Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier 9780300216530

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HOME RULE

T H E L A M A R S E R I E S I N W E ST E R N H I STO RY The Lamar Series in Western History includes scholarly books of general public interest that enhance the understanding of human affairs in the American West and contribute to a wider understanding of the West’s significance in the political, social, and cultural life of America. Comprising works of the highest quality, the series aims to increase the range and vitality of Western American history, focusing on frontier places and people, Indian and ethnic communities, the urban West and the environment, and the art and illustrated history of the American West. E D I TO R I A L B OA R D

howard r. lamar, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus, Past President of Yale University william j. cronon, University of Wisconsin–Madison philip j. deloria, University of Michigan john mack faragher, Yale University jay gitlin, Yale University george a. miles, Beinecke Library, Yale University martha a. sandweiss, Princeton University virginia j. scharff, University of New Mexico robert m. u tley, Former Chief Historian, National Park Service RECENT TITLES

Sovereignty for Survival: American Energy Development and Indian Self-Determination, by James Robert Allison III George I. Sánchez: The Long Fight for Mexican American Integration, by Carlos Kevin Blanton The Yaquis and the Empire: Violence, Spanish Imperial Power, and Native Resilience in Colonial Mexico, by Raphael Brewster Folsom Gathering Together: The Shawnee People through Diaspora and Nationhood, 1600–1870, by Sami Lakomäki Nature’s Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West, by Monica Rico Rush to Gold: The French and the California Gold Rush, 1848–1854, by Malcolm J. Rohrbough Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier, by Honor Sachs The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity, by Gregory D. Smithers Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian, by Don C. Talayesva, edited by Leo Simmons, Second Edition Before L.A.: Race, Space, and Municipal Power in Los Angeles, 1781–1894, by David Samuel Torres-Rouff Geronimo, by Robert M. Utley Wanted: The Outlaw Lives of Billy the Kid and Ned Kelly, by Robert M. Utley F O RT H C O M I N G T I T L E S

American Genocide: The California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873, by Benjamin Madley

HOME RULE HOUSEHOLDS, MANHOOD, AND NATIONAL EXPANSION ON THE EIGHTEENTH- CENTURY KENTUCKY FRONTIER

Honor Sachs

New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund. Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Calvin Chapin of the Class of 1788, Yale College. Copyright © 2015 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in MT Baskerville and MT Bulmer types by IDS Infotech, Ltd. Printed in the United States of America. ISBN: 978-0-300-15413-9 (cloth; alk. paper) Library of Congress Control Number: 2015934197 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Amy and Eve

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CON TEN TS

Acknowledgments, ix Introduction, 1

CHAPTER CHAPTER

2 “To Live Independent,” 41

CHAPTER CHAPTER

1 “Servant to Master,” 13

3 “Ruin Poor Families,” 71

4 “A Stroke of Manly Courage,” 94

CHAPTER

5 “A New Race of Men,” 120 Conclusion, 144

List of Abbreviations, 151 Notes, 153 Index, 187

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ACK NOW LEDG MEN TS

This project began on the very first day of my very first class in my very first year of graduate school. For the inaugural meeting of Chuck Cohen’s colonial history seminar, our class tackled David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. In the section on the colonial backcountry, one sentence jumped out at me. It stated that the only difference between the colonial backcountry and the American frontier was the direction that people faced. I underlined it and marked it with a very important asterisk: “The fact that the [backcountry] was thought to be ‘back’ rather than ‘front’ tells us which way the colonists were facing in that era.”1 When colonists faced England, the backcountry lay behind them. When the colonies declared their independence, people simply up and turned themselves around to face the frontier that lay before them. This explanation conjured such a strange image in my head, an image of an entire population spinning on its heels in unison to create the American frontier. It was so problematic and, yet, there was something there. I couldn’t shake it. In many ways, this image would haunt me as I formulated my research agenda at the University of Wisconsin –

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Madison. Picturing a national about-face certainly made some sense to me. Americans did go through a dramatic and profound process of reorientation in the wake of the American Revolution. With the encouragement of my Wisconsin mentors, I embarked on an intellectual journey that would help me understand the complicated ways that ordinary people participated in and shaped this national realignment. I could not have asked for a more generous and rigorous dissertation committee. It was a great privilege to work with Bill Cronon, whose precise thinking and commitment to narrative have always inspired me to be become a better writer and scholar. Bill has been particularly thoughtful in the past several years since my advisor, the late Jeanne Boydston, passed away, and I have leaned on him more than usual to help navigate professional terrain in her absence. Susan Johnson encouraged me to question anything and everything with a kind intensity that reflects her quality as a person and a scholar. Her dedicated readings helped me focus my thinking and writing in fundamental ways. I will forever treasure the mentorship of Art McEvoy, whose irrepressible enthusiasm gave me new confidence in my work. Art taught me to think of writing as a spiritual process and to find beauty and majesty in the structure of prose. When I began the process of revising my dissertation into a book, I had the great privilege of joining an unparalleled group of scholars as the Cassius Marcellus Clay Postdoctoral Fellow with the Howard Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders at Yale University. I am profoundly grateful to John Mack Faragher, Jay Gitlin, George Miles, and Howard Lamar for welcoming me into their community of scholars and providing me with valuable time to work and write. While at Yale, I also found a home with the endlessly dynamic group of scholars at the Gilder Lerhman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. David Blight became a wonderful mentor and provided me with so many opportunities, not the least of which was a gracious invitation to present an early draft of a chapter to the Yale Working Group on Slavery and the Law. Dana Schaffer and Tom Thurston ran a tight ship at the GLC, and it was a privilege to join them at events both scholarly and social. Many archives and research institutions have provided me with generous support throughout every stage of this process. The Filson Historical Society granted me a research fellowship at the very beginning of this x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

project, and I have since come to think of the Filson as a scholarly home away from home. Many thanks to Jim Holmberg, Mark Wetherington, and the irrepressible A. Glenn Crothers for helping me feel so welcome during my many trips to Louisville. Shirley Harmon guided me through the Bullitt Family Papers and taught me an enormous amount about the process of building a collection. As well, I am grateful to Heather Stone for helping me gather images for the final manuscript. Several other archives have supported and funded my research for this book. I have benefited greatly from generous funding from the American Antiquarian Society, the Virginia Historical Society, and the Kentucky Historical Society. I spent two crucial years of research and writing on a J. Willard Hurst Fellowship in Legal History through the Institute for Legal Studies at the University of Wisconsin Law School. As well, I presented an early version of chapter 5 at the Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History and am grateful for the constructive and encouraging insights of Barbara Welke and all of the institute participants. My final year of dissertation writing was generously supported by a University Dissertation Fellowship from the Graduate School at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. It has been a great privilege to benefit from the guidance, assistance, and insight of archivists, librarians, scholars, and staff at multiple research institutions. I will always treasure my years of reading and writing at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, where I worked under portraits of Lyman Copeland Draper and the spiritual presence of Frederick Jackson Turner. Special thanks to Michael Edmonds for guiding my interests in the eighteenth-century West during my early years of graduate school and to Jim Danky, for just being Jim Danky. I explored the vast collections of court records at the Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives with the help of Jim Prichard and the extremely knowledgeable KDLA staff. Tim Tingle was especially helpful in locating an elusive image. I am also thankful for all the assistance I received in Special Collections at the University of Chicago, the University of Virginia, and the University of Kentucky. My colleagues at Western Carolina University have cheered me on as I marched through the final stages of this manuscript and generously provided me with a course release so that I could complete the book. xi

