s Lexington,
which contained less than three thousand people. [Footnote: Perrin Du
Lac "Voyage," etc., 1801, 1803, p. 153; Michaux, 150.] Lexington was a
neatly built little burg, with fine houses and good stores. The leading
people lived well and possessed much cultivation. Louisville and
Nashville were each about half its size. In Nashville, of the one
hundred and twenty houses but eight were of brick, and most of them were
mere log huts. Cincinnati was a poor little village. Cleveland consisted
of but two or three log cabins, at a time when there were already a
thousand settlers in its neighborhood on the Connecticut Reserve,
scattered 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