The Flickr Harrodsburg Image Generatr

This is the still-standing mansion of Beriah Magoffin, who was Kentucky's governor at the outset of the U.S. Civil War.

Although the Danville-based attorney would later advocate for the passage of the 13th Amendment to free slaves, Magoffin also believed that the South legally could freely pack up and form a Confederacy, despite its ban in Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution. While in office, his was a position that the secessionist South appreciated. However, the vast majority of lawmakers in his home state of Kentucky did not. Governor Magoffin tried in vain to broker a compromise with the South while keeping the United States at bay in the process.

His peace attempts were shattered when Confederate troops conducted a surprise attack on Kentucky, and then another and another, taking swaths of its land piece by piece. It turned out that the mutual understanding with the South on the governor's peace efforts was not so mutual or really an understanding. Magoffin stepped down as governor.

This is a vestige from the days before there were plumbing and public sewage systems here.

This is an old 19th-century window at the remains of a Shaker Village building in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky.

The church's official name was United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing. That was quite a name, telling the world that Christ had come into the world again (as a woman this time around). Nonetheless, that was not only quite a mouthful for impatient Americans but that long string of nouns was also hard to remember unless you were a member and had to. So, Americans predictably gave it a much shorter nickname, Shakers.

Now only the buildings and visitors remain of this utopian community that tried to equalize the genders.

I bump into barns like this fairly frequently in rural Kentucky. I did today.

Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens lays out the great cause, the rationale, the cornerstone, for which the Confederacy was founded.

"Our new government [the Confederate States of America] is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas [as Thomas Jefferson's phrase 'all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence]; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science."

The Confederate constitution guaranteed slavery forever. It would have been harder to remove slavery under that Constitution than removing the Second Amendment in our Constitution.

And by the way, the South did rise again quite some time ago. It continues to rise.