Some fighting during the war took place in Kentucky. One of the last battles of the war, the Battle of Blue Licks, resulted in a British victory in 1782, 10 months after the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown.

The Kentucky territory had, since the 1760s, been nominally owned by Virginia. Disagreements between Kentucky settlers and the Virginia state government resulted in a call for a Kentucky constitutional convention, in 1784. Virginia granted Kentucky its "freedom" in 1788, and Congress began to consider Kentucky statehood not long after that.

The statehood process took considerable time, and a final convention opened in Danville in April 1792. Attendees at the convention drafted a state constitution and submitted it to Congress, which admitted Kentucky as the 15th state in the Union (and the first west of the Appalachian Mountains) on June 1.