is the air freight hub, a manufacturing and logistics city, the home of the Commonwealth’s largest hospital complex, and the place the Derby happens. Its politics are the opposite of the Commonwealth’s around it, and Louisville and Frankfort have been in a low-grade constitutional argument about municipal powers since the 1890s.

Louisville has never been sure whether it is in the South. It faces a free polity across the river, took its commerce from the north and its society from the south, was a market for the slave trade and a destination for people escaping it in the same decade, and its own writers have been worrying at the question for a hundred and fifty years without settling it. Muhammad Ali was born here in 1942, and the city’s relationship with him ran the whole distance from prosecution to veneration inside one lifetime, which Louisville regards as the most honest thing about itself.

Lexington

Lexington is the second city, about three hundred and thirty thousand, and it is the Bluegrass: the university, the horse farms, the auction houses, and a downtown of nineteenth-century money. It was the larger of the two cities until the 1830s and lost the position to the river.

It has the most restrictive urban growth boundary in the Realm, adopted in 1958 to stop the city eating the horse farms, and it works, which is why Lexington ends abruptly in pasture and why its housing is expensive.

Northern Kentucky

Covington, Newport, Florence and their neighbours hold about four hundred thousand people and constitute the third urban region, and it is a suburb of Cincinnati. It watches Ohio’s television, reads Ohio’s newspaper, supports Ohio’s teams, and sends most of its workforce over the bridges every morning.

It votes as its own thing, has the Commonwealth’s fastest population growth, holds the Cincinnati airport on its own soil, and is chronically convinced that Frankfort neither understands nor funds it. Newport’s twentieth-century career as an open gambling town, run by interests from outside the Commonwealth until a reform campaign in 1961, is the region’s most colourful history and the one it least likes discussed.

Bowling Green and the west

Bowling Green, about eighty thousand, is the largest place in the west, a university and motor-manufacturing town, and the most demographically changed city in Kentucky: refugee resettlement since the 1980s has made it the most various small city in the Realm’s interior, with substantial Bosnian, Burmese, Congolese and Iraqi communities.

Owensboro, Paducah and Henderson serve the western coalfield and the rivers.

Frankfort

Frankfort is the capital and has about twenty-eight thousand people, which makes it among the smallest capitals in the Realm. It was chosen in 1792 by a commission on the classic compromise ground that it was neither Lexington nor Louisville, and the town’s own account is that its founder secured it by offering the commission a quantity of building stone, some nails and a reputed six hundred pounds’ worth of whisky.

It is a government town in a bend of the Kentucky river, prone to flooding, and it empties on Fridays.

Demographics

Kentucky’s population is approximately 4.6 million, and it is the least mobile in the Realm after Alabama: about two thirds of residents were born in the Commonwealth.

It is about eight per cent Black, concentrated in Louisville, Lexington and the western counties, and almost absent from the eastern mountains, which is the same distribution as the enslaved population of 1860 and for the same reason. Hispanic residents are about five per cent and are a development of the last thirty years, in the horse industry, in food processing and in Bowling Green.

The eastern counties are the demographic problem. Thirty-one Kentucky counties have lost population in every decade since 1950, several by more than half, and the people leaving are young. The Commonwealth’s overall growth is slow and is concentrated in Northern Kentucky, the Lexington region and the counties around Louisville and Bowling Green.

Kentucky is overwhelmingly Protestant, with Baptists the largest body by a distance, a substantial Methodist and Pentecostal presence, a Catholic concentration in Louisville, Northern Kentucky and the central “Kentucky Holy Land” counties settled from Maryland in the 1780s, and the oldest Shaker sites in the Realm’s interior, now preserved rather than inhabited.

Society and culture

Bourbon is the Commonwealth’s most recognisable product and its relationship with it is comic. Kentucky makes almost all the world’s bourbon and spent most of the twentieth century unable to sell much of it at home: the Commonwealth went dry with the Realm, stayed drier for longer afterwards by local option, and even now a substantial minority of its hundred and twenty counties are dry or partly so. There are still counties that distil bourbon and forbid its sale, which every visiting journalist discovers and reports as though it were new.

Horses are not a sport here but an industry with a sport attached. The Derby at Louisville on the first Saturday in May is the Commonwealth’s national day in everything but name, and the breeding, training and sale of thoroughbreds organises the working year of a whole region.

Basketball is the polity sport, unambiguously and to a degree that surprises outsiders who assume football. The rivalry between the universities at Lexington and Louisville structures the calendar, the high school tournament fills the largest arena in the Commonwealth every March, and the eastern counties in particular have a basketball culture out of all proportion to their population, which is generally explained by the fact that a mountain county with no flat ground can still build a gymnasium.

Bluegrass music is named after the place and was invented in it. It is a twentieth-century form rather than an ancient one, built out of older mountain and southern string traditions by musicians who knew exactly what they were doing, and it is one of two or three musical forms the Realm has exported wholesale. The eastern counties also hold an older ballad tradition that collectors have been working through since 1900, and the labour songs of the coalfield sit inside the same tradition and are sung at the same gatherings.

Food is country ham cured for a year, burgoo, beaten biscuits, the Derby pie, and a mutton barbecue in the western counties that exists nowhere else and is a survival of Welsh sheep-farming settlement.

Political tensions

The coalfield transfer question. The eastern counties need money and produce little revenue; the Bluegrass and the cities produce it. Every ministry contains this argument and several have ended on it. What makes it intractable is that sixty years of programmes have not changed the trajectory, so the eastern members cannot point to a return and the paying regions can point to that.

