Ever since the Civil War, Kentucky had been shaped politically by divisions created by that war between secessionist, Democratic counties and Unionist, Republican ones,[1] although the state as a whole leaned Democratic throughout this era and the GOP would never carry the state during the Third Party System at either presidential[2] or gubernatorial level.[3] Following Samuel J. Tilden’s 24-point victory in the state in 1876, the tobacco-growing Jackson Purchase and Western Coal Field were affected by the Greenback movement. This aimed to restore the fiat money system used to pay for the Civil War, in order to pay off farmer’s debts.[3] It also was aimed at regulating the railroads which the western landowners – many former slaveholders – saw as siphoning the profit from their cash crop economy.[4]
The Greenback movement managed to carry 8.3 percent of the vote in the 1879 gubernatorial election,[3] but a rebound in tobacco prices and the adoption of some key elements of the Greenback platform by Democrats ensured that this decline was arrested and Greenback nominee James B. Weaver won only 4.39 percent of Kentucky’s ballots. Weaver did best in the regions where the Greenback insurgency was always strongest, but received no votes at all in fourteen of Kentucky’s 117 counties (most of those lying in the Eastern Coalfield). Democratic nominee Winfield Scott Hancock thus comfortably carried the state, although his margin was only two-thirds that of Tilden. As of the 2020 presidential election[update], this is the last occasion when Rockcastle County voted for a Democratic presidential candidate.[5]
1 2 3 4 In this county where Weaver ran second ahead of Garfield, margin given is Cleveland vote minus Weaver vote and percentage margin Cleveland percentage minus Weaver percentage.
1 2 3 Brown, Thomas J.; ‘The Roots of Bluegrass Insurgency: An Analysis of the Populist Movement in Kentucky’; The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Vol. 78, No. 3 (Summer 1980), pp. 219-242
↑ Humphreys, George G.; ‘Western Kentucky in the Twentieth Century: From the End of Isolation to the Collapse of the “Gibraltar of Democracy”’; The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Spring/Summer 2015, Vol. 113, No. 2/3, Building a History of Twentieth-Century Kentucky, pp. 357-384
↑ Menendez, Albert J.; The Geography of Presidential Elections in the United States, 1868-2004; pp. 208-213 ISBN0786422173
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