USA > Kentucky > The Commercial history of the Southern States covering the post-bellum period Kentucky > Part 2
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XV
SOUTHERN STATES
HIS CHANCES FOR THE FUTURE
What of his future? If the man of the South deals diligently and prudently with the mighty resources that are laid at his door and of whose enormous value he has just been apprised, what will the next ten years in his history bring forth? It is safe to say that no one is able to appreciate exactly what changes will take place and what growth will be manifested within that time.
Young and strong and vigorous, he stands ready to meet the mighty opportunities of the future as fast as they present themselves. He has been educated through a long series of countless struggles and oft-repeated fail- ures, and with ever-increasing strength has learned to fight for his com- mercial supremacy. For his present status in the business world he has no apology to offer. He has done his best, and the odds have not always been in his favor. Weighed in the balance of his past achievements, we think well of his future. He shall, with the electrical impetus offered by this age of machinery and mechanism, push his way forward to his proper place-in the fore of all competing sections.
TWO PHASES
The historian of that period of the South, from 1850 until now, will, of necessity, discriminate between two phases of Southern life and character. One is a Southerner whose glory was attained in war and whose deeds of chivalry are justly accounted "the bravest ever known." His valor is best attested by the recital of the awful tragedy of the Civil War. The other is a Southerner whose glory was attained in times of peace, and yet it has excited the admiration of the world.
He began his work upon a wasted, though beautiful, heritage, and in the mills and factories that he has built and operated, in the railroads that he has constructed, in the beds of stone and coal and iron and phos- phate that he has unearthed, in the mighty fabric of the South itself and the evidences of its enormous growth within a single generation, one may read at its best the story of his undying greatness.
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KENTUCKY
CHAPTER I
CIVIL HISTORY
ENTUCKY was first organized as a State on the first day of K June, 1792, at which date it was admitted into the Union as the fifteenth State. Of none of those which preceded or have followed it is there so much of romance as attached to its settlement. The older of the commonwealths had the advantage of having been founded under the protection of strong governments beyond the seas, with open front to the ocean, and with the Blue Ridge and Alleghanies as barriers against the strong and hostile Indian tribes of the West. With few excep- tions the Indians among or near them were either docile and friendly or too weak to offer serious resistance to the occupation of their territory. The experience of the Virginians with the Powhattan Indians, and the Pequod war in Massachusetts, had little more consequence than to furnish themes for romance on a small scale and illustrations for common-school histories. The only Indians east of the mountains powerful enough for injury were the Iroquois, or Six Nations, of New York, and in the Colonial period they were always friendly or under control of the whites. In the war of the Revolution, it is true, they took sides with the British, but with the excep- tion of the massacre of Wyoming, an incident of war rather than settlement, there were few instances in which the whites suffered from the savage instinct. As regards Kentucky, on the other hand, all the circumstances were different. Its settlement was not the result of an organized coloniza- tion by royal or other patent, but of individual and voluntary migration, the early settlers being chiefly from remote parts of the older commonwealths. and with little or no scheme of co-operation. Besides this they found not only the most warlike and powerful Indian tribes hostile to their purpose,
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HISTORICAL SKETCH
but in time braved, first, French opposition, and later that of the British combined with the other two.
The territory now comprised within the boundaries of Kentucky was originally part of a grant from James I of England, in 1656, to the Virginia colony, of all the land from the thirty-fourth to the forty-fifth parallels of latitude, and extending back from the coast westwardly to the South Sea. as the Pacific was then called, the distance between the two oceans being unknown or only vaguely surmised. It was more than two hundred years after the discovery of America, and more than a century after the settlement of Jamestown, before there was any recorded passage of the Blue Ridge. On the other hand, the French, who founded Quebec in 1608, the year after the English landed at Jamestown, followed the water route of the lakes, discovered the Mississippi, traced it to its mouth, and acquired all west of it, before there was a settler's cabin in the British territory one hundred miles from the coast. They had even penetrated the country watered by the Ohio, propitiated the Indians, and laid claim to all the territory between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi.
