Here Comes the Fear—Again

"Lie still and go to sleep, or the Shawnees will catch you," Kentucky women warned their children at the start of the nineteenth century, using fears of Native American bogeymen to discipline their children (Friend, p. 256). In the antebellum period when Kentuckians' anger was "waxing warm," the Warsaw Patriot, in order to silence abolitionists' "demon spirits" (Harrold, p. 81), called for capital punishment for anyone convicted of circulating antislavery documents. Finally, in the postebellum South, with Kentucky wracked by violence, the New York Times stated "the peaceable people of Kentucky are to-day in more danger from outlaws and murderers of their own race than they were at the dawn of the century from hostile Indians" (Marshall, p. 79). Whether found in bedtime stories or on the pages of the New York Times, fear, with its unique combination of universality and divisiveness, plays a special role in Kentucky's history.

Fear of external invasion and internal subversion haunted white Kentuckians from the settlement of the region to the emergence of modern Kentucky in the twentieth century. But, rather than let fear cripple them, Kentuckians embraced it to define themselves against their real and imagined enemies. Taken in sequence, Craig Thompson Friend's Kentucke's Frontiers, Stanley Harrold's Border War: Fighting over Slavery before the Civil War, and Anne Marshall's Creating Confederate Kentucky, provide a history of Kentucky from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth; yet at each stage of development, fear drives Kentucky's history. White Kentuckians seemed to be constantly assailed by both real and perceived threats to their very existence, and they made this persistent state of conflict the foundation of their identity. White Kentuckians turned that fear of invasion and subversion into a call for vigilant defense; and in defining their internal and external enemies, however inchoate, they in turn defined what it meant to be a Kentuckian.

In Kentucke's Frontiers, Craig Thompson Friend argues that the transition from a western Kentucky in the 1770s to a southern Kentucky in the 1800s was not a natural development but was instead a contested process that ended with the dominance of wealthy white male Kentuckians. Friend frames this transition, and Kentucky's early history more broadly, through the rise and fall of several frontiers. He uses the term frontier to unite Kentucky's history, from the "Indians' Frontiers" of the early eighteenth century to the "Old South frontier" that developed at the start of the nineteenth century. Even more than cultural conflict, Friend makes the argument that violence, fear, and terror defined these various frontiers. Violence between native people, between white hunters and native hunters, between white settlers and Native Americans and then between free whites and enslaved African Americans were all part of the settlement of Kentucky. Indeed, decades of violent conflict led white Kentuckians' to construct their identity in opposition to an "Other." Native Americans were colonial Kentuckians' negative reference point, but Friend argues that, by 1800, "African Americans became the dark, uncivilized Others" (Friend, p. xxi).

According to Friend, both violence and fluidity characterized "Indians' frontiers" and the early colonial frontiers. A series of imperial wars both led to the depopulation of the trans-Appalachian West and its eventual repopulation by the Shawnee, Miami, and Mingo. Much of this material will be familiar to specialists on the early American West, but Friend offers a model that connects this early history of Kentucke with later periods in colonial American history. While this frontier ends with the conclusion of the Seven Years' War in 1763, it is only the beginning of a colonial...