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Thank you to Saheed Aderinto, Charlotte Cosner, Andy Denson, Mary Ella Engel, Rob Ferguson, Gael Graham, Libby McRae, Richard Starnes, and Jessie Swigger for their professionalism and good cheer. Special thanks to David Dorondo for the Mirado Black Warrior pencil with which I edited the final version of this book. I am especially thankful for Vicki Szabo’s sense of humor and for Alex Macaulay, who always makes sure that my glass is half-full, often literally. Everybody at Yale University Press has helped me navigate this whole process of transforming a dissertation into a book with good grace and extraordinary patience. My editor, Chris Rogers, has supported me from the very beginning, and I sometimes wonder if I could have done this without him. Chris is remarkably understanding, infinitely thoughtful, and wonderfully creative. I am so grateful that he has helped me navigate a writing process that intimidates in equal measure as it rewards. Two anonymous reviewers offered extremely encouraging and insightful critiques to the manuscript, and I deeply appreciate their careful consideration of my work. This is a far better book because of their guidance and help. Erica Hanson has fielded a superhuman number of questions from me in the final stages of production, and Margaret Otzel has guided me over these last hurdles with good cheer and great skill. It has been an enormous privilege to work with everybody involved in the copyediting, design, and production process at the end of this very long journey. So much has changed since I began this project. The one thing that has remained constant since the very beginning is my beloved canine companion, Blue. Before I left on my very first research trip to Kentucky in graduate school, I rescued a sweet but complicated pit bull puppy to accompany me on my travels. Blue has traveled with me to multiple archives, kept me safe in many hotel rooms, walked beside me on historic trails, and helped me explore the landscape of my research. Now an advanced senior, she sleeps curled up at my feet as I finish this book. I am so grateful for her loyal company and unfailing love throughout this entire process. I have found advice, support, encouragement, and levity from so many people, as friends, mentors, and fellow scribblers have opened their hearts and minds to help me along the way. I have been humbled throughout this process for the friendship and support of so many people, but xii

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especially for Steve Kantrowitz, Ted Frantz, Flannery Burke, David Herzberg, Charlotte Haller, Dorothea Browder, Maia Surdam, Stephanie Westcott, Angela Pulley Hudson, Robin Morris, Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Amanda Moniz, and Lisa Pinley Covert. Special thanks are due to Scott Poole and Jason Coy, who supported me in a time of need and have always upheld the highest standards of scholarship and friendship. It was a great privilege to experience the peculiar mix of anxiety and joy that comes with finishing a manuscript alongside Brian Murphy and Rob Parkinson, both of whom cheered me on as only the best of friends can. As we overlapped in New Haven, Virginia Scharff became a wonderful happy hour companion who inspired me through her good humor and boundless energy. And, of course, few words can describe my admiration for Joanne Meyerowitz, who has shown me endless kindness over countless cups of coffee, meals, and walks in East Rock Park. There are a handful of people who have helped shape my life almost as much as they have shaped this book. Those friends who have helped me understand myself as a scholar and as a person deserve special recognition. Joe Cullon has been my friend since I met him in that very first seminar in graduate school, and he has had an incalculable impact on my intellectual development. Over many years and many hours on the phone, Joe has pushed me to pursue big ideas with intensity and precision and has always been there for me in my times of need. Jen Manion read every one of these chapters, helping me sharpen my analytic focus and providing me with crucial insights into the historiography that have dramatically improved this project. I am grateful to have benefited from Jen’s humor and fearless approach to life and work. And few people understand me quite like Joanne Freeman, who has tolerated my nonsense for many years now and yet still remains one of my dearest friends and favorite people. Joanne keeps me laughing and, more importantly, laughs at my jokes no matter how bad they are. She has improved my life in countless ways, and I feel enormously lucky that I can call her a friend. It is likely impossible to express fully my gratitude to Lisa Cline for her unfailing support for my work and for me at every stage of this process. We began writing our dissertations together in the libraries and coffee shops of Madison, and she continues to help me through all of the scholarly, pedagogical, and emotional ruts that I find myself in with xiii

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heroic levels of patience and understanding. Lisa’s support has kept me going through many a rough patch, and she has taught me much about compassion and friendship. Tammy Ingram has helped me make this book whole more than anyone else. Every word on the pages that follow has been shaped by years of writing, reading, laughing, learning, traveling, and dog-wrangling with Tammy. As we both wrote books together, I had Tammy’s excellent example to follow, and her extraordinary focus inspired me to accomplish what I had once thought impossible. I will forever be indebted to her for her friendship, her company, and her collaboration, all of which have left an indelible imprint on my work and my life. My process of becoming a historian began as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, where Mary Kelley first awakened in me a sense of my intellectual self that I had not known existed. For over two decades now, Mary has nurtured and supported my personal and intellectual growth as a mentor, confidant, and close friend. Perhaps the greatest gift that Mary gave me was the suggestion that I work with her dear friend Jeanne Boydston for my graduate work. I truly believe that Jeanne was the only person on earth who could have taken on such an unwieldy and unrefined graduate student as myself. I arrived at her doorstep brimming with ideas but lacking in direction, and Jeanne calmly navigated my passage through intellectual terrain with her characteristic patience, warmth, and sense of mischief. Jeanne taught me how to ask questions, showed me how to communicate ideas, helped me to untangle my writing, and guided my raw creative impulses into refined scholarly pursuits. Ultimately, she helped me better understand myself by believing in me, especially when I harbored doubts. Jeanne lost her battle with cancer before this book was complete, but her guidance is evident in every word and her influence is alive on every page. Writing a book about households and families reflects the enormous impact of my own family on my intellectual development. My parents, Robert and Phyllis Sachs, have always supported my scholarly pursuits, even when my chosen career path seemed fraught with obstacles and riddled with setbacks. My father taught me to love a good book and to respect a good sentence. My mother taught me to get my head out of those books once in a while to make sure that I don’t forget to take in the rest. xiv

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It is with great love and enormous pride that I dedicate this book to the two most important people in my life, my sisters, Amy and Eve. My sisters make me real, make me whole, and define my place in this world. They are the source of my strength and help me understand the true meaning of home. Together, we are far greater than the sum of our parts. Amy and Eve: This is for you.

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INTRODUCTION

“Whereas the European tries to escape his sorrows at home by troubling society, the American derives from his home that love of order which he carries over into affairs of state.” —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

In 1784, John Filson published The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke. At the end of his work, he included a sketch of Daniel Boone that would later win the work considerable notoriety. Although Boone was just one of many hunters who traversed the Appalachian Mountains and surveyed the early West for eastern speculators, the presence of his story in Filson’s work gave Boone a mythic status that helped make him a lasting symbol through which generations would continue to understand the eighteenth-century frontier experience. In the opening lines of his narrative—which Filson claimed to have recorded as an oral history— Boone describes how he first left his family behind for adventures in the West. “It was on the first of May, in the year 1769,” the narrative goes, “that I resigned my domestic happiness for a time . . . to wander through the wilderness . . . in quest of the country of Kentucke.”1

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INTRODUCTION

Boone’s opening lines asserted a literary and geographical divide between the western “wilderness” of Kentucky and the domestic comforts of home and family. The events of his “quest” in the wild woods of Kentucky were separate from the experiences of “domestic happiness.” Through Filson, Boone described a Kentucky filled with wild beasts, harsh winters, nagging hunger, and hostile Indians. He left behind “family and peaceable habitation” to enter a world filled with danger.2 The Kentucky of 1769, Boone recalled, was fierce and untamed, a world away from the domestic refuge of home. At times, his mind would wander to “the idea of a beloved wife and family” when tested by the acute deprivation, oppressive loneliness, and winter storms of the wild frontier.3 Determined to bring his family with him to Kentucky, Boone sought to establish a household as evidence that the wilderness could be tamed. By the time he told his story to Filson in 1784, the dangers had passed. Early explorers had brought “order out of confusion” so that Boone and his family could “live in peace and safety.”4 Over a century before Frederick Jackson Turner would present the frontier as a dividing line between “savagery” and “civilization,” Filson anticipated such distinctions. In many ways, the two frontier historians were not that different. Both imagined the frontier as a testing ground, as a place where Americans could forge a better society by wrestling with the “savage” or “wild.” Both presumed that conquest and elimination of Indians was the cost or, rather, the prerequisite of Anglo-American progress. And both suggested that the process of transforming the frontier created a special destiny and forged the conditions under which American ideals could be fully realized.5 Yet where Turner imagined an abstract “civilization” as the instrument of settler colonialism, Filson saw “domestic happiness.”6 Writing at the close of the American Revolution, Filson utilized markers of progress familiar to his eighteenth-century audiences. In Boone’s quest through a wild frontier, Filson captured the young nation’s deep yearnings for security and order and equated them with the stability of the domestic household.7 These yearnings, embedded deep in the experience of the American Revolution, found their clearest expression on the national frontier. When the colonists declared their independence, they rejected the symbolic family that had ruled the British Empire for two centuries. 2

INTRODUCTION

“This Map of Kentucke Drawn from Actual Observations,” by John Filson, published in his book The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke (Philadelphia, 1784; repr. New York: Corinth Books, 1962). Photograph courtesy of the Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky.