Such was the condition when Virginians, animated by vague reports from hunters and French explorers of the vast territory, and inspired by the British greed for land, as contradistinguished from that of the French for traffic and the Spanish for gold, began to organize for the possession of part of that domain which they claimed under the original charter. Accordingly, in 1750, Doctor Thomas Walker, representing the Loyal Land Company. and in 1751 Colonel Christopher Gist, representing the Ohio Land Com- pany, of which Lawrence, half-brother of George Washington, was president, made each a trip through the eastern part of Kentucky, with little result other than to keep a journal of each day's journey. They saw no human being in their trips, and were the first white men of record who had traversed the country. In 1769 Daniel Boone, a native of Buck's County, Pennsylvania, who lived on the Yadkin River in North Carolina. accom- panied John Finlay (a hunter and trader, who had told him of the fine country and game) to this country, and in company with John Stewart, Joseph Holden, James Mooney, and William Cool, spent two years in hunting and exploring. After many perilous adventures which only he and his brother, Squire Boone, who joined him later, survived, they returned home. In 1770 Colonel Knox and a party known as the Long Hunters visited that part of Kentucky south of the Kentucky River and spent a year or more in hunting and exploring. In 1773 Captain Thomas Bullitt came to the Falls of the Ohio and surveyed two tracts of land of 2,000 acres
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STATE OF KENTUCKY
each, covered in part now by the city of Louisville, and in the same year the McAfee brothers, James, George, and Robert, came down the Ohio, and passing up the Kentucky River located lands in what is now Mercer County. In the year following, Hancock Taylor and John Floyd, deputies of William Preston, Surveyor of Fincastle County, Virginia, came down the Ohio, and after surveying large bodies of land near Louisville passed up into the bluegrass region and made extensive locations there. James Harrod and others, also in the same year, visited Kentucky and erected a log cabin at what is now Harrodsburg. Daniel Boone also came with Michael Stoner, bearing a message from Governor Dunmore to the survey- ors to return on account of a rising of the Indians, which culminated in the battle of Point Pleasant and their defeat on the 10th day of October by the Virginians under Colonel Andrew Lewis. In 1773 and 1774 Simon Kenton had also explored the country about Maysville.
It was not. however, until 1775 that any organized movement looking to the settlement of Kentucky was made. In the early spring of 1775 Colonel Richard Henderson, of North Carolina, and a number of associates came to East Tennessee, and on March 17th made a treaty with the Cherokee Indians at Wautauga, whereby for $10,000 he purchased from them all the land south of the Kentucky River, estimated at 17,000,000 acres. It was on that occasion that Oconistoto, the Dragging Canoe, one of the signers, remarked to Daniel Boone that he feared his white friends had bought a "dark and bloody ground," or words to that effect, referring to the fact that it had long been the scene of bloody Indian wars, as hunting ground or residence. From this a common belief arose and remains that Kentucke or Kentake, as it was first called, was an Indian word signifying "the dark and bloody ground." The true explanation of it is that Kentake is an Iroquois word, meaning a "meadow " or "grassy land," and that it was applied by the Iroquois when, early in the Seventeenth Century, returning from the conquest of the Cherokees in the South, they passed through that portion of Kentucky known as the "Barrens, " then a prairie of five or six thousand square miles. They then so designated it, and it was afterward applied to the whole territory.
Pending the conclusion of the treaty of Wautauga, the proprietors made preparations to take formal possession of the property, and on the 10th day of March Daniel Boone was sent forward with a company of thirty men to blaze the way through Cumberland Gap to the Kentucky River, upon the south bank of which they proposed to build a fort and form a colony. He reached his destination March 22d, but not without having
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HISTORICAL SKETCH
lost several of his men a few days before, from an Indian attack, in ambush. He set to work at once to build a fort at the mouth of Otter Creek, now in Madison County, and upon the arrival of Colonel Henderson and his party, on the 14th of April, the fort was nearly completed. Other parties under Benjamin Logan and James Harrod came in about the same time and built forts at St. Asaph's, near Stanford. Lincoln County, and at Harrodsburg. On the 23d of May, pursuant to a call by Colonel Henderson, representatives from these settlements met at Boonesborough as the Legislature of Tran- sylvania Colony, passed laws for its government, provided for the sale of lands to colonists, and adjourned to meet in September. But there was no other meeting. The governor of Virginia, claiming title both under the Colonial grant and a treaty with the Six Nations at Fort Stanwix, New York, in 1768, whereby Virginia had purchased all the territory of Kentucky east of the Tennessee, issued a proclamation repudiating Henderson's claim. This was followed by a similar proclamation from the Governor of North Carolina, and the Transylvania Colony ceased to exist as a separate government. Later, Virginia, recognizing the services of the Henderson Company in pro- moting the settlement of Kentucky, granted it two tracts, each twelve miles square, or 200,000 acres, at the mouth of Green River, part of which com- prises Henderson County, and North Carolina also gave to it 200,000 acres in Powell's Valley, Tennessee, then a part of North Carolina.
