Last summer, after touring the floodwall murals in Covington, Kentucky, I ate at a pizza joint called The Gruff, situated close to the Roebling Bridge. While the bar filled up with Cincinnati Reds fans, I had my first encounter with bacon-apple pizza at the recommendation of my winsome waitress. As we chatted, I learned she’d just finished high school and was figuring out her next move in life. In time, she asked about my research project, which led me to test a theory about how much Kentuckians remember about their history as a border state. I asked, “Was Kentucky a Union or Confederate state?” I could tell by the way her eyebrows shot up that the question surprised her. “Let me think while I run your credit card,” she said. As I would have done at her age, she got it wrong. Kentucky never seceded from the Union. I just checked the Kentucky Academic Standards and it looks like my waitress would have studied the Civil War in eighth grade, which might explain her leaky memory, but it seems like the kind of thing that would have stuck in the way that you don’t need fingers to remember that 2+2=4. I’m not putting my waitress down or dismissing the quality of her education. In many ways, Kentucky presents itself to the world as a former Confederate state. As an aside, is eighth grade a bit early to study the complexities of the Civil War? Does it do any good to give eighth graders a survey course on something that still divides our country today? I’d love your thoughts.This brings me to the subject of this month’s trivia: Kentucky and the Civil War. The quiz will lean heavily on research and analysis by the scholar Ann E. Marshall in her book, Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State. That’s where I found this 1926 quote from E. Merton Coulter, who observed that Kentuckians “…waited until after the war was over to secede from the Union.” Dr. Marshall reminds us that Kentucky’s white population identified as both Union and Confederate before and after the war, and that African-Americans, who identified with and fought for the Union, were eager to draw upon the Union victory to claim what had been promised to “all men” in the Constitution. That “emancipation narrative” never resonated with the majority of white Kentuckians, no matter their partisan affiliation. In the words of historian Patrick Lewis, Ph.D., “Kentuckians imagined themselves as the last remaining spokespeople with political power for a defeated South.” With that, it’s time for the quiz.Note to my fabulous new subscribers:Monthly trivia is for sport. It’s not a test of intelligence or character. I couldn’t answer these questions without a significant amount of research, either! Do your best and enjoy learning something new. Answers in the footnotes.QUESTIONSThe first four questions will help ground us in Kentucky’s economics and culture before the Civil War. Then we’ll move to the war years, and finally, the aftermath.* The African slave trade was outlawed by Congress in 1808, consequently raising the price of enslaved workers born into what’s known as the domestic slave trade. With proximity to the Ohio River, Lexington and Louisville became major slave markets. When the cotton gin created a cotton boom in the deep South, the average value of an enslaved worker sold in New Orleans rose from $500-1800 between 1800-1860. At the peak of the cotton boom (1850-60) how many enslaved people did Kentucky sell into the cotton belt?* Over 37,000, making it the fourth highest state in the domestic slave trade.* At least 54,000, making it second only to Virginia.* The Commonwealth of Kentucky taxed enslaved workers as property, eventually assessing owners 22 cents per $100 of value. At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, with 250,000 enslaved workers in residence, what percentage of Kentucky’s tax revenue was based in human bondage/trafficking? * 10%* 20%* 35%* During Kentucky’s constitutional convention of 1849-1850, delegates debated the possibility of gradual, compensated emancipation. Proslavery forces in the state quashed all hopes of that. What did they accomplish instead?* Section three in the 1850 constitution bill of rights strengthened owners rights, saying, “The right of property is before and higher than any constitutional sanction; and the right of the owner of a slave to such slave, and its increase, is the same, and as inviolable as the right of the owner of any property whatever.”* They chartered The Kentucky Colonization Society and allocated money to purchase land for freed slaves to settle in Liberia. The colony was called “Kentucky in Africa.” * They repealed Kentucky's Nonimportation Act of 1833 to remove a significant barrier to a profitable domestic slave trade. The goal was increased tax revenue for the state.* In the 1860 national election, Abraham Lincoln took 40 percent of the country’s vote. What percentage of ...