By casting off the patriarch, American patriots undid an ancient world order, one that hierarchically ranked every member of public and private life from the royal Father King to the lowliest household subject. As John Adams would explain near the end of the eighteenth century, the “source of revolution” was fundamentally “a systematical dissolution of the true 3

INTRODUCTION

family authority.”8 What the Declaration of Independence undid with the stroke of a pen could not be easily replaced. Like Boone, Americans found themselves wandering through the ideological wilderness and dreaming of the comforts of home.9 This book explains how the struggles to secure household and family shaped the world that Boone encountered at the edge of American empire. I look specifically at the settlement and statehood of Kentucky during the eighteenth century to understand how visions of patriarchal household order forged the experience of nation building in the first state west of the Appalachian Mountains.10 My chronology is framed by two revolutions, American independence in 1776 and Thomas Jefferson’s self-styled “revolution” of 1800. It was during this remarkably short period of time—barely a quarter-century—that the broader region of the Ohio River Valley would transform from a hotly contested colonial backcountry into a celebrated national frontier.11 A landscape that once sat at the nexus of imperial competition became America’s “empire for liberty,” embodying the hopes and aspirations of the new nation. This book interprets that complex, formidable, and extraordinary transformation from the perspective of ordinary people. It argues that the experiences of families and the expectations of households shaped settlers’ demands on the western fringe of the emerging nation-state and guided the story of national expansion on a turbulent frontier. By taking a closer look at the household unit and considering the experiences of the diverse people within it, we gain greater insight into a paradox that lies at the heart of America’s frontier mythology. At the end of the eighteenth century, Jeffersonian Republicans ascended to power by promoting the agrarian potential of vast western lands and celebrating the yeoman household ideal. A century later, Turner argued that the frontier was the seedbed of a uniquely “American” democracy, one rooted in a spirit of individualism and forged in the process of western migration. How did the American West simultaneously nurture households of many and produce autonomous individuals at the same time? The historian Thomas Perkins Abernethy, a student of Turner’s, posited this conundrum in conversation with his mentor. As Abernethy explained, the “importance of the family as the fundamental social unit has long been recognized. On the other hand, the tendency of the frontier to 4

INTRODUCTION

develop individualism is one of the best known of modern historical concepts. But the conflict between the stress on family and the glorification of the individual has usually escaped notice in this connection.” This book makes these connections central and explains how the competing ideals of the collective household and the liberal self were, in fact, deeply contingent on one another and became crucially linked in the particular circumstances of the early national West.12 In the tumultuous years after the colonies declared their independence from the British, romantic visions of self-sufficient households helped bring clarity to the project of American expansion in a chaotic and unscripted period of political revolution, border war, and national uncertainty. Kentucky sat at the nexus of competing imperial powers as British, American, Spanish, and Indian forces struggled to assert control over the broader Ohio River Valley. Situated at the far reaches of European, American, and, to a certain extent, Indian authority, no one power claimed clear supremacy over the region.13 For many in the new American republic, the idea of territorial expansion was not looked upon favorably. It seemed unclear how the new confederation of American states could possibly exert sovereign authority over a western territory so distant from the centers of power. While in theory, many envisioned— and expected—the nation to expand, in practice the reality of territorial acquisition required many things that the young nation did not have: a standing army, financial resources, and the unbounded loyalties of western settlers. In the Age of Revolution, in other words, an American frontier was not a foregone conclusion.14 As a case study, Kentucky provides a unique perspective on the imperial and national struggles that historians have termed “the Long War for the West.”15 A region coveted by influential land speculators since the Seven Years’ War, Kentucky became the focal point of imperial struggles after the royal Proclamation Act of 1763 banned investment west of the Appalachian Mountains. The hunger for Kentucky lands propelled Virginians into talk of independence, and the American Revolution unleashed wealthy investors upon the region. After the war, Kentucky experienced unprecedented population growth as settlers and speculators scrambled for a foothold in the celebrated American frontier.16 5

INTRODUCTION

With virtually no colonial-era past, the Kentucky frontier absorbed the hopes and aspirations of the new republic, even as it revealed the shortcomings of national ambitions. Struggles over sovereignty in Kentucky challenged the very premise of national expansion. When Kentucky applied for statehood in 1792, the event attracted national and even international attention. Kentucky was the first state to be settled entirely in the context of the American Revolution. Although Vermont had become a state a year earlier, its application was bolstered by roots of settlement and government in the colonial past.17 When Kentucky applied to Congress to become a state, the region had barely twenty years of American settlement and only ten years of significant white population to support it. Kentucky’s admission into the union suggested the promise of continuing national growth, yet it also fueled anxieties about division and conflict during an era beset with internal dissent. The process of constitution-making in Kentucky seemed to demonstrate that the enlightened principles of government and law that had fueled the revolutionary generation could be developed in practice, yet, in truth, it was all really just a theory. What happened in Kentucky became a practical experiment in whether or not the principles that had inspired the American Revolution could take root in western lands.18 My title, Home Rule, addresses an ongoing debate over the nature of the American Revolution, taking the core language of this dialogue quite literally. In the early twentieth century, another student of Frederick Jackson Turner’s named Carl Becker produced a thesis about the politics of the American Revolution in which he famously argued that the war waged for American independence was not about “home rule” but was, rather, a contest over “who would rule at home.”19 Becker argued that the American Revolution was not so much an event that centered on separation from the British Empire but rather on an extended process that involved redefining, negotiating, and rebuilding the nature of authority in the new nation as a consequence of independence. The basic premise that Becker laid out has shaped scholarship on the period ever since, and historians continue to evaluate how the struggles over “rule at home” played out in ballot boxes, on rural plantations, in urban streets, and in frontier forests.20 6

INTRODUCTION

This book looks literally into the question of “home rule” to understand how the struggles for authority that unfolded in ordinary households contributed to the larger processes of reconstituting national sovereignty and American identity. The centrality of family and household order in the evolving struggle for “rule at home” was everywhere in the eighteenth-century West, if we care to look for it. In the fractious and unruly western settlements, the symbolic household provided a stable ideal through which to interpret profoundly unstable realities. Historian Richard Maxwell Brown defined this ideal as the “homestead ethic,” a set of rural values that framed the expectations of western settlers and fueled backcountry unrest throughout the revolutionary frontier. At the heart of the homestead ethic, Brown argues, was an abiding faith among backcountry settlers that those who lived and labored on land had “the right to have and hold, incontestably, a family-size farm.”21 Indeed, the ideal of a self-sufficient family farm shaped the impulse for migration among ordinary settlers hoping to establish freeholds in western lands during and after the American Revolution. Within this ideal, however, the nature of family structure and household order had a far more capacious symbolism.22 The concept of a “family-size farm” was not an empty vessel but rather contained a complex and mercurial set of expectations about gendered authority and dependence, physical safety and security, and economic autonomy and support. As such, the household served as the touchstone of backcountry identity and experience. Anxieties about the security of households framed petitions from male settlers who worried about their inability to protect families against the threats of Indian violence or the greed of land speculators. The idea of family protection galvanized military action against Indian enemies, and the degradation of Indian families justified unspeakable horrors. In newspapers, the printing and reprinting of depredations against women and children created a narrative of collective suffering, one that underscored the vulnerability of household dependents and the duty of household heads to protect. And during the political upheavals that shaped the years before Kentucky became a state in 1792, westerners used family metaphors to understand their place in the new republic and deployed a language of family protection and responsibility to spread rumors of disunion and separation from the new United States. 7