In the fall of 1775 the family of Daniel Boone arrived in Kentucky, his wife being, as he said. "the first white woman who ever stood on the banks of the Kentucky River, " and from that time immigrants began to arrive both through Cumberland Gap and by way of the Ohio River. Of the great hardships and dangers suffered by these sturdy pioneers through the long years of contest with the Indians and their white allies northward for pos- session of the soil, space will not admit detail. The story of the sieges at Boonesborough, Bryant's and other stations, in which they held out in their rude stockaded forts, where the women molded bullets and cared for the wounded while the men fought, the massacres at night, the ambush in the daytime, the settler cultivating his crops with a rifle as a constant com- panion, and the privations inseparable from such life, make up a record of fortitude and heroism unsurpassed in any annals. Heroic figures stand out on the canvas whose names, too numerous to mention, will never die.
Historians have overlooked the part played by these pioneers in the Revolutionary War. For, while Washington held the tidewater line facing eastward, George Rogers Clark and the hardy hunters, facing westward, held the line in Kentucky which protected the rear of Washington's army at the
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STATE OF KENTUCKY
time of its sorest need. Had the assaults on Boonesborough by the Indians and the Canadians, under British instigation, been successful in 1778, and its defenders driven back to the Blue Ridge, as in Braddock's time, there might have been a different result to the unequal contest. They not only prevented this, but by his matchless strategy Clark, without the loss of a man, captured Kaskaskia and Vincennes, disconcerting the enemy and adding an empire to our domain. Nor did the struggle cease in Kentucky and the West, as in the East, with the close of the Revolutionary War. It was not until 1795, when the treaty of peace at Greenville, Ohio, termi- nated the Indian wars, which began before the Declaration of Indepen- dence, that the Kentucky pioneer was freed from the defense of his home and of the northern frontier. Nor was it until the close of the second war with England that he could wholly lay aside his arms.
CIVIL ORGANIZATION OF THE STATE
As soon as a sufficient number of immigrants had entered Kentucky to suggest a civil organization, its territory, which had formed part of Fin- castle County, Virginia, was, on the 5th of December, 1776, erected into a county, with its present name, and given two representatives in the legislature. On the Ist of November. 1780, the County of Kentucky was divided into three counties : Fayette, embracing the land north of the Kentucky River, Lincoln, that south of the Kentucky and Green rivers, and Jefferson the remainder, each with a colonel, lieutenant-colonel, and surveyor. In 1783 Kentucky was formed into a district, a district court was opened at Harrodsburg, and eight more counties were soon after- ward established. Thus, as population increased, new counties were organized and civil administration extended, and in 1787 a representative in Congress was given to Kentucky as a district of Virginia. But the people of Kentucky early aspired to a separate government, on account of its remoteness from Virginia and because its local interests needed better atten- tion. Spain held the mouth of the Mississippi River, and notwithstanding that under the terms of the treaty of peace in 1783 free navigation of the Mississippi had been guaranteed, she levied heavy export and import duties at New Orleans as tribute upon the trade of Kentucky, of which the Mississippi was the natural outlet, as well as other exactions, Remon- strances and appeals to the parent government were ineffectual on account of the indifference of the commercial States of the East, which controlled
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HISTORICAL SKETCH
the Continental Congress, and which, deaf to the appeals of Kentucky, were in favor of surrendering the Mississippi to the control of Spain, and inclined to limit the boundary of the States to the Alleghany Mountains. In 1784 the people of Kentucky held a convention to make known their grievances on this score and to secure a separate government. Successive conventions of the same kind were held until Virginia assented to its organization as a State in 1786, but it was not until February, 1791, that Congress gave its consent that it should be admitted as a State on June I. 1792. On the toth of December of that year the tenth convention of the State met at Danville, where the previous ones had been held, and adopted the constitution which went into effect June 1. 1792. On the latter day the legislature met at Lexington, and Isaac Shelby, first governor of Kentucky, was inaugurated. On November 1, 1792, Frankfort having been in the meantime selected as the permanent capital, the legislature met there, and it has remained the capital since. In 1799 a second constitution was adopted making the governor elective by the people, providing for a lieutenant-governor, and correcting some other objections to the first.
