Kentucky had an abolitionist movement, remember Cassius Marcellus Clay? No, not the boxer, the abolitionist he was named after.
In the election of 1849 for the Kentucky constitutional convention, "Although the Emancipation party ran candidates in 29 counties and polled 10,000 votes, it did not elect a delegate to the convention." http://books.google.com/books?id=LBAbUejXimoC&pg=PA58
Repeat: Not one single delegate. The convention adopted an addition to Kentucky's bill of rights that "The right of property is before and higher than any constitutional sanction; and the right of the owner of a slave to his property is the same and as inviolate as the right of the owner of any property whatsoever." No slave could be freed in the future without leaving the state, and free blacks were forbidden to enter Kentucky.
In 1851, in the first gubernatorial race under the new consitutution, Cassius Clay, running for governor, got only 3,621 votes. (The Democratic candidate, Lazarus W. Powell won with 54,613 votes, narrowly edging out the Whig Archibald Dixon, who got 53,763.)
In 1860 Abraham Lincoln got just 1,364 votes in the state of his birth.
This should give you an idea of just how feeble the antislavery movement was in Kentucky, politically speaking, in the decade or so before the Civil War. About the most one can say Cassius Clay accomplished within his state in electoral terms during those years was to take enough votes away from the Whigs to elect Powell in 1851.
I will acknowledge that even some Kentuckians (especially Whigs) who did not vote for Emancipationist or Republican candidates may have been somewhat uncomfortable with slavery and may have vaguely hoped that in the future some plan for gradual emancipation could be adopted. But such vague hopes are a long way from any concrete plan for emancipation, and without the ACW no such plan had any chance of getting enacted in Kentucky for a long time to come. (Even with the ACW, of course, Kentucky rejected Lincoln's proposals for compensated emancipation.)
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