What replaces coal, and whether anything does. The Commonwealth has tried tourism, prisons, call centres, broadband and reclamation-site industrial parks. Some have worked locally. None has worked regionally, and Kentucky’s political class no longer promises that any will.

The constitution. Everybody agrees the 1891 instrument is unfit and nobody will risk a convention, because a convention could be captured and the five regions each fear a different capture. The borrowing cap, the salary provisions and the sixty prohibited categories of local legislation are worked around rather than repealed, and the working-around is itself now a constitutional tradition.

Louisville and Frankfort. The largest city has a fifth of the Commonwealth’s people, produces a disproportionate share of its revenue, and is governed on terms set by an Assembly in which it can be outvoted by rural members whose combined population is smaller. This is the oldest live argument in Kentucky politics and it is genuinely unresolved.

The counties. A hundred and twenty is indefensible and untouchable, and both facts are equally well understood.

The monuments that remain. The rebel memory is intellectually finished, which has not settled what to do with its objects. Kentucky’s working position is that a monument is evidence about the year it went up and should be labelled with that year, and this satisfies people who want them gone rather less than it satisfies people who want them kept.

Assessment

Kentucky’s history is a series of consequential things that happened because the Commonwealth did not act.

It stayed in the Union by not acting, and the account of 1861 is not one of loyalty chosen but of a legislature that could not be brought to a division. It kept a Black electorate by not acting, since it was never reconstructed and so had nothing to undo and never built the machinery its neighbours built, and Black men have voted in Kentucky continuously since 1870, which almost nothing south of the Ohio can say. And it lost the eastern half of itself by not acting, because the broad form deeds were signed at the kitchen table one farm at a time while the Commonwealth’s government was elsewhere, and the law that let a company destroy a farm above the heads of the family that owned it stood for eighty years.

That pattern is why Kentucky’s two great modern achievements are both instances of the Commonwealth being made to move. In 1988 the electorate did it to itself, ending the broad form deed by a majority of eighty-two per cent, the largest ever recorded here. In 1989 the Supreme Court did it, telling the Commonwealth it had no lawful school system and giving it until April, and the Assembly built one and it worked, and the poorest counties gained the most. Both were done by an instrument that bypassed the ordinary politics, and it is not obvious that Kentucky’s ordinary politics could have produced either.

The rebel memory is worth a separate line, because the way it ended is to the Commonwealth’s credit in a way the memory itself is not. Kentucky invented a past for itself, held it for a century, and then dismantled it with muster rolls, monument dates and library catalogues, in its own universities, for its own audiences. Nobody made it do that. There is no equivalent in the Realm of a polity that took apart its own founding myth this thoroughly and this recently, and the reason it has held is precisely that nobody can say it was done from outside.

What Kentucky still has not managed is to be one polity. Five regions that agree on nothing sit in a legislature designed in 1891 to stop legislatures acting, under a borrowing cap set in the same year, with a hundred and twenty counties and a road plan for a currency. The Commonwealth works, and it works the way a coalition of small countries works, and the things it has achieved were achieved when something outside that arrangement forced its hand.

Chronology

Symbols

The flag of Kentucky is a bespoke design and carries no reference to the war. Its proportion is 2:3.

It is a map of the Commonwealth read as a landscape. A band of river blue runs along the top edge, the full width of the flag, for the Ohio; a narrower band of the same blue runs down the hoist, for the Mississippi at the Purchase. The body of the flag is limestone cream, for the pale rock that underlies most of Kentucky, that filters the water the bourbon is made from, that grows the grass the horses are bred on, and that has dissolved into the longest cave system on earth. And at the fly, rising from the bottom edge to meet the river, is a wedge of mountain green for the Cumberland Plateau.

The blue meets the very edge of the flag, and this is deliberate. Kentucky’s northern boundary runs at the far bank of the Ohio as it stood in 1792, so the whole river is the Commonwealth’s, and the flag gives it no shoreline on that side because in law there is not one.

The design was adopted by an Act of 1962, replacing an armorial banner of the polity seal on a blue ground, at the recommendation of a commission which reported that the Commonwealth’s existing flag was indistinguishable at any distance from eleven others and that whatever replaced it should show the country rather than an argument about it. The commission sat five years after the last serious attempt to put a rebel device on a public building in Frankfort, and its report does not mention that and did not need to.

The motto is “United we stand, divided we fall.” It was adopted in 1792 and it is the most quoted line in Kentucky’s public life, almost always with an awareness of how it sits against the record: a Commonwealth of five regions that has never mustered a durable majority for anything, whose legislature would not divide in 1861, and which spent a century divided about which side it had been on.

The Commonwealth’s song, My Old Kentucky Home, is a sentimental ballad written in 1853 by a composer from Pennsylvania about an enslaved man being sold away from his family. It was adopted in 1928 by people who had stopped hearing what it said, is sung annually before the Derby, and its text was amended by the Legislature in 1986 to remove a racial term that generations had sung without discomfort. The amendment is the whole of Kentucky’s twentieth century in one legislative act.

The State tree is the tulip poplar, the flower the goldenrod, the bird the cardinal, and the fossil the brachiopod, which is limestone again.

Trivia

See also

• Commonwealth of West Virginia
• Province of Virginia
• Commonwealth of Ohio
• State of Alabama
• State of Missouri
• The American Civil War
• Henry Clay
• Royal American Parks System