Rural places in Ky., slave state that didn't secede but later joined the losers, remember Civil War

Exactly 150 years ago right now, the United States of America were (the prevailing verb then) becoming less united. The Deep South states had formed the Confederate States of America, and the Civil War was coming. Observances of the war's sesquicentennial have already begun, and are especially thought-provoking during Black History Month in Kentucky, a slave state that was the birth place of both wartime presidents and remained in the Union but aligned itself with the defeated South after the war.

In the last two days in Western Kentucky, which was the state's most Confederate-sympathetic area, local observances in rural places have helped bridge a racial divide that still exists in some ways.

Yesterday, in Morganfield, an expert on Frederick Douglass, local native Michael Crutcher Sr., portrayed the early civil-rights leader meeting with Abraham Lincoln, played by Jim Sayre. Lincoln hosted Douglass at the White House in 1863, after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. Douglass is not known to have visited Morganfield, but Lincoln did in 1840, as a presidential elector in nearby Illinois for Kentuckian Henry Clay. "Crutcher remarked at the close of his discussion with Sayre's Lincoln that the friendship between the two men was at that time quite politically incorrect," reports Victoria Grabner of The Gleaner in Henderson. (Gleaner photo by Mike Lawrence) The observance was part of the bicentennial of Union County, which was named in 1811 after "the united desire of its residents to form a new county," according to Kentucky Place Names by Robert Rennick.

At the Fairview historic site that is the birthplace of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, "Two female African American preachers would not contain their joy Friday when a small group gathered for a black history lesson" from The Female Re-Enactors of Distinction, a group affiliated with the Civil War Museum in Washington, D.C., reports Jennifer P. Brown of the Kentucky New Era in Hopkinsville. FREED members dress in period costumes and use period speech to portray African Americans from the era. (Read more, subscription required)