Attachment E_Narrative Outline.pdf

FROM REVOLUTION TO STATEHOOD: Kentucky’s Founding in Myth and Reality

EXHIBIT NARRATIVE OUTLINE: WORKING DRAFT 052225

Introduction

1774 – 1792: Kentucky’s nearly two-decade journey from a frontier “wilderness” to the fifteenth state was played out against the combustible backdrop of revolution, treaties, international power struggles, religious freedom, and the displacement of indigenous people. The establishment of white settlements in Kentucky created an approach, and possibly an expectation, for how the new “United States” would wrest control of lands west of the original 13 Colonies from native people and international competitors.

The turbulence and violence of the period and region became grist for romanticized imagery and storytelling—memorializing and elevating many of the prominent early settlers to near mythic status.

How did idealizing Kentucky’s founding contribute to its national image, development, and self-identity—while obscuring the reality of those marginalized in the process? This exhibit will explore these questions through the lens of objects, documents, and art from the Kentucky Historical Society’s collection. We invite visitors to explore how memory, storytelling, and collecting influence our understanding of history by investigating events and people during the Revolutionary period in Kentucky.

Interpretive Goals

• Re-examine long-standing narratives and concepts involving Kentucky’s settlement and founding

—commit to perspectives from native people, British, French, etc.

• Interpret commemorative crafts and narrative art from the KHS collection through the lens of period perspectives and motivation—what did the creators get wrong or right.

• Interpret early artifacts from the KHS collection in the context of the collectors’/donors’ motivation for commemorating or venerating founding events and characters. In some instances, give emphasis to provenance and the impulse to preserve objects rather than the authenticity for the objects themselves.

• Expand the use of early documents and maps as interpretive objects.

Institutional Goals

• Provide “temporary” (impermanent) exhibit installation and programming closely aligned with

America250 commemorations and events.

• Create opportunities for the display of infrequently seen pieces from the KHS collection

• Use this exhibit to establish alternating two-exhibit layout in Keeneland Gallery

• Use the development of these interpretive storylines as the basis for new interpretation in A

Kentucky Journey exhibit space

Interpretive Organization

Revolution to Statehood’s core storyline is organized around four primary topics; The First Kentuckians;

Wars, Treaties, and Boundaries; A World War in the West; and Statehood. While visitors may encounter some of this content in loosely chronological order, the exhibit is not timeline driven. The point of this structural choice is to underscore that the confusing swirl of events and issues during Kentucky’s founding period frequently overlapped or intersected.

The overarching conceptual motif throughout the experience is how historical memory is shaped through art, documents, and artifacts by using examples from KHS’s collections. While the interpretation and placement of these objects can directly relate to the core historical topics, the approach is malleable, allowing other selected artifacts/objects to be displayed as “sidebars” in the exhibition space.

Artifacts will date from both the founding period and from later periods speaking to how past events were remembered or commemorated over time.

TOPIC 1: The First Kentuckians

Set the pre-contact scene as prologue—introduction to geography and peoples/Indigenous groups on the eve of European contact in North America/Kentucky

• Cherokee

• Shawnee

• Chickasaw

• Osage

• What other tribes are present in the immediate pre-contact period?

The conclusion of this first section could be the first European explorers setting eyes on the region (de

Soto, LaSalle, Gabriel Arthur, Arnout Viele).

TOPIC 2: The Land Beyond the Forest: Wars, Treaties, and Boundaries1

As French, British, and Spanish nationals increasing made their presence felt in the region, tensions and competition inevitably led to conflict. Nearly each conflict ended with a treaty that eroded native peoples’ control and land claims in the western frontier.

• Treaty of Paris and the Proclamation of 1763 (end of French and Indian War)

• Treaty of Hard Labor 1768 (Does Pontiacs’ war add to understanding?)

• Treaty of Fort Stanwix 1768 (reset the Proclamation Line of 1763 boundary to south of the Ohio

River. Iroquois made the treaty with British…but Shawnee and other did not sign it (Cherokee were not involved at all

• Lord Dunmore’s War 1774

1 There are more treaties and conflicts than are shown here, what are the ones that are most consequential for Kentucky’s development.

Transylvania?

While tensions between colonists and the crown accelerated toward armed rebellion in the East, land speculators, settlers and native people jockeyed for land claims in the West.

