Charitable and Penal Institutions.—The charitable and penal institutions are managed by separate boards of trustees appointed by the governor. There are a deaf and dumb institution at Danville (1823), an institution for the blind at Louisville (1842), and an institution for the education of feeble-minded children at Frankfort (1860). The Eastern Lunatic Asylum at Lexington, established in 1815 as a private institution, came under the control of the state in 1824. The Central Lunatic Asylum at Anchorage, founded in 1869 as a house of refuge for young criminals, became an asylum in 1873. The Western Lunatic Asylum at Hopkinsville was founded in 1848. The main penitentiary at Frankfort was completed in 1799 and a branch was established at Eddyville in 1891. Under an act of 1898 two houses of reform for juvenile offenders, one for boys, the other for girls, were established near Lexington.
Education.—The early history of the schools of Kentucky shows that the rural school conditions have been very unsatisfactory. A system of five trustees, with a sixty-day term of school, was replaced by a three trustee system, first with a one-hundred-day term of school, and subsequently with a one-hundred-and-twenty-day term of school annually. The state fund has not been supplemented locally for the payment of teachers, who have consequently been underpaid. The rural teachers, however, have been paid from the state fund, so that the poorer districts receive aid from the richer districts of the commonwealth. The rural schools are supervised by a superintendent in each county. Throughout the state white and negro children are taught in separate schools. The state makes provision for revenue for school purposes as follows: (1) the interest on the Bond of the Commonwealth for $1,327,000.00; (2) dividends on 798 shares of the capital stock of the Bank of Kentucky—representing a par value of $79,800.00; (3) the interest at 6 % on the Bond of the Commonwealth for $381,986.08, which is a perpetual obligation in favour of the several counties; (4) the interest at 6 % on $606,641.03, which was received from the United States; (5) the annual tax of 26½ cents on each $100 of value of all real and personal estate and corporate franchises directed to be assessed for taxation; (6) a certain portion of fines, forfeitures and licences realized by the state; and (7) a portion of the dog taxes of each county. The present school system of Kentucky may be summarized under three heads: the rural schools, the graded schools, and the high schools (which are further classified as city and county high schools). The 1908 session of the General Assembly passed an act providing: that each county of the state be the unit for taxation; that the county tax be mandatory; that there be a local subdistrict tax; and that each county be divided into four, six or eight educational divisions, that one trustee be elected for each subdistrict, that the trustees of the subdistricts form division Boards of Education, and that the chairmen of these various division boards form a County Board of Education together with the county superintendent, who is ex officio chairman. This system of taxation and supervision is a great advance in the administration of public schools. Any subdistrict, town or city of the fifth or sixth class may provide for a graded school by voting for an ad valorem and poll tax which is limited as to amount. There were in 1909 135 districts which had complied with this act, and were known as Graded Common School districts. By special charters the General Assembly has also established 25 special graded schools. Statutes provide that all children between the ages of 7 and 14 years living in such districts must attend school annually for at least eight consecutive weeks. In each city of the first, second and third class there must be, and of the fourth class there may be, maintained under control of a city Board of Education a system of public schools, in which all children between the ages of 6 and 20 residing in the city may be taught at public expense. There were in 1909 62 city public high schools whose graduates are admitted to the State University without examination. A truancy act (1908) provides that every child between the ages of 7 and 14 years living in a city of the first, second, third or fourth class must attend school regularly for the full term of said school. It was provided by statute that before June 1910, there should have been established in each county of the state at least one County High School to which all common school graduates of the county should be admitted without charge. Separate institutes for white and coloured teachers are conducted annually in each county. These institutes are held for a five or ten day session and attendance is required of every teacher. The state provides for the issuance of three kinds of certificates. A state diploma issued by the State Board of Examiners is good for life. A state certificate issued by the State Board of Examiners is good for eight years with one renewal. County certificates issued by the County Board of Examiners are of three classes, valid for one, two and four years respectively.
According to a school census there was in 1908-1909 a school population of 739,352, of which 587,051 were reported from the rural districts. In the school year 1907-1908 the school population was 734,617, the actual enrolment in public schools was 441,377, the average attendance was 260,843; there were approximately 3392 male and 5257 female white teachers and 1274 negro teachers; and the total revenue for school purposes was $3,805,997, of which sum $2,437,942.56 came from the state treasury.
What was formerly the State Agricultural and Mechanical College at Lexington became the State University by legislative enactment (1908); there is no tuition fee except in the School of Law. The State University has a Department of Education. The state maintains for the whites two State Normal Schools, which were established in 1906—one, for the eastern district, at Richmond, and the other, for the western district, at Bowling Green. Under the law establishing State Normal Schools, each county is entitled to one or more appointments of scholarships, one annually for every 500 white school children listed in the last school census. A Kentucky Normal and Industrial School (1886) for negroes is maintained at Frankfort. Among the private and denominational colleges in Kentucky are Central University (Presbyterian), at Danville; Transylvania University, at Lexington; Georgetown College (Baptist) at Georgetown; Kentucky Wesleyan College (M.E. South), at Winchester; and Berea College (non-sectarian) at Berea.
