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 market.
