Kentucky's Compromisers: A Scrapbook Timeline, 1820–1861

Kentucky Between North and South

1Kentucky sat on the line between North and South. Across the Ohio River lay the free states of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. Most Kentucky farmers grew tobacco, hemp and grain rather than cotton, and in 1860 about one in five people in the state was enslaved. Kentucky's leaders often looked for middle ground that would hold the Union together.

2Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky helped pass the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Missouri entered the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state, leaving 12 free states and 12 slave states. Slavery was banned in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of a line at 36°30′ north latitude.

3By 1850 the United States had won California and other western land from Mexico. Clay, now 72 years old, offered a new plan. California would enter as a free state; settlers in the New Mexico and Utah territories would decide about slavery themselves; the slave trade, though not slavery, would end in Washington, D.C.; and a strict new Fugitive Slave Act would require Northerners to help capture people who had escaped slavery. Many Northerners hated that law, and some Northern states passed laws to resist it.

4In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act let settlers in those territories vote on slavery, ending the Missouri Compromise line. In 1857 the Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott case that Congress had no power to ban slavery in any territory.

5In 1860 Kentucky's voters chose John Bell, whose new Constitutional Union Party asked Americans to stand by "the Constitution of the Country, the Union of the States, and the Enforcement of the Laws" and said little about slavery. Abraham Lincoln, a Republican born in Kentucky, won the presidency with almost no votes from the South. Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky then proposed amendments to the Constitution that would bring back the 36°30′ line, extend it to the Pacific Ocean and protect slavery south of it in all present and future territories. Lincoln wrote privately to an Illinois senator, "Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery." A Senate committee could not agree, and the plan failed.

6Seven states of the Deep South left the Union and formed the Confederacy. After the attack on Fort Sumter, Kentucky's government tried to stay out of the war.