The Kentucky Gentry.
The Danville Political Club.
Though the typical inhabitant of Kentucky was still the small frontier farmer, the class of well-to-do gentry had already attained good proportions. Elsewhere throughout the West, in Tennessee, and even here and there in Ohio and the Territories of Indiana and Mississippi, there were to be found occasional houses that were well built and well finished, and surrounded by pleasant grounds, fairly well kept; houses to which the owners had brought their stores of silver and linen and heavy, old-fashioned furniture from their homes in the Eastern States. Blount, for instance, had a handsome house in Knoxville, well fitted, as beseemed that of a man one of whose brothers still lived at Blount Hall, in the coast region of North Carolina, the ancestral seat of his forefathers for generations. [Footnote: Clay MSS., Blount to Hart, Knoxville, Feb. 9, 1794.] But by far the greatest number of these fine houses, and the largest class of gentry to dwell in them, were in Kentucky. Not only were Lexington and Louisville important towns, but Danville, the first capital of Kentucky, also possessed importance, and, indeed, had been the first of the Western towns to develop an active and distinctive social and political life. It was in Danville that, in the years immediately preceding Kentucky's admission as a State, the Political Club met. The membership of this club included many of the leaders Of Kentucky's intellectual life, and the record of its debates shows the keenness with which they watched the course of social and political development not only in Kentucky but in the United States. They were men of good intelligence and trained minds, and their meetings and debates undoubtedly had a stimulating effect upon Kentucky life, though they were tainted, as were a very large number of the leading men of the same stamp elsewhere throughout the country, with the doctrinaire political notions common among those who followed the French political theorists of the day. [Footnote: "The Political Club," by Thomas Speed, Filson Club Publications.]
The Large Landowners.
Open-air Life.
Of the gentry many were lawyers, and the law led naturally to political life; but even among the gentry the typical man was still emphatically the big landowner. The leaders of Kentucky were men who owned large estates, on which they lived in their great roomy houses. Even when they practised law they also supervised their estates; and if they were not lawyers, in addition to tilling the land they were always ready to try their hand at some kind of manufacture. They were willing to turn their attention to any new business in which there was a chance to make money, whether it was to put up a mill, to build a forge, to undertake a contract for the delivery of wheat to some big flour merchant, or to build a flotilla of flatboats, and take the produce of a given neighborhood down to New Orleans for shipment to the West Indies. [Footnote: Clay MSS., Seitz & Lowan to Garret Darling, Lexington, January 23, 1797; agreement of George Nicholas, October 10, 1796, etc. This was an agreement on the part of Nicholas to furnish Seitz & Lowan with all the flour manufactured at his mill during the season of 1797 for exportation, the flour to be delivered by him in Kentucky. He was to receive $5.50 a barrel up to the receipt of $1500; after that it was to depend upon the price of wheat. Six bushels of wheat were reckoned to a barrel of flour, and the price of a bushel was put at four shillings; in reality it ranged from three to six.] They were also always engaged in efforts to improve the breed of their horses and cattle, and to introduce new kinds of agriculture, notably the culture of the vine. [Footnote: Do., "Minutes of meeting of the Directors of the Vineyard Society," June 27, 1800.] They speedily settled themselves definitely in the new country, and began to make ready for their children to inherit their homes after them; though they retained enough of the restless spirit which had made them cross the Alleghanies to be always on the lookout for any fresh region of exceptional advantages, such as many of them considered the lands along the lower Mississippi. They led a life which appealed to them strongly, for it was passed much in the open air, in a beautiful region and lovely climate, with horses and hounds, and the management of their estates and their interest in politics to occupy their time; while their neighbors were men of cultivation, at least by their own standards, so that they had the society for which they most cared. [Footnote: Do., James Brown to Thomas Hart, Lexington, April 3, 1804.] In spite of their willingness to embark in commercial ventures and to build mills, rope-walks, and similar manufactures,—for which they had the greatest difficulty in procuring skilled laborers, whether foreign or native, from the Northeastern States [Footnote: Do., J. Brown to Thomas Hart, Philadelphia, February 11, 1797. This letter was brought out to Hart by a workman, David Dodge, whom Brown had at last succeeded in engaging. Dodge had been working in New York at a rope-walk, where he received $500 a year without board. From Hart he bargained to receive $350 with board. It proved impossible to engage other journeymen workers, Brown expressing his belief that any whom he chose would desert a week after they got to Kentucky, and Dodge saying that he would rather take raw hands and train them to the business than take out such hands as offered to go.]—and in spite of their liking for the law, they retained the deep-settled belief that the cultivation of the earth was the best of all possible pursuits for men of every station, high or low. [Footnote Do., William Nelson to Col. George Nicholas, Caroline, Va., December 29, 1794.]