INTRODUCTION

An idea that loomed so large in the expectations and demands of ordinary settlers deserves our critical attention, particularly given that most households rarely achieved this family ideal. The political utility of the idealized Anglo-American family emerged against a backdrop of households fractured by western unrest. As violence between Americans and Indians escalated in the West, ordinary families found themselves in the crosshairs of a war they did not fully understand or support. While popular writers and policymakers celebrated the independent yeoman household in the early national West, ordinary Kentucky settlers faced landlessness, economic exploitation, and political disaffection. During and after the American Revolution, wealthy investors and speculators consolidated vast tracts of western lands and forced ordinary settlers into positions of tenancy and dependency. White men who expected to find personal independence in the West instead found themselves working for wages alongside hired slaves or tending land for the absentee elite. White women experienced poverty and financial hardship that tore families apart, and local authorities stepped in to remedy fractured homes where heads of households failed to provide. Slave men and women took advantage of the social disorder to pursue their own ambitions and at times suffered backlash as a consequence. In this relatively unscripted context, ordinary men and women migrated into a contested landscape against the forces of ongoing violence, economic exploitation, imperial competition, and perceived neglect. As they did so, they developed their own expectations of government and asserted their own understandings of rights. Central to their local understanding of rights was an abiding faith in the patriarchal household and an evolving commitment to the social and political privileges of white men.23 The exultation of orderly households in Kentucky was less a signal of the changing nature of domestic governance in the early republic than a reflection of deep anxiety over the economic, political, and social pressures that frontier expansion placed on the structure of family life. By providing an intimate perspective on the lives and homes of ordinary people on the Anglo-American frontier, this book explains how invocations of household order compensated for the political and personal dislocations of eighteenth-century western expansion.

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INTRODUCTION

In order to gain access to the personal and political experiences of ordinary western households, this book bridges microhistory with a larger narrative of state formation. Individual stories of otherwise anonymous people have shaped my understanding of broad political change. Records from the Kentucky Overseers of the Poor helped me to piece together stories of frontier poverty. Court records involving the placement of orphans and bastard children provided insight into the internal dynamics of frontier families. Workplace records illuminated the increasingly fraught meanings of dependence and independence among those struggling to make a living in a cutthroat economy. The language of petitions from Kentucky settlers revealed the importance of family protection and household security to western men, in both reality and rhetoric. And, of course, booster literature explained how the ideals of personal independence and household self-sufficiency became fused with deep cultural associations with the Anglo-American frontier. By integrating such sources into a larger story of state formation in the early West, Home Rule contributes a new perspective to an ongoing scholarly conversation about the early national frontier. In recent years, historians have turned a critical eye to the eighteenth-century West and have begun to recognize the significance of border populations to the constitution of imperial and state power in early America. While we traditionally think about imperial or national politics as emerging from state officials and city centers, new scholarship considers how the actions and demands of peripheral populations—those settlers, traders, hunters, and missionaries who operated on the frontiers, backcountries, or borders of territories—exerted greater pressure on the course of empires and nationstates than governing officials. As foot soldiers of conquest, the men and women living in territorial peripheries were essential to the unfolding of imperial politics. The distance of such people from the centers of power made them notoriously difficult to control and, as such, their actions often guided imperial affairs in the face of official desires.24 Studying Kentuckians’ own understanding of and commitment to family structure provides a valuable point of entry into this larger debate and reveals the many ways that fringe populations inserted their personal and regional concerns into global power struggles. The ubiquity of the household ideal during this critical period of national reckoning is worthy 9

INTRODUCTION

of our attention if we are to understand how settlers conceived of the world they helped create at the far reaches of the American state. More importantly, by looking critically at the whole household, this book explains the importance of all settlers—men and women, free, slave, servant, and child—to a frontier narrative that is often dominated by white men alone. As this book explains, the ascendance of a frontier egalitarianism that ultimately embraced the political equality of all white men had roots in these personal struggles over relations of power within the household. The themes that frame this book are, in many ways, ideas that women’s and gender scholars have been talking about for some time. Women’s historians have long studied the ways that concepts of a mythologized household ideal masked political, social, and economic upheaval in a wide range of contexts.25 The ideal of an ordered household has infused American politics since the nation’s founding, just as it continues to shape debates and policies in the present day. This is a book about events that unfolded at a certain time in a certain place, events that were shaped by the particular historical circumstances of political revolution, territorial expansion, and frontier discontent. And yet, many of the ideas herein can be read as part of larger historical patterns. As Kentucky settlers and western leaders responded to conditions of frontier instability, they forged solutions through a collective understanding of family supremacy that privileged white male authority and responsibility. In many ways, it could be argued that paying greater attention to the symbolic household—to the mythic substance of the “American dream”—reveals a much larger story about the American experience, one in which the cultural meanings, legal definitions, and economic functions of family have formed the bedrock of our national narrative since the beginning.26 This book is centrally concerned with the familial ideals that transformed Kentucky from a colonial backcountry into a national frontier. As such, I begin my narrative in the 1770s and follow the experiences of frontier families who lived through the violent years of the American Revolution in the West. Although many early American settlers migrated west with hopes of securing cheap land and establishing independent households, the war years forced men and women to reorient their 10

INTRODUCTION

families around the mounting realities of Indian violence and the growing complexities of land law. Although western boosters celebrated the transformative nature of the early frontier as a place where even the poorest men could become masters, the realities of violence and the complexities of land distribution rapidly undermined such expectations. Chapter 2 moves into the 1780s and focuses on one of Kentucky’s earliest and most profitable manufacturing sites, the Bullitt’s Lick saltworks. The saltworks sat on the far western edge of the Kentucky settlements. They were dangerous and dirty, but scores of landless workingmen and -women flocked to Bullitt’s Lick in search of labor and wages. As elite land speculators consolidated their grasp on property and power in Kentucky, ordinary men and women survived as tenants, wage laborers, or itinerant “hirelings.” The daily experiences at the saltworks laid bare the failure of the frontier to create the fabled personal independence that boosters promoted and promised. Instead, white men found themselves working as dependent labor in the service of wealthy elites, often alongside women and slaves. As a case study, the world of life and labor at Bullitt’s Lick reveals men who found themselves stripped of the traditional markers of household authority and denied personal independence on the revolutionary frontier. In an increasingly competitive labor market, ordinary families found themselves strained under economic pressures. Chapter 3 looks at the experience of poverty in Kentucky, with particular attention to the impact of financial hardship on poor women and orphans. As migration to Kentucky continued at an unprecedented rate into the 1790s, local court records reveal the failure of household integrity. Authorities responded with a vision of poor relief shaped by deeply gendered presumptions about household order. Families who found themselves unable to make ends meet turned to local courts for poor relief and financial assistance. Records of the Overseers of the Poor reveal how local courts managed the problem of poor relief, bound out orphaned and poor children, and supported single mothers after their husbands abandoned them. In the practices and policies of poor relief, local and state officials crafted a gendered approach to poverty that aimed to protect women as vulnerable dependents and criminalize poor men as vagrants.

11

INTRODUCTION

The consequences of poverty, economic inequality, political instability, and military insecurity coalesced in popular outrage at the end of the 1780s and the early 1790s. Chapter 4 explores the separatist crisis that ripped through the Kentucky settlements as settlers began to question their place in the new nation. All around the Ohio River Valley, Spanish, British, and Anglo-allied Indian forces labored to sever ties between the westerners and the American state. As western settlers threatened disunion and made overtures to foreign powers for protection, they articulated a critique of the American state that hinged on their right to protect their families. As American authority declined in the West, men and women in Kentucky forged their own understanding of rights and asserted their own interpretation of legitimate government. At the core of their discontent was a vision in which the purpose of government was to secure conditions for men to maintain their positions as heads of households. This dissent in the West required a muscular and lasting remedy if the region was to remain part of the United States. Chapter 5 describes how lawmakers began to recognize that political concessions to the race and gender privileges of white men could secure the region from disorder and disunion. The Kentucky Constitutional Convention of 1792 and the subsequent convention to revise the constitution in 1799 recognized white male privilege through expansive political rights. Once lawmakers realized how politically volatile white male westerners could become when the state failed to secure their status as household heads, they began to repair their eroded status with political rights that celebrated white manhood. Such measures ultimately forged a lasting alliance between rich and poor and paved over the simmering unrest that plagued the region. Political concessions to whiteness and manhood repaired the bonds between elite men and the landless poor without significantly altering the systemic inequality that would persist in the West for decades to come.

