At the close of the War of Independence the Kentuckians complained because the mother state did not protect them against their enemies and did not give them an adequate system of local government. Nine conventions were held at Danville from 1784 to 1790 to demand separation from Virginia. The Virginia authorities expressed a willingness to grant the demand provided Congress would admit the new district into the Union as a state. The delay, together with the proposal of John Jay, the Secretary for Foreign Affairs and commissioner to negotiate a commercial treaty with the Spanish envoy, to surrender navigation rights on the lower Mississippi for twenty-five years in order to remove the one obstacle to the negotiations, aroused so much feeling that General James Wilkinson and a few other leaders began to intrigue not only for a separation from Virginia, but also from the United States, and for the formation of a close alliance with the Spanish at New Orleans. Although most of the settlers were too loyal to be led into any such plot they generally agreed that it might have a good effect by bringing pressure to bear upon the Federal government. Congress passed a preliminary act in February 1791, and the state was formally admitted into the Union on the 1st of June 1792. In the Act of 1776 for dividing Fincastle county, Virginia, the ridge of the Cumberland Mountains was named as a part of the east boundary of Kentucky; and now that this ridge had become a part of the boundary between the states of Virginia and Kentucky they, in 1799, appointed a joint commission to run the boundary line on this ridge. A dispute with Tennessee over the southern boundary was settled in a similar manner in 1820.[1] The constitution of 1792 provided for manhood suffrage and for the election of the governor and of senators by an electoral college. General Isaac Shelby was the first governor. The people still continued to have troubles with the Indians and with the Spanish at New Orleans. The Federal government was slow to act, but its action when taken was effective. The power of the Indians was overthrown by General Anthony Wayne’s victory in the battle of Fallen Timbers, fought the 20th of August 1794 near the rapids of the Maumee river a few miles above the site of Toledo, Ohio; and the Mississippi question was settled temporarily by the treaty of 1795 and permanently by the purchase of Louisiana in 1803. In 1798–1799 the legislature passed the famous Kentucky Resolutions in protest against the alien and sedition acts.
For several years the Anti-Federalists or Republicans had contended that the administration at Washington had been exercising powers not warranted by the constitution, and when Congress had passed the alien and sedition laws the leaders of that party seized upon the event as a proper occasion for a spirited public protest which took shape principally in resolutions passed by the legislatures of Kentucky and Virginia. The original draft of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 was prepared by Vice-President Thomas Jefferson, although the fact that he was the author of them was kept from the public until he acknowledged it in 1821. They were introduced in the House of Representatives by John Breckinridge on the 8th of November, were passed by that body with some amendments but with only one dissenting vote on the 10th, were unanimously concurred in by the Senate on the 13th, and were approved by Governor James Garrard on the 16th. The first resolution was a statement of the ultra states’-rights view of the relation of the states to the Federal government[2] and subsequent resolutions declare the alien and sedition laws unconstitutional and therefore “void and of no force,” principally on the ground that they provided for an exercise of powers which were reserved to the state. The resolutions further declare that “this Commonwealth is determined, as it doubts not its co-states are, tamely to submit to undelegated and therefore unlimited powers in no man or body of men on earth,” and that “these and successive acts of the same character, unless arrested on the threshold, may tend to drive these states into revolution and blood.” Copies of the resolutions were sent to the governors of the various states, to be laid before the different state legislatures, and replies were received from Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Virginia, but all except that from Virginia were unfavourable. Nevertheless the Kentucky legislature on the 22nd of November 1799 reaffirmed in a new resolution the principles it had laid down in the first series, asserting in this new resolution that the state “does now unequivocally declare its attachment to the Union, and to that compact [the Constitution], agreeably to its obvious and real intention, and will be among the last to seek its dissolution,” but that “the principle and construction contended for by sundry of the state legislatures, that the General Government is the exclusive judge of the extent of the powers delegated to it, stop nothing [short] of despotism—since the discretion of those who administer the government, and not the Constitution, would be the measure of their powers,” “that the several states who formed that instrument, being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of the infraction,” and “that a nullification by those sovereignties of all unauthorized acts done under color of that instrument is the rightful remedy.” These measures show that the state was Democratic-Republican in its politics and pro-French in its sympathies, and that it was inclined to follow the leadership of that state from which most of its people had come.
The constitution of 1799 adopted the system of choosing the governor and senators by popular vote and deprived the supreme court of its original jurisdiction in land cases. The Burr conspiracy (1804–1806) aroused some excitement in the state. Many would have followed Burr in a filibustering attack upon the Spanish in the South-West, but scarcely any would have approved of a separation of Kentucky from the Federal Union. No battles were fought in Kentucky during the War of 1812, but her troops constituted the greater part of the forces under General William Henry Harrison. They took part in the operations at Fort Wayne, Fort Meigs, the river Raisin and the Thames.
The Democratic-Republicans controlled the politics of the state without any serious opposition until the conflict in 1820–1826, arising from the demands for a more adequate system of currency and other measures for the relief of delinquent debtors divided the state into what were known as the relief and anti-relief parties. After nearly all the forty-six banks chartered by the legislature in 1818 had been wrecked in the financial panic of 1819, the legislature in 1820 passed a series of laws designed for the benefit of the debtor class, among them one making state bank notes a legal tender for all debts. A decision of the Clark county district court declaring this measure unconstitutional was affirmed by the court of appeals. The legislature in 1824 repealed all of the laws creating the existing court of appeals and then established a new one. This precipitated a bitter campaign
- ↑ The southern boundary to the Tennessee river was surveyed in 1779–1780 by commissioners representing Virginia and North Carolina, and was supposed to be run along the parallel of latitude 36° 30′, but by mistake was actually run north of that parallel. By a treaty of 1819 the Indian title to the territory west of the Tennessee was extinguished, and commissioners then ran a line along the parallel of 36° 30′ from the Mississippi to the Tennessee. In 1820 commissioners representing Kentucky and Tennessee formally adopted the line of 1779–1780 and the line of 1819 as the boundary between the two states.
- ↑ This resolution read as follows: Resolved, that the several states composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government; but that by compact under the style of a Constitution for the United States and of amendments thereto, they constituted a general government for special purposes, delegated to that government certain definite powers, reserving each state to itself the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force: That to this compact each state acceded as a state, and is an integral party, its co-states forming, as to itself, the other party: That the government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself, since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.