Disquietude continued in Kentucky over Spain's retention of the con- trol of the Mississippi, even to the verge of threatened hostilities. Genet. the French Minister to the United States, presuming upon the amity which had existed between the two countries, sought to embroil the latter in the troubles between the new Republic, which he represented, and England, operating not only in his diplomatic relations but by direct appeals to the people. He was, indeed, so violent that Washington requested his recall, and his successor arrived before he had been here a year. But he remained in this country and continued to foment dissension .. One form in which this was manifested was in encouraging, in the West, hostile demonstrations against the Spanish possessions. To this end, being seconded by agents sent direct from France to Kentucky, the enlistment of troops was set on foot with a view to wrest from Spain the control of the Mississippi. A strong sympathy was developed in Kentucky, and General George Rogers Clark accepted a commission as Major-general in the French army. Wash- ington had already issued a proclamation enjoining neutrality and warning the people against enlisting for the purpose of making war upon any gov- ernment with which the United States was at peace. This had the effect of paralyzing Genet's schemes in the East, but in Kentucky, owing to the intensity of feeling against Spain's exercise of exclusive control over the Mississippi River and the prominence of the local leaders, they still had a dangerous vitality. In anticipation of an expedition down the Ohio a
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STATE OF KENTUCKY
Federal force was sent to Fort Massac, Illinois. just below Paducah, and every preparation made to enforce the neutrality laws. But the evidences of a possible conflict were so strong that on the 24th of March, 1794, Washington issued another proclamation, directed especially against the Kentucky movement, in such strong terms that the preparations making for the expedition were suspended and later abandoned. Just prior to the issuing of the proclamation, James Innes. Attorney-general of Virginia, had come to Kentucky on a confidential mission to Governor Shelby, and explained to him that negotiations were pending between Spain and the United States in which the latter had made the ultimatum that Spain should limit her claim to the territory on the east bank of the Mississippi to the 3Ist degree of latitude and concede the free and unlimited navigation of the river, with the right of deposit at New Orleans of all American goods free from the control of that power. This intelligence, together with the proc- lamation of the President, put an effectual stop to all further excitement upon the subject, and within the following year Spain signed the treaty inaking all the concessions enumerated above. Thus, largely through the persistence of the pioneers of Kentucky, maintained without abatement for ten years, was secured a right guaranteed by solemn international treaty, but to which the commercial Eastern States had shown an inexcusable indifference. The earnestness with which Kentucky contended for its enforcement aroused the East to a realization of the importance of the con- tention, and exerted a beneficial influence in promoting the acquisition of Louisiana.
Entering upon the Nineteenth Century fully organized by its more republican new constitution, Kentucky progressed rapidly in population and general development, finding in New Orleans and along the Mississippi a lucrative market for its productions. In 1811 the first steamboat appeared upon the Ohio, and by the end of the second decade the new invention had ceased to be a novelty. Just preceding and during the War of 1812 the attention of her people was engrossed by military affairs, and from the battle of Tippecanoe, November 7, 1811, to the 8th of January, 1815, at New Orleans, her volunteers were ever to the front. Especially did they bear the brunt of defending the frontier of Indiana and Ohio, as at the battles of the River Raisin and the Thames, where fell the flower of her manhood.
