out on their farms. [Footnote:  “Historical Collections of Ohio,” p. 120.] Natchez was a very important town, nearly as large as Lexington.  It derived its importance from the river traffic on the Mississippi.  All the boatmen stopped there, and sometimes as many as one hundred and fifty craft were moored to the bank at the same time.  The men who did this laborious river work were rude, powerful, and lawless, and when they halted for a rest their idea of enjoyment was the coarsest and most savage dissipation.  At Natchez there speedily gathered every species of purveyor to their vicious pleasures, and the part of the town known as “Natchez under the Hill” became a by-word for crime and debauchery. [Footnote:  Henry Ker, “Travels,” p. 41.]

    Growth of Kentucky.

Kentucky had grown so in population, possessing over two hundred thousand inhabitants, that she had begun to resemble an Eastern State.  When, in 1796, Benjamin Logan, the representative of the old woodchoppers and Indian fighters, ran for governor and was beaten, it was evident that Kentucky had passed out of the mere pioneer days.  It was more than a mere coincidence that in the following year Henry Clay should have taken up his residence in Lexington.  It showed that the State was already attracting to live within her borders men like those who were fitted for social and political leadership in Virginia.

  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