Finance.—Kentucky, in common with other states in this part of the country, suffered from over-speculation in land and railways during 1830-1850. The funded debt of the state amounted to four and one-half millions of dollars in 1850, when the hew constitution limited the power of the legislature to contract further obligations or to decrease or misapply the sinking funds. From 1850 to 1880 there was a gradual reduction except during the years of the war. The system of classifying the revenue into separate funds has frequently produced annual deficits, which are, as a rule only nominal, since the total receipts exceed the total expenditures. In 1902 the net bonded debt, exclusive of about two millions of dollars held for educational purposes, was $1,171,394, but this debt was paid in full in the years immediately following. The sinking fund commission is composed of the governor, attorney-general, secretary of state, auditor and treasurer. The first banking currency in Kentucky was issued in 1802 by a co-operative insurance company established by Mississippi Valley traders. The Bank of Kentucky, established at Frankfort in 1806, had a monopoly for several years. In 1818-1819 the legislature chartered 46 banks, nearly all of which went into liquidation during the panic of 1819. The Bank of the Commonwealth was chartered in 1820 as a state institution and the charter of the Bank of Kentucky was revoked in 1822. A court decision denying the legal tender quality of the notes issued by the Bank of the Commonwealth gave rise to a bitter controversy which had considerable influence upon the political history of the state. This bank failed in 1829. In 1834 the legislature chartered the Bank of Kentucky, the Bank of Louisville and the Northern Bank of Kentucky. These institutions survived the panic of 1837 and soon came to be recognized as among the most prosperous and the most conservative banks west of the Alleghanies. The state banking laws are stringent and most of the business is still controlled by banks operating under state charters.
History.—The settlement and the development of that part of the United States west of the Alleghany Mountains has probably been the most notable feature of American history since the close of the Seven Years’ War (1763). Kentucky was the first settlement in this movement, the first state west of the Alleghany Mountains admitted into the Union. In 1763 the Kentucky country was claimed by the Cherokees as a part of their hunting grounds, by the Six Nations (Iroquois) as a part of their western conquests, and by Virginia as a part of the territory granted to her by her charter of 1609, although it was actually inhabited only by a few Chickasaws near the Mississippi river and by a small tribe of Shawnees in the north, opposite what is now Portsmouth, Ohio. The early settlers were often attacked by Indian raiders from what is now Tennessee or from the country north of the Ohio, but the work of colonization would have been far more difficult if those Indians had lived in the Kentucky region itself. Dr Thomas Walker (1715-1794), as an agent and surveyor of the Loyal Land Company, made an exploration in 1750 into the present state from the Cumberland Gap, in search of a suitable place for settlement but did not get beyond the mountain region. In the next year Christopher Gist, while on a similar mission for the Ohio Company, explored the country westward from the mouth of the Scioto river. In 1752 John Finley, an Indian trader, descended the Ohio river in a canoe to the site of Louisville. It was Finley’s descriptions that attracted Daniel Boone, and soon after Boone’s first visit, in 1767, travellers through the Kentucky region became numerous. The first permanent English settlement was established at Harrodsburg in 1774 by James Harrod, and in October of the same year the Ohio Indians, having been defeated by Virginia troops in the battle of Point Pleasant (in what is now West Virginia), signed a treaty by which they surrendered their claims south of the Ohio river. In March 1775 Richard Henderson and some North Carolina land speculators met about 1200 Cherokee Indians in council on the Watauga river and concluded a treaty with them for the purchase of all the territory south of the Ohio river and between the Kentucky and Cumberland rivers. The purchase was named Transylvania, and within less than a month after the treaty was signed, Boone, under its auspices, founded a settlement at Boonesborough which became the headquarters of the colony. The title was declared void by the Virginia government in 1778, but Henderson and his associates received 200,000 acres in compensation, and all sales made to actual settlers were confirmed. During the War of Independence the colonists were almost entirely neglected by Virginia and were compelled to defend themselves against the Indians who were often under British leadership. Boonesborough was attacked in April and in July 1777 and in August 1778. Bryant’s (or Bryan’s) Station, near Lexington, was besieged in August 1782 by about 600 Indians under the notorious Simon Girty, who after raising the siege drew the defenders, numbering fewer than 200, into an ambush and in the battle of Blue Licks which ensued the Kentuckians lost about 67 killed and 7 prisoners. Kentucky county, practically coterminous with the present state of Kentucky and embracing all the territory claimed by Virginia south of the Ohio river and west of Big Sandy Creek and the ridge of the Cumberland Mountains, was one of three counties which was formed out of Fincastle county in 1776. Four years later, this in turn was divided into three counties, Jefferson, Lincoln and Fayette, but the name Kentucky was revived in 1782 and was given to the judicial district which was then organized for these three counties. The War of Independence was followed by an extensive immigration from Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina[6] of a population of which fully 95%, excluding negro slaves, were of pure English, Scotch or Scotch-Irish descent. The manners, customs and institutions of Virginia were transplanted beyond the mountains. There was the same political rivalry between the slave-holding farmers of the Blue Grass Region and the “poor whites” of the mountain districts that there was in Virginia between the tide-water planters and the mountaineers. Between these extremes were the small farmers of the “Barrens”[7] in Kentucky and of the Piedmont Region in Virginia. The aristocratic influences in both states have always been on the Southern and Democratic side, but while they were strong enough in Virginia to lead the state into secession they were unable to do so in Kentucky.
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.[8] 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[9] 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.