In 1818 an important addition was made to the territorial area of Ken- tucky by the purchase from the Chickasaw Indians of that portion of the State which is west of the Tennessee. As stated, Virginia had only
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HISTORICAL SKETCH
acquired from the Six Nations, by the treaty of Fort Stanwix, in 1768, the territory east of the Tennessee, the remaining portion, as also that part of Tennessee lying between that river and the Mississippi, belonging to the Chickasaws, who still dwelt there. In 1818 President Madison appointed ex-Governor Isaac Shelby, of Kentucky, and General Andrew Jackson, of Tennessee, commissioners to treat with these Indians for the purchase of this territory, and on the 19th of October, 1818, a treaty was duly signed whereby the land in question was purchased, the consideration being the payment of $300,000, in annual installments of $20,000 for fifteen years. The land was afterward surveyed by the United States in townships, sec- tions, and quarter-sections, the only portion of the State thus surveyed. It is unfortunate that this system was not observed as to the rest of the State, since it would have prevented much complication of titles, especially in the mountains.
A CRITICAL PERIOD
With the new century began a critical period in the State's history. Kentucky's first ventures in banking proved very disastrous. In 1802, under the guise of establishing an insurance company for the purpose of insuring the cargoes on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers against accident and loss, the legislature had, in effect. incorporated a bank. Its name was the Kentucky Insurance Company, into the charter of which was clan- destinely inserted a clause investing it with banking privileges of a danger- ous character. Later it was authorized to issue notes, payable to bearer, equal to its capital, money in its vaults, and real and personal property. A fictitious prosperity followed, and in time the natural result, a corres- ponding depression. In 1806 the old Bank of Kentucky was chartered, coupling the State with its capital stock and credit as a stockholder, with the right to name a proportional number of directors. In 1812 it was forced to suspend specie payments, and in 1815 the legislature authorized an increase of its capital to $3,000,000, with the right of any debtor to replevy his debt for one year if his creditor refused to take his pay in the notes of the suspended bank. This was what is known as the Stay Law, the agitation following which constitutes one of the most stormy periods of Kentucky's history, leading to the formation of a new Court of Appeals. contending with the old for jurisdiction and precedence, and which for a time threatened to involve the people in a civil war. In 1818 forty more
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STATE OF KENTUCKY
banks were chartered, with a capital of $10,000,000, notwithstanding that, in 1817, a branch of the United States Bank had been established in Louis- ville and also in Lexington. The new banks were also authorized to issue their notes on demand to an amount equal to three times their capital stock, less their indebtedness, and permitted to redeem them in the paper of the Bank of Kentucky. This was banking run mad, and an experiment in fiat money which soon culminated in inevitable disaster, and in 1822 the new banks and the Bank of Kentucky were wiped out of existence. In 1823 the Court of Appeals, in the case of Lapsley v. Brashears, decided the Stay Law unconstitutional, and later it was required that property sold under execution should be valued in specie. It was in consequence of this decision that the legislature, in December, 1825, undertook to set aside the old Court of Appeals, and passed an act establishing a new one, but after two years of turbulence this act was repealed in December, 1827, and the conflict ceased. Fortunately, the large influx of thrifty immigrants from the older States, good crops, and the growth of trade and commerce, in time enabled the people to pay their debts without repudiation or pay- ment in depreciated paper, and the year 1830 found the State with no banking institutions within its limits except the two branches of the United States Bank. In 1833-34, in contemplation of the early expiration of the United States Bank, the legislature established the Bank of Kentucky, with a capital of $5,000,000, the Northern Bank of Kentucky, with a cap- ital of $3,000,000, and the Bank of Louisville, with a capital of $2,000,000, and except in the period of general suspension of 1837 they continued as the principal banks of the State, under conservative management, for more than sixty years with unchanged names.
While the period during which the problems of banking, debt, and the Old and New Court involved much political discord and partisan bitterness, it was also one of great ultimate good to the State. A distinctive State character of a higher and broader type in public affairs was evolved, and a much more practical tone established. With the removal of these vexed issues the legislature and the public gave attention to such practical issues as the establishment of a system of public schools and internal improve- ments. The laws in regard to the former, which directed certain funds of the State to be forever applied to the interests of education, and laid the foundation of our present public school system, was engrafted upon the Constitution of 1850, and still further improved in the present one. In internal improvements there was established a system of turnpike roads and slack-water navigation, which gave great impetus to the development
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