Two Presidents, One Commonwealth, Lincoln and Davis

Within a year and a half of each other, in different parts of Kentucky, two men were born who would become the opposing presidents of the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln came into the world on February twelfth, eighteen oh nine, in a log cabin on Sinking Spring Farm in Hardin County. Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederacy, was born on June third, eighteen oh eight, in Christian County in the southwestern part of the state, just over a hundred miles to the west.

The coincidence has fascinated historians ever since, and it captures something essential about Kentucky's peculiar position in American history. The state was neither solidly North nor solidly South. It shared the Ohio River border with Ohio and Indiana, making it a geographic threshold of freedom for enslaved people fleeing north.

But it was also a slave state, economically linked to the cotton South, and its landowning class had deep cultural and kinship ties to Virginia and the Carolinas. When secession came in eighteen sixty-one, Kentucky declared neutrality, a position that satisfied almost nobody and lasted about four months. Confederate forces entered the state in September of eighteen sixty-one; Union forces followed within days.

The state officially stayed in the Union, but tens of thousands of Kentuckians fought for the Confederacy. Families were genuinely divided. Brothers fought brothers; fathers and sons chose different flags.

Lincoln's family had left Kentucky for Indiana when he was seven, driven partly by land-title disputes of the kind that plagued most Kentucky settlers. Davis left as a small child and grew up in Mississippi. Both men carried Kentucky in their blood without ever quite being Kentuckians, which is perhaps why the state, for a century and a half, has claimed them both.