12

C H A P T E R ON E “ S E R VA N T T O M A S T E R ”

In 1792, Unitarian minister Harry Toulmin left England and sailed for Virginia in search of religious freedom and tolerance. Accompanied by his wife and children, Toulmin landed in Norfolk with letters of introduction to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Toulmin was intent on finding a new home for his congregation back in England. Both Jefferson and Madison pointed him westward to Kentucky. Kentucky had just entered the United States in 1792 as the nation’s first “western” state. Armed with a new set of letters from Jefferson and Madison, Toulmin and his family headed west, to evaluate the suitability of the Kentucky frontier.1 Throughout his travels in Kentucky, Toulmin took detailed notes on his observations. From these notes, he published a number of works that extolled the virtues of western settlement. Filled with detailed commentary on the value of land, the expense of migration, and the cost of living in Kentucky, Toulmin’s writings provided his audience with everything they would need to make the transatlantic and transmountain journey to Kentucky. In addition to an account of expenses, Toulmin provided a full report on the character of the early American West, evaluating its 13

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potential for regional and personal prosperity. On all fronts, the prospects were glowing. First and foremost, he intended to convince his readers that the dangerous years of the 1770s were over. Intrepid men like Daniel Boone had weathered the most violent years of Indian resistance to white settlement. Toulmin assured his readers that the “hardships and adversity” endured by early explorers had cleared the path for safe and unobstructed white settlement. He explained that the Indians had a saying: “when they see a swarm of [honey] bees in the woods,” they turned to each other and said, “ ‘Well, brothers, it is time for us to decamp, for the white people are coming.’ ” Indian people, Toulmin explained, simply cleared themselves off the land without struggle or resistance. He assured his readers that “a man may settle with as much safety in Kentucky, as he could in any part of Great Britain.”2 Toulmin also addressed the issue of investment. Now that its security could be presented as intact, Kentucky might become a place of boundless opportunities for individual prosperity. “It is impossible,” he explained, for anyone in Kentucky to “experience any thing like poverty,” as no place “upon the globe is so rich in the comforts and necessaries of life.”3 Kentucky was the land of opportunity for any man willing to avail himself of America’s western bounty. The poor, the disenfranchised, and the destitute could prosper in the American West. “No rational man can doubt that America is the country for poor men—for men of small property—for all industrious men—for the friends of liberty.”4 If America was such a place, then Kentucky extended, both ideologically and geographically, its promise over an expanding landscape of American nationhood. Kentucky could transform men of the most humble origins into autonomous citizens. “If the view of the emigrant should be to render himself and his posterity independent,” Toulmin explained, “here is the country that will suit his wishes.”5 Toulmin’s words communicated enormous confidence. His forecast was an unapologetic celebration of peace, prosperity, and social mobility. There was no war in the West. The resources were boundless. His collected writings read like a hopeful paean to the triumph of personal independence over the stultifying constraints of Old World social stratification. In America, Toulmin asserted, any man could rise “from a 14

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servant, to the rank of a master” and “become a free man, invested with lands, to which every municipal blessing is annexed!”6 For Toulmin, the highest aspiration for a potential migrant was to achieve the “rank of a master.” Mastery was an almost holy status, constituting a “blessing,” and the ease with which Toulmin associated Kentucky with personal metamorphosis gave the region an almost a magical quality. Toulmin was certainly not alone in the celebration of mastery on the eighteenth-century frontier. As interest in western investment blossomed during the years surrounding the American Revolution, observers and promoters heralded the opportunities for the common man lying just beyond the crest of the Appalachian Mountains. Toulmin was part of a larger chorus of voices—Thomas Jefferson, Gilbert Imlay, and John Filson among the most prominent—to equate western migration with the demise of Old World decay and the ascendance of New World opportunity. Whether they wrote of the wonders of the forest or the virtues of the farm, eighteenth-century commentators celebrated the “western waters” as the portal that turned men into masters.7 Seldom stated in such celebrations was the fact that becoming a master was contingent on the presence of many people who would never achieve such status. The master’s household required the presence of figures whose labor remained largely invisible—the dependent wives, children, and laborers upon whom the vaunted status of free men rested. The work of many created the household, but in the rhetoric of western boosterism, it was the family that really mattered. One might acquire servants or slaves, explained Toulmin, but “this is of no importance to a man who depends on the labor of his own family.”8 In the fantasies of personal transformation that boosters projected onto the Kentucky frontier, the shift from servant to master consolidated an individual into a household. As the head of a household, the minion became the patriarch, the anonymous drudge became a figurehead for many.9 Projecting fantasies of white male household authority onto areas of settlement was not a particularly new idea. Long before Toulmin, commentators celebrated patriarchal household order as the cornerstone of European settlement in the New World. Whether they wrote of cultural superiority over Indian family structure, justified the enslavement of Africans with a rhetoric of paternalism, or based an economy on the 15

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consolidation of female identity into a male household head, the Anglo vision of a patriarchal household unit served deep and varied purposes throughout the colonial project.10 In fact, the particular visions of household authority that boosters deployed in promoting Kentucky reflected well-established notions of family order far more than they forecast new horizons. Nobody knew this better than Toulmin, who tailored his favorable impressions of Kentucky for an English audience that had long grown accustomed to this narrative of familial order in the colonial context. Mailing letters home for publication in London, his visions of ordered, patriarchal households reflect a narrative clarity specifically designed to awaken Anglo desires.11 And, as such, Toulmin’s descriptions of western opportunities little resembled the experiences of actual settlers, particularly during the tumultuous years of revolutionary war. Anglo-American families who moved westward into Kentucky during the 1770s and 1780s carried with them visions of household order that were very much in flux. The war itself transformed ideas about household order in radical ways, shattering notions of male patriarchal authority and female invisibility. During the years of revolutionary crisis between 1760 and 1790, women’s labor gained new levels of visibility and significance. Boycotts and nonimportation movements politicized women’s household production and purchasing power. Communities relied on women’s contributions to supply soldiers and fuel the war effort. When men left farms and businesses for war, women took over households and assumed the management and maintenance of affairs and accounts. Far from just temporary adjustments to wartime conditions, the social changes ushered in by the American Revolution upended the patriarchal household and inspired vigorous debates about the nature of family order and the structure of domestic relationships.12 When families migrated west during the American Revolution, such wartime transformations grew increasingly intense as settlers encountered violence and conflict in a frontier war zone. After 1776, the war exploded in the West as British, American, and Indian powers competed for control of the Ohio River Valley. Violence became a part of daily life for western settlers. Settlers lived in the crosshairs of revolutionary conflict, forcing men and women to adapt household expectations to the realities 16

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of war. The structures in which men and women lived, the social roles they performed, and the very purpose of family life itself revolved around wartime defense, the specter of death, and the dislocation of migration. At the same time that violence threatened their homes, settlers also faced assaults on their property by land speculators and wealthy investors. Small farmers with meager resources found themselves in conflict with the interests of elite gentlemen who had the ready capital and political power to undermine their aspirations of landed independence. Throughout the war years, ordinary men endured intense regional battles over land rights and experienced fierce competition for legitimacy and entitlement. As expectations of white male mastery met the realities of a cutthroat western land market, the visions promoted by boosters like Toulmin rapidly deteriorated. Throughout the American Revolution, external violence with Indians and internal conflicts over land rights eroded the markers of mastery. Concerns over family protection and land ownership undermined the triumphalism that boosters ascribed to the western household. Instead of finding clearly ordered families and productive homesteads, aspiring patriarchs faced a steady decline of their social status. In many ways, the story of Kentucky during the years of the American Revolution emerges at the nexus of visions like Toulmin’s and the failure of the frontier to deliver on the expectations of mastery. Linking the promise of mastery in the West both to household order and to land unleashed expectations that simply could not be achieved during the war years. The shape of the household itself had to adapt. The myths that surround the frontier household have stretched over many generations, celebrating the collective harmony of the frontier family as the apotheosis of American exceptionalism. But during the years of the American Revolution, Kentucky settlers knew only two kinds of homes, neither of which resembled the mythologies of self-sufficiency and rugged individualism with which they were later associated. As settlers migrated into Kentucky during the war, they encountered households shaped by violence and defined by law. During the war, frontier violence determined how and where settlers could live, turning 17

