A forty-thousand-square-mile region of grassland and forest bounded by the Appalachian Mountains and the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, Kentucky derives its name from Iroquois and Shawnee words for "grassland" and "dark and bloody ground." While the area had few permanent Native American settlements during the era of European colonization, it was a favorite Shawnee and Cherokee hunting preserve and the junction of several major Indian paths.
In 1750 Virginia explorers led by Thomas Walker discovered the Cumberland Gap, which allowed regular overland travel from Virginia to central Kentucky. Surveyors and hunters from Pennsylvania and Virginia, including Daniel Boone (c. 17341820), followed Walker's party in the 1760s and 1770s, despite a royal proclamation of 1763 forbidding white settlement west of the Appalachians. These adventurers' reports encouraged Virginia speculators to claim and sell Kentucky lands and white farmers to establish permanent settlements there, beginning with Harrodsburg in 1774.
The Ohio Valley Indians resisted the intruders, and skirmishes between warriors and settlers led to Dunmore's War (1774), whereby Virginia laid claim to the Kentucky region. During the Revolutionary War the Shawnees and other British-allied Woodland Indian warriors ambushed white travelers, plundered flatboats, and besieged frontier outposts in Kentucky. The Indian confederates renewed their guerrilla war in the 1780s and maintained it until 1794 in an effort to bar white farmers from the Ohio Valley. White Kentuckians built blockhouses, organized punitive raids, and in 1779 captured the British post of Vincennes, but ultimately they could not secure their settlements without outside assistance. They finally received it in the 1790s, when the U.S. Army broke the Northwest Indians' confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers on 20 August 1794.
Migration from the eastern states to Kentucky continued in spite of the war, encouraged by a liberal Virginia land law of 1779 that opened Kentucky lands to white settlement and allowed old settlers to buy land at a discount. Kentucky's non-Indian population increased over 900 percent in the 1780s, and with the end of Indian warfare and Spain's opening of the Mississippi River to American shipping in the 1790s, immigration surged. In 1790 the total population of Kentucky was 73,677 and its slave population was 12,430. These figures grew to 220,955 and 40,343 in 1800; 406,511 and 80,561 in 1810; 564,317 and 126,732 in 1820; and 687,917 and 165,213 in 1830.
Kentucky's economy concurrently changed from a subsistence culture to a commercial one. Farmers in the Bluegrass raised wheat, tobacco, hemp, cattle, and horses for export to the Lower South and New Orleans. The villages of Lexington and Louisville had grown into booming cities by 1830. Businessmen financed ropewalks, sawmills, and gristmills and opened dozens of private banks. In fact, Kentucky chartered one-third of the approximately four hundred American banks that opened between 1815 and 1820.
Economic growth had some adverse social costs. Many planters increased their profits by employing African American slaves, particularly on the state's hemp and tobacco plantations. Hard work, harsh punishments, and unstable family life were norms for Kentucky slaves, though opportunities for escape were greater than in other southern states because of the North's proximity. The spread of the institution of slavery, the growth of a cash and credit economy, and frequent litigation stemming from inaccurate land surveys concentrated wealth in the hands of planters, merchants, and lawyers. Thousands of less successful families, like that of Thomas and Nancy Lincoln, the parents of the future president, left Kentucky after 1800 in search of better opportunities.
Educational opportunities were limited in early national-era Kentucky, and private academies remained the sole source of schooling until the 1830s. Religious institutions, however, experienced explosive growth during a series of Protestant revivals that produced tens of thousands of converts. The Cane Ridge Revival of 1801 drew over twenty thousand attendees, and membership in Baptist and Methodist churches tripled within a few years. The Presbyterians and Disciples of Christ also used revivals to increase their membership. Kentucky Evangelicals later took the lead in establishing the state's first temperance society in 1830 and transforming Transylvania University into an eminent institution of higher learning.
Kentuckians' political outlook remained localist and populist throughout the period. Kentucky settlers denounced the never-consummated Jay-Gardoqui Treaty of 1785-1786, opposed the federal Constitution of 1787, and refused to pay the Federalists' whiskey excise of 1791. Kentucky's admission to the Union as the fifteenth state in 1792 did not improve its relationship with the federal government, and in 1798 the legislature threatened to nullify the Alien and Sedition Acts as unconstitutional. In national elections Kentuckians voted for the Democratic Republican Party, then in the 1820s, when that party splintered into factions, supported the presidential candidacy of Henry Clay (1777-1852). Clay, a native Virginian and lawyer, moved to Lexington in 1797 and successively served in the Kentucky General Assembly, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. House of Representatives. He became Speaker of the House in 1811, and later served on the commission which negotiated the Treaty of Ghent and crafted the legislation that resolved the Missouri Controversy. Clay's reputation suffered, however, after he helped engineer the election of President John Quincy Adams in 1824 and became Adams's Secretary of State. Meanwhile, a state controversy over banking, debtor relief, and judicial reform from 1823 to 1825 led many Kentuckians to transfer their political allegiance to Andrew Jackson in 1828.