A month before the “shot heard round the world” at Lexington and Concord, the Treaty of Sycamore

Shoals (March 1775) saw investor Richard Henderson lead a gambit to buy a large portion of western land, including a large portion of Kentucky, from the Cherokee. He wanted to name the land Transylvania

(roughly translated…land beyond the forest). Virginia and North Carolina’s Governors immediately disputed the legality of the 20-million-acre land deal and by 1778, the Treaty was upended by the courts.

Religious Persecution and the Traveling Church

Religious freedom spurred a particular motivation for some white settlers to Kentucky. The growth of the

Baptist church in Virginia challenged the Anglican establishment, and their unwillingness to seek official licenses to preach brought down the wrath of Virginia authorities, leading to an intense season of persecution early in the 1770s.

In the winter of 1781, Rev. Lewis Craig led some 200 congregants and 400 other settlers from Virginia into Kentucky —"Leaving behind the discrimination against them by the established church in colonial

Virginia, they sought fertile soil"[4] for both physical and spiritual fruitbearing”. The group (including numerous enslaved people) established some of Kentucky’s first churches, white and black.

Land Patents and Surveys

In the 1700s, land was wealth in Kentucky, but obtaining legal title was a complicated process. French and Indian War veterans earned land for their service. Some settlers bought claims from a land company.

Others just moved in.

Haphazard surveying by inexperienced or unethical surveyors resulted in overlapping claims. The legal battles2 that followed attracted a new kind of frontiersman-the lawyer. Even with lawyers, many of the settlers who came to Kentucky seeking land and opportunity, lost their disputes and the land they had claimed. By 1792, only one-third of the householders in Kentucky owned land—the commonwealth quickly became a society of rich and poor, landlords and tenants.

2 Good location for exhibiting both land patents and the Washington survey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Travelling_Church#cite_note-Clark,_Traveling_Church,_897-4

TOPIC 3: A World War in the West3 4

As more settlers poured into Kentucky, the violence escalated. Factions of Cherokee and Shawnee joined the British seeing this alliance as their best chance to stem the tide of colonists moving over the

Appalachians into their territories.

• A system of forts and stations

• Raids and counter raids

• George Rogers Clark’s Campaign

The Declaration of Independence and 27th Grievance

Perhaps the most Kentucky-specific situation addressed in the Declaration of Independence was the colonist’s 27th grievance with King George III.

"He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions."

The Battle of Blue Licks and the end of the Revolution…but not the end of violence

Lasting perhaps 15 minutes, the largest battle of the Revolutionary War fought in Kentucky was a resounding British victory. A superior force of Loyalists and Native warriors routed 182 Kentucky militiamen. Over half of the Kentuckians were casualties.

The brief engagement proved to be the last in America’s struggle for independence from Britain, which ended eleven months later with the Treaty of Paris. It was, however, another in a series of battles fought by a young United States in the quest to gain control of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois from the Native

Americans.

About 7% of Kentucky settlers had been killed in battles against Native Americans, contrasted with 1% of the population killed in the Thirteen Colonies. Lingering resentments led to continued fighting in the west after the war officially ended.

Expansion of Slavery

The American Revolution had a profound effect on the institution of slavery. It gave enslaved African

Americans unprecedented opportunities to escape from slavery by serving in the British or Continental armies. Others took advantage of the chaos to run away and forge new lives elsewhere. When the

American Revolution began, approximately 450,000 people were enslaved in the thirteen colonies. Some

3 See Stephanie Lang about Darren Reid’s work on “Violence and Psychological Warfare on the Kentucky Frontier:

1715-1783” 4 This is a good section to compare and contrast the war in the 13 Colonies vs. the Kentucky frontier.

estimates claim that as many as 80,000 to 100,000 slaves throughout the thirteen states escaped to the

British lines.

Dunmore’s proclamation

On November 7, 1775, Dunmore issued a proclamation that established martial law and offered freedom to slaves who would leave patriotic owners and join the British army: "I do hereby farther declare all indented servants, Negroes, or others (appertaining to rebels) free, that are able and willing to bear arms, they joining his Majesty’s troops, as soon as may be, for the more speedily reducing this colony to a proper sense of their duty, to his Majesty’s crown and dignity."