Virginia and Kentucky.
In many ways the life of the Kentuckians was most like that of the Virginia gentry, though it had peculiar features of its own. Judged by Puritan standards, it seemed free enough; and it is rather curious to find Virginia fathers anxious to send their sons out to Kentucky so that they could get away from what they termed "the constant round of dissipation, the scenes of idleness, which boys are perpetually engaged in" in Virginia. One Virginia gentleman of note, in writing to a prominent Kentuckian to whom he wished to send his son, dwelt upon his desire to get him away from a place where boys of his age spent most of the time galloping wherever they wished, mounted on blooded horses. Kentucky hardly seemed a place to which a parent would send a son if he wished him to avoid the temptations of horse flesh; but this particular Virginian at least tried to provide against this, as he informed his correspondent that he should send his son out to Kentucky mounted on an "indifferent Nag," which was to be used only as a means of locomotion for the journey, and was then immediately to be sold. [Footnote: Do., William Nelson to Nicholas, November 9, 1792.]
Education.
The gentry strove hard to secure a good education for their children, and in Kentucky, as in Tennessee, made every effort to bring about the building of academies where their boys and girls could be well taught. If this was not possible, they strove to find some teacher capable of taking a class to which he could teach Latin and mathematics; a teacher who should also "prepare his pupils for becoming useful members of society and patriotic citizens." [Footnote: Shelby MSS., letter of Toulmin, January 7, 1794; Blount MSS., January 6, 1792, etc.] Where possible the leading families sent their sons to some Eastern college, Princeton being naturally the favorite institution of learning with people who dwelt in communities where the Presbyterians took the lead in social standing and cultivation. [Footnote: Clay MSS., passim; letter to Thomas Hart, October 19, 1794; October 13, 1797, etc. In the last letter, by the way, written by one John Umstead, occurs the following sentence: "I have lately heard a piece of news, if true, must be a valuable acquisition to the Western World, viz. a boat of a considerable burden making four miles and a half an hour against the strongest current in the Mississippi river, and worked by horses.">[
Currency.
Prices of Goods.
All through the West there was much difficulty in getting money. In Tennessee particularly money was so scarce that the only way to get cash in hand was by selling provisions to the few Federal garrisons. [Footnote: Do., Blount to Hart, Knoxville, March 13, 1799.] Credits were long, and payment made largely in kind; and the price at which an article could be sold under such conditions was twice as large as that which it would command for cash down. In the accounts kept by the landowners with the merchants who sold them goods, and the artizans who worked for them, there usually appear credit accounts in which the amounts due on account of produce of various kinds are deducted from the debt, leaving a balance to be settled by cash and by orders. Owing to the fluctuating currency, and to the wide difference in charges when immediate cash payments were received as compared with charges when the payments were made on credit and in kind, it is difficult to know exactly what the prices represent. In Kentucky currency mutton and beef were fourpence a pound, in the summer of 1796, while four beef tongues cost three shillings, and a quarter of lamb three and a sixpence. In 1798, on the same account, beef was down to threepence a pound. [Footnote: Do., Account of James Morrison and Melchia Myer, October 12, 17098.] Linen cost two and fourpence, or three shillings a yard; flannel, four to six shillings; calico and chintz about the same; baize, three shillings and ninepence. A dozen knives and forks were eighteen shillings, and ten pocket handkerchiefs two pounds. Worsted shoes were eight shillings a pair, and buttons were a shilling a dozen. A pair of gloves were three and ninepence; a pair of kid slippers, thirteen and sixpence; ribbons were one and sixpence. [Footnote: Do., Account of Mrs. Marion Nicholas with Tillford, 1802. On this bill appears also a charge for Hyson tea, for straw bonnets, at eighteen shillings; for black silk gloves, and for one "Aesop's Fables," at a cost of three shillings and ninepence.] The blacksmith charged six shillings and ninepence for a new pair of shoes, and a shilling and sixpence for taking off an old pair; and he did all the iron work for the farm and the house alike, from repairing bridle bits and sharpening coulters to mounting "wafil irons" [Footnote: Do., Account of Morrison and Hickey, 1798.]—for the housewives excelled in preparing delicious waffles and hot cakes.