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households into spaces of anxiety and fear characterized by material scarcity and collective confinement rather than self-sufficiency and personal independence. At the same time that violence defined domestic spaces, lawmakers were busily crafting the legal meanings of entitlements to help clarify who could legitimately claim property. These two issues—the daily experience of western violence and the evolving system of land rights— shaped the frontier household during the late 1770s and early 1780s. The American Revolution came swiftly and without mercy to the Ohio River Valley. For years before the war, Kentucky had been a home to hunters, traders, explorers, and a handful of squatters. But American independence brought to Kentucky new waves of migrant families and a growing number of permanent settlements on lands hotly contested by British, Indian, and Americans alike. By the end of 1776, the Shawnee and their allies began raiding the fledgling settlements from the north while the Cherokee launched attacks from the south. Fighting became only more intense the following year. During 1777, the violence grew so catastrophic and produced such massive casualties that Kentuckians would refer to the year as the “terrible sevens” for years to come.13 In the context of an escalating and extremely violent war, families abandoned their ambitions to establish independent homesteads and moved into fortified stations for collective safety. Rather than establish individual households, men and women retreated to the security of these forts. They needed safety in numbers and sought refuge behind defensive walls. Clearing fields, planting crops, and building homes were activities that proved too exposed and too dangerous to pursue during the war. Instead, men, women, and children made their homes in militarized spaces, where domestic life became shaped by violence more than order.14 At defensive outposts like Fort Boonesborough, settlers structured their homes and their lives around collective protection rather than personal independence. Life within the walls of Boonesborough revolved around a crude assemblage of twenty-six cabins that lined the perimeter of the fort. Here, families were confined to a shared enclosure of around only 260 feet long by 180 wide. Each cabin was outfitted with portholes for rifles in case of a siege. Wartime defense required the full participation of every settler, regardless of race or gender. Women wielded guns. Slaves were armed with weapons.15 The very shape and arrangement of the 18

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A rendition of Fort Boonesborough, based on existing plans and records. Illustrates the cramped and collective nature of defensive living in early frontier outposts. From George W. Ranck, Boonesborough: Its Founding, Pioneer Struggles, Indian Experiences, Transylvania Days, and Revolutionary Annals (Louisville: John P. Morton and Co., 1901). Image courtesy of the Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky.

station home was outfitted for war, from the inward slope of the roofs to the second-story overhang on the corner blockhouses to prevent Indian enemies from scaling walls and breaching security.16 Scholars have noted how the defensive nature of frontier war zones placed new emphasis on male militarism and exaggerated martial masculinity.17 In some ways this was certainly true in Kentucky, for the violence of the western conflict required the ready contributions of all fightingage men. But at the same time violence often breached the defensive walls of forts and stations and undermined the ability of men to protect their families and dependents. Furthermore, the ongoing frontier war turned men into particularly vulnerable targets of Indian violence. As the war progressed, American and Indian casualties piled up, leaving women and children without husbands and fathers. One observer reported to the governor of Virginia that “our fort is filled with widows and orphans” 19

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whose “state of weak infancy and helpless widowhood . . . sets heavy upon us.”18 For women and children, the possibility of losing a husband or father was very real. Male vulnerability in war had the effect of creating growing pressures on women to shoulder new responsibilities of widowhood.19 Few understood this quite as well as three-time widow Ann Wilson Poague Lindsey McGinty. Born Ann Kennedy in Virginia in the mid1730s, Ann lost her first husband, John Wilson, and their only child in the early 1760s. She married William Poague in 1762, with whom she had five children in Virginia and two more once they migrated to Kentucky. The Poagues were among the original families to arrive in Boonesborough in 1776. There, Ann and her children joined Rebecca Boone and her family, along with a growing number of other adult women and minors. Before the revolution began, the Anglo-American explorers and settlers in Kentucky had all been male. After 1776, an influx of families like the Poagues brought new populations of women and children to Kentucky.20 When Boonesborough proved too dangerous, the Poagues moved to another fortified station, Fort Harrod, which had been established a year earlier, in 1775. There, Ann lived with three other adult women and their multiple children.21 At Fort Harrod, Ann lost her second husband, William, during an Indian siege in 1778 or 1779. Ann lived as a widow for a few years after William’s death, until she married a third husband, Joseph Lindsey. Lindsey was a former trader in the West Indies who hoped to exploit new markets in the American interior. He settled in Kentucky after serving as an officer in the Army of the West under George Rogers Clark. Ann’s marriage to Lindsey did not last long. Lindsey was killed during the Battle of Blue Licks in 1782, just a year after his marriage to Ann.22 As Ann lost husband after husband to western violence, she carried on the work of sustaining life within the fortified walls of Fort Harrod. She was the only western woman who brought a spinning wheel with her to Kentucky, and she learned to produce cloth from local materials. Without flax to cultivate or sheep to shear, Ann experimented with various weeds and grasses growing around the fort to spin into thread. Before his death, her second husband, William, built a loom on which Ann produced an experimental but serviceable cloth using nettles and buffalo hair. 20

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Confined within the walls of Fort Harrod, she taught the station women to sew using foreign materials and managed the production of all new cloth and clothing at the fort. After the death of her third husband, she lived alone for some time, supporting herself and her children by running a tavern at her home.23 Ann did marry a fourth time, but her marriage was brief and tempestuous. Her fourth husband, James McGinty, was virtually penniless when he met Ann. He may have seen opportunity in the marriage, for, as the widow of three husbands, Ann had accumulated considerable wealth. Shortly after they married in 1787, however, James became abusive and violent. It became clear that he had married her for her money, as James “often insultingly told her,” according to her later accounts.24 They separated after a few years through private negotiations, and Ann went back to managing her household on her own. She ran her tavern and raised her children as a female head of household. After losing multiple husbands to wartime violence, Ann decided to support her family alone.25 Ann’s experiences with frontier widowhood were not uncommon during the late 1770s and early 1780s. While certainly both men and women were targets of frontier violence, men were particularly vulnerable. There were only around two hundred settlers living in Kentucky in 1776, and any military engagement required the participation of all adult men.26 Husbands and fathers were more likely to leave the protected confines of stations and forts than women and were thus exposed to enemy fire more often. Prominent men who had brought families with them to establish claims were particularly vulnerable. Indian soldiers, savvy to frontier leadership, targeted those who held positions of power. Each death left wives and children to fend for themselves. John Floyd, Kentucky’s first land surveyor, was fatally wounded in 1783, leaving a widow and at least one child.27 William Christian, a military leader who served in the Seven Years’ War, was shot and killed, leaving his wife Annie to raise five daughters and a young son. Richard Callaway, an early settler at Boonesborough, was ambushed and killed not far outside of the fort by a Shawnee war party, leaving a widow and several children. As families continued to migrate, the violence grew bloodier. Thomas Jefferson received news in April of 1781 that “forty seven of the Inhabitants have been killed & taken by the Savages, Besides a number of wounded since 21

