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Two
hundred
years after it was wrested from the
Native Americans, KENTUCKY
still hasn’t quite made up its mind
as to whether it belongs in the North
or the South. Both the rival
presidents in the Civil War, Abraham
Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, were born
here, and divisions were acute between
slave-owning farmers and the merchants
who depended on trade with the nearby
cities of the industrial North.
Officially neutral, seventy thousand
Kentuckians joined the Union army and
forty thousand the Confederates. After
the war Kentucky sided with the South
in its hostility to Reconstruction,
and since then it has remained solidly
Democrat.
Kentucky’s rugged beauty is at
its most appealing in the mountainous east
and the small historic towns of the Bluegrass
Downs, with visits enlivened by
the varied attractions of bourbon
whiskey, thoroughbred horses and
bluegrass music. Louisville,
home of the Kentucky Derby, is
a busy manufacturing and arts center;
the more reserved Lexington,
eighty miles east, is a major
horse-breeding marketplace.
Click here to go to
Kentucky State web site.
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