Lincoln and the Bluegrass

THE BLUEGRASS REGION OF KENTUCKY was the only part of the slaveholding South that Abraham Lincoln knew intimately. Even before the young Illinois lawyer had married a daughter of one of Lexington’s leading statesmen, he had taken Robert Todd’s close friend, Henry Clay, as his political idol. Mary Todd, who had grown to young womanhood in Lexington, widened Lincoln’s circle of acquaintances in the ...