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Jan[uar]y last,” including military officiers.28 Before the end of that year, Indian raids resulted in the death or capture of 131 people near the Falls of the Ohio. As American forces in the West experienced massive military setbacks in the years before 1782, those numbers would only increase.29 As violence shaped western households, the burden of looming widowhood placed an intense psychological burden on women. Ann Harrod was haunted by dreams that her husband might die in frontier violence. Ann had already lost her first husband in an Indian attack not long after she arrived in Kentucky in 1776. In 1778, she married James Harrod, a prominent westerner who three years earlier had established Fort Harrod, which became the first permanent Anglo-American settlement in Kentucky. Her husband’s prominence as a military and political leader in early Kentucky made him a vulnerable target.30 Ann began having nightmares about her husband’s death. In her dreams, she saw James running outside the fort to help his men during an Indian attack, saw him shot and stabbed to death. Ann had already lost one husband to violence, and her fears reflected her mental torment and anxiety over potential attacks against her second husband and her son. Her dreams proved tragically prophetic. In 1787, her son was captured by Indians and burned at the stake. Not long after that, her husband James left on a hunting party and never returned.31 Settler women bore a particular burden both within their communities and within the broader war zone. As violence between Indian and American men grew so intense in the early years of the war, death became a part of life. Widows often became responsible for the management of estates, the protection of property, and the raising of families. Women’s names are scattered throughout the records of the Virginia Land Commissioners, who first arrived in Kentucky to register land claims in 1779. Many of the claimants’ names were entered as “deceased” and a female heir registered as the official assignee. For instance, Diannah Denton registered land on behalf of her husband John Denton, who was dead by 1779, and Mary Hartness was listed as the heir of Jacob Greenhouse. In 1779, Peggy McNeil claimed a settlement certificate, which was usually awarded in the amount of 1,400 acres, having satisfied the Commissioners that she and her deceased husband, Archibald, had established residence in Kentucky.32 22

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Alongside the issue of inheritance, the presence of settler women took on a particularly significant symbolism in the context of frontier war. Certainly all settlers were vulnerable to violence, but while men were killed as enemy soldiers, Indian raiders often took women and children as prisoners for their value as captives. As recent scholars have shown, captive women and children became crucial to the negotiation of conflicts throughout the colonial world in the eighteenth century. Both Indian and European powers took women and children as prisoners of war and bartered for their return as a diplomatic strategy. While the presence of adult men symbolized hostile intent in the context of war, captive women and children were exchanged in negotiations or were leveraged for peace.33 In the late 1770s and early 1780s, female settlers were both targets of raids and subjects of kidnapping. The reasons behind such targeted raids were complex. On the one hand, scholars have argued that women and children were easier to integrate into Indian communities when taken into captivity than men. When Indian people took captives in war, they often used those prisoners to replace or “cover” losses within their own communities. On the other hand, more recent historians have identified the particular significance of female captives within a system of Indian diplomacy based on kinship and gender. If women’s lives were spared during Indian raids, it was not because of their imagined innate malleability or ability to adapt to Indian life. Rather, in eighteenthcentury frontier warfare, women and children were uniquely valuable for diplomatic leverage.34 The 1776 raid on Jacob Hite’s family illustrates how men and women served different purposes in the western war zone. Hite was a prominent and wealthy Virginian who had engaged in private negotiations with the Cherokees to purchase a 150,000-acre tract of land—a deal that the courts later voided.35 After struggling with the law, Hite moved his family “to the neighborhood of the Cherokee country.” Barely a month after the American colonies declared their independence, the Virginia Gazette reported that Hite “was murdered at his own house by those savages, with most of his slaves, and his wife and children carried off prisoners; his son who was in the Cherokee country, was likewise murdered.”36 When Cherokee raiders attacked the Hite household, they took his wife 23

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and children captive and left the men of the house dead. They killed both Hite and his son as enemy combatants but took his wife and children into captivity. In western warfare, women and children had greater value as live prisoners than they did as dead settlers.37 The language of the report on the Hite family is also significant. The Gazette made special note of the fact that Hite was attacked and killed “at his own house.” Such language reflected the special symbolism that the home represented for Anglo-American readers. Early American audiences would understand the enormity of this breach through their own deeply rooted notions of the home as a place of safety and security. As well, such language tapped into a familiar narrative that equated attacks against the home with a distinctly Indian form of savagery. As scholars of seventeenth-century Indian warfare have explained, attacks against Anglo-American homes elicited particularly virulent outrage from colonists who, in turn, explained such violations against households with reference to the Indians’ supposed lack of humanity. The attack against the Hite family at their “own house” was more than just an act of aggression against an individual household, it was an assault on the inviolate and foundational institution of Anglo-American identity.38 Even at a heavily fortified station like Boonesborough, families were still vulnerable. Heavily fortified walls could not always protect women and children from becoming targets for kidnapping. In July of 1776, a small party of Shawnees and Cherokees captured Daniel Boone’s daughter Jemima along with two other young girls, Elizabeth and Frances, the daughters of Richard Callaway. The three girls, all teenagers, had ventured beyond the fortified walls of the station for a Sunday afternoon paddle on the Kentucky River. The Indians keeping watch on the fort saw the three girls on the water and overtook their canoe. For three days, the raiding party marched the captive girls northward through the woods. At Boonesborough, Daniel Boone, Richard Callaway, and a handful of other men organized a search party to track the Indians and their female hostages. When the tracking party finally caught up with the Indians, they surprised the party and rescued the three girls.39 The significance of female captivity in the story of the three girls’ kidnapping is often overshadowed by the dramatic rescue orchestrated by their fathers. The abduction of the Boone and Callaway girls has become 24

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one of the most fabled stories of early Kentucky, one that became central to Daniel Boone’s reputation as a founding father of the frontier. In Kentucky lore, the kidnapping of the three Boonesborough girls embodies a narrative of female vulnerability and male protection. As stories of the rescue were told over and over, the episode came to emphasize the girls’ helplessness in the face of an Indian enemy and underscored the men’s bravery in pursuit. Overlooked in this narrative is the subtext of female kidnapping and the significance of captivity to the broader context of frontier warfare. By the eighteenth century, captive women and children had become crucial diplomatic collateral. Indian raiders targeted women and children for abduction because they had value as pawns in diplomatic exchange, not because they were inherently less capable than men or naturally more vulnerable. Rather, as violence escalated throughout the Ohio River Valley after the beginning of the American Revolution, women’s real and symbolic presence became pivotal to broader regional conflicts.40 Kentucky settlers themselves seemed well aware of the powerful role that women played in the evolving rules of frontier warfare. Beginning in the spring of 1782, violence intensified throughout the Ohio River Valley. Both Indian and American forces escalated the ferocity of their attacks. American troops made a number of raids into Indian country, instigating new waves of aggression throughout the region. In March of 1782, American rangers crossed the Ohio River and attacked villages along the Muskingum River. Performing the same violations that outraged settlers when perpetrated against themselves, American troops attacked Indian homes and specifically targeted women and children. In one particularly ruthless moment, soldiers attacked and slaughtered a group of peaceful Delaware Indians at Gnadenhutten, Ohio, most of whom were Christian converts. Two-thirds of the nearly one hundred victims were women and children.41 At the same time that Americans attacked Indian households in savage pursuit, they also manipulated the value of white women in the context of war. When outraged Indian forces retaliated against American atrocities, Kentucky settlers used the symbolic importance of women to their advantage. In 1782, Shawnee warriors surrounded a fortified frontier outpost called Bryan’s Station in preparation for an attack. The 25

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residents of Bryan’s Station anticipated the imminent raid but were not adequately outfitted to withstand a siege. They still needed to collect water from a spring located some distance outside the fortified walls of the station. Unprepared for a battle, the settlers within the station made a calculated decision to send women outside the walls of the fort as a way to forestall violence. If they sent men to collect water, the act would hasten the coming violence. If they sent women, however, they bargained that the Shawnee army would not open fire. The settlers of Bryan’s Station gambled that the Indians were not likely to open fire on women, nor were they likely to kidnap them while being watched by armed men within the fort. Despite being surrounded by Shawnee warriors, the settlers opted to send the women of the station outside of the fort to fetch water from the spring.42 The story of the Bryan’s Station siege would later become another episode of frontier legend, one that enshrined female bravery as a heroic anomaly. Later generations celebrated the women’s courage as they fetched water in the face of a hostile enemy because it was so incongruous with familiar narratives of female vulnerability and male heroism. Such narratives, however, obscure the important symbolic role that women played in eighteenth-century frontier warfare. The decision to send women into the face of an enemy army as a way to ward off or delay violence reflected the profound ways that frontier war had shifted the gender dynamics within settler society. Hostility between Anglo and Indian men had become so intense by the 1780s that their mere presence inspired violence. So long as Indian soldiers valued women and children as captive prisoners, female settlers possessed a powerful ability to mitigate that violence in times of need. Although the women of Bryan’s Station held off the battle long enough to supply the fort, the violence that ensued in the coming siege devastated the Kentucky troops. The attack on Bryan’s Station was an opening salvo to one of the worst American defeats in the western theater. Shawnee troops unleashed an assault on Bryan’s Station and destroyed all the settlers’ livestock and crops. When the Indians learned that the Kentucky militia was on its way with reinforcements, they retreated to an area where their own reinforcements were waiting. In an impulsive and ill-fated decision, the Kentucky men assembled at Bryan’s Station decided 26

