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 flatboa