Kentucky
From Turtledove
Kentucky is a state located in the East Central United States, normally included in the group of Southern states, but sometimes partially included, geographically and culturally, in the Midwest. Kentucky is one of four U.S. states established as a commonwealth. Originally a part of Virginia, in 1792 it became the 15th state to join the Union.
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[edit] Kentucky in Southern Victory
In the War of Secession, Kentucky was overrun by a Confederate army commanded by Braxton Bragg and was forcibly joined to the CS. It was invaded in 1881 during the Second Mexican War, but the US commander, Orlando Wilcox, was woefully unprepared and his invasion was easily beaten back by his Confederate counterpart, Thomas Jackson.
In the Great War, Kentucky was again invaded by two US armies, one commanded by George Custer and the other by John Pershing. Between the two, the state was completely overrun, and after the war it was returned to the United States. The US Army and Kentucky State Police were forced to endure a difficult occupation both during and after the war as both Confederate diehards and socialists resisted their authority.
When the Freedom Party took power in the CS in 1934, President Jake Featherston supported the violent activities of Confederate diehards in the state for several years, then demanded a plebiscite in Kentucky and two other former CS states, Houston and Sequoyah, from US President Al Smith. Smith met with Featherston, formalized the plebiscite in the Richmond Agreement.
Kentucky voted to return to the CS under the plebiscite in 1940. The Richmond Agreement stipulated that it would remain demilitarized until 1965, but Featherston violated this term of the agreement and gathered a massive army, which used Kentucky as a springboard for Operation Blackbeard.
In 1943, US forces under General Irving Morrell forced the Confederates back into Kentucky and quickly pushed their way through the state, readmitting it to the Union later that year (albeit under martial law indefinitely). An intractable Confederate resistance movement quickly came into existence.
[edit] Kentucky in The Guns of the South
Kentucky was a slave-holding state. As such, the newly-independent Confederate States sought to annex the state. Kentucky finally joined the C.S. after a plebiscite in the years following the Second American Revolution.
[edit] Kentucky in The Disunited States of America
See Boone.
[edit] Trivia
Kentucky was the birthplace of both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis.