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not to wait for reinforcements but, rather, to pursue the enemy on their own. The small outfit of some 160 men, nearly every man of fighting age in the area, followed the Indians to a spring at Lower Blue Licks. Here, the Kentucky militia learned that they were vastly outnumbered by Indian troops. The ensuing Battle of Blue Licks proved to be one of the most devastating defeats for Kentuckians in the frontier wars. It represented a resurgence of Indian military power and eviscerated the Kentucky militia. Nearly sixty men died on the field, and countless more were injured.43 Scarcely a household emerged unscathed from the violence of 1782. Daniel Boone, who thought that the pursuit to Blue Licks was a bad idea from the beginning, lost his son as the militia retreated.44 Those who survived and made it back to Bryan’s Station accounted for fallen husbands and fathers. Boone later remarked that “many widows were now made” as a result of the fighting at Blue Licks.45 Even before the battle, Bryan’s Station had been a haven for widows. Josiah Collins recalled that in the wake of some violent raids, the “widows had to remove with their families to Bryant’s Station.”46 After the violence of 1782, the population of widowed women supporting families on their own only increased. Living with violence shaped the frontier household in fundamental ways. As war raged through the Ohio River Valley during the American Revolution, the ideal of a self-sufficient homestead governed by independent men proved impossible. Confined to forts and stations, settlers lived collective lives shaped by fear and death. Fighting-age men became particularly vulnerable to violence, and widowed women sustained families and estates when their husbands fell. In the context of war, the family unit became fragile and ephemeral. Violence eroded the power and vigor of the patriarchal household as it upended its internal structure. At the same time that violence forced settlers to adapt their expectations of family structure in the 1770s and early 1780s, so too did the politics of land threaten to undermine ambitions of mastery. On the eve of the American Revolution, wealthy investors and small settlers alike were hungry for western lands. Since well before the Seven Years’ War, Virginia’s leading gentlemen had set their sights on the vast acreages of the Ohio River Valley. For most of the eighteenth century, ordinary 27

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colonists had been pushing further and further into the interior, filling up the Shenandoah Valley and rapidly approaching the Appalachian Mountains. In the 1770s, American settlers began to move beyond the mountains and explore the fertile lands and rich hunting grounds of Kentucky. For wealthy Virginians, such migrations portended opportunity. They were eager to exploit this land for personal gain and leverage themselves in a risky but potentially profitable venture.47 Few Virginia gentlemen wanted to move west themselves.48 Rather, they hoped to secure patents to massive amounts of acreage and then parcel them out for sale to small farmers. Their ambitions echoed those of Virginia’s early colonial elite, men who during the seventeenth century had turned the practice of land speculation into a high art. The great Tidewater patriarchs of colonial Virginia amassed estates by learning how to treat land as a commodity rather than as an endowment. In perfecting the art of speculation, Virginia’s early elite changed the very meaning of land. Whereas the Old English gentry traditionally viewed land through ancient manorial models of entitled estates, the colonial planters began to commodify land for commercial exchange. They bought and sold land with wild abandon, accumulating unheard-of acreage, dividing it up into small plots, and selling it off for profit. A century later, Virginia’s eighteenth-century gentlemen, looking back at the commercial vision of the great Tidewater planters with great admiration, hoped to emulate their entrepreneurial acumen in the early national West. Such men looked to the lush, well-watered lands of the Ohio River Valley and saw raw material they could buy in bulk and sell off to settlers for handsome profits.49 They certainly had an eager market. Ordinary settlers were just as poised to exploit frontier lands, albeit in different ways, as wealthy investors. Poorer men and women also heeded the call of opportunity, looking to the frontier as a place to escape the social stratifications of life along the eastern seaboard. Further, the great tobacco plantations that once fueled the growth of the British Empire in North America had taken their toil on Virginia lands, exhausting the fertility of fields and diminishing the profitability of farms. If the rumors about the abundance and fecundity of Kentucky lands were true, then westward migration could provide boundless new horizons for rich and poor alike.50 28

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The outbreak of the revolution released both settlers and speculators onto these rich western lands. Revolutionary leaders like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Patrick Henry had expressed interest in Kentucky as early as the 1760s, and much of their revolutionary opposition to British policy grew out of frustration with the royal ban on western speculation. After the British cut off investment in Kentucky with the Proclamation of 1763, Virginia elites began to articulate a forceful critique of the crown’s western land policy. Many saw British policy as hostile to the interests of investors who were eager to consolidate western acreage and profit through its sale. By 1768, Jefferson had begun work to secure himself seven thousand acres of land west of the Appalachian Mountains. Although Jefferson never had any interest in moving to Kentucky, he knew that dividing up a large investment into small, twohundred acre farms for sale to individual families would reap a healthy profit.51 While the revolutionary elite readied themselves for a western land boom, so too did ordinary people with few financial resources at their disposal. Poor settlers like Bartholomew Fenton, a Virginia servant with aspirations of personal independence, also began to make plans for a new life in Kentucky. Fenton had not been in Virginia long before he began to imagine new opportunities on the fabled Kentucky frontier. In the tumultuous years before the revolution, Fenton lived across the Atlantic Ocean in London and sustained himself as a petty thief. In 1769, British officials arrested Fenton for stealing twelve pigeons and sentenced him to criminal transportation.52 Transportation was an eighteenthcentury legal innovation whereby the English exported convicts, miscreants, and undesirables to the colonies for punishment and rehabilitation. Fenton was just one of many petty criminals loaded onto the aptly named convict ship Justitia and sent to work in the colonies. He arrived in Virginia in 1770 and was sold into servitude as a sentence for his crime.53 With the outbreak of revolution, Fenton looked westward to Kentucky, hoping that land ownership could transform him from a servant into a master. Fenton was the kind of settler that big investors both needed and loathed. On the one hand, land speculators benefited greatly from the willingness of people to brave the western war zone. Early settlers who migrated to Kentucky in the 1770s absorbed the lion’s share of frontier 29

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violence. The presence of these families protected the very land that investors hoped to exploit. Wealthy land speculators needed such people on the front lines to secure and develop the land for their future benefit.54 On the other hand, investors ultimately wanted to control the distribution of land, and the ambitions of enterprising settlers were at odds with such ends. Even before the outbreak of war, individuals took advantage of the pending imperial crisis and, absent any clear sovereign power, maneuvered for western lands. Despite the 1763 royal prohibition of settlement in the region, opportunistic settlers took advantage of deteriorating imperial relations to slip beyond the grasp of colonial authorities. As one essayist in the Virginia Gazette noted in 1773, “Not even a second Chinese wall, guarded by a million soldiers could prevent the settlement of the lands on the Ohio.”55 Those early settlers who migrated during the early years of the war hoped to secure title to land through their own hard labor. They planned to cultivate land and establish homesteads as a way to lay claim to property.56 Despite the intentions of speculators, settlers like Fenton made their way to Kentucky and began working to establish land claims by planting corn and clearing fields. By 1776, Fenton, barely out of servitude, sought to establish his personal independence by working and, ultimately, owning land on which to establish his household. One early settler, John Jackman, recalled settling in Kentucky on the north side of Elkhorn Creek in 1776 and mentioned “Bartholomew Fenton on the east” clearing fields and building a rough shelter.57 Jackman and