Within a month 300 black men had signed up with Dunmore’s "Royal Ethiopian Regiment." While the regiment grew to only 800 men, his proclamation inspired thousands of enslaved people to seek freedom behind British lines throughout the Revolutionary War.

Although Dunmore’s Proclamation applied only to Virginia, it was printed in newspapers throughout the thirteen colonies. This copy of the proclamation was published in the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly

Advertiser on December 6, 1775.

TOPIC 4: Statehood!

Statehood Conventions5

By the early 1780s, survival of the Kentucky settlements, so uncertain only a few years earlier, was assured. The end of the American Revolution curtailed British support for Indian raids, and thousands of settlers sought a better life in the "Eden of the West." They swarmed through Cumberland Gap and down the Ohio River, cleared the land for crops, and established towns. The division of sprawling

Kentucky County into three counties in 1780 indicated its rapid growth, and that growth accelerated during the following decade.

Would it leave Virginia and become a new state, or leave the United States and form a separate nation?

The distance to Richmond posed problems for Kentuckians with legal business to conduct at the state capital. Troubles with the Indians and navigation of the Mississippi hastened the need for change.

With population increase came sentiment for separation from Virginia. Such demands had been voiced earlier, but a definite separation movement began in 1784 when a convention—the first of ten such— met in Danville.

Winners and Losers

Settlement and land speculation fueled the idea that Kentucky was open territory for prosperity. But the opportunity for prosperity was heavily weighted toward white men of means. Women, the poor, and the enslaved were politically and financially excluded. Who was left out of power as Kentuckians moved toward separation from Virginia and independent statehood.6

5 Lowell H. Harrison’s “Kentucky’s Road to Statehood” is a good starter resource on this process 6 See Honor Sach’s Home Rule “On America’s western frontier, myths of prosperity concealed the brutal conditions endured by women, slaves, orphans, and the poor. As poverty and unrest took root in eighteenth-century Kentucky, James Wilkinson and the Spanish conspiracy

Wilkinson was a brevet brigadier general in the Revolutionary War and moved to Kentucky with his family in 1784. Spain closed the Mississippi River to American trade in 1787, which hurt Kentucky settlers' ability to get goods to market and get supplies. Wilkinson was angry and sought to open the river.

Wilkinson sent a cargo of Kentucky products down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where the Spanish governor attempted to confiscate the goods. Wilkinson convinced him to allow Kentucky a monopoly on the river in exchange for promoting Spanish interests in the west.

Wilkinson's plot failed.

Statehood Achieved

After all the State Conventions and international intrigue, it wasn’t until April 1792 that a constitution was finally drafted under which the Commonwealth of Kentucky could enter the Union. While most

Kentuckians favored separation, they differed over how and when and on what terms it should occur.

Three factions struggled to control the movement, but their goals and methods shifted with changing circumstances.

On June 1, 1792, Kentucky became the fifteenth state in the new nation and the first west of the

Alleghenies.

Was Kentucky’s journey to Statehood a precedent or template for westward expansion? How was

Kentucky separation from Virginia different than the process established in the Northwest Ordinance expansion and statehood in other territories? Was this the beginning of Manifest Destiny?

Interpretive Theme: Mythmaking in art and memory7

For white settlers to occupy the Kentucky country, it meant violent interactions with Native Americans.

This violence became central to the myth of the frontier and often the justification or pretext for removing “un-civilized” native people. The dominant culture creates the narrative and casts the participants into heroes/villains, protagonists/antagonists. Contemporaneous artists and creators re-enforced this narrative through skewed portrayals of heroic figures, racial stereotypes, etc.

Kentucky’s status as a Virginia county, rather than one of the 13 original colonies may have created the desire for Kentuckians to establish their own identity in the context of the American Revolution.

Connecting Kentucky to America’s founders through art and object helped cement this legacy.

western lawmakers championed ideas about whiteness, manhood, and patriarchal authority to help stabilize a politically fractious frontier…examine how conditions in Kentucky facilitated the expansion of rights for white men in ways that would become a model for citizenship in the country as a whole”.

7 Because many of the KHS collections lean into the historical memory/mythmaking motif…the artifacts may support interpretive points anywhere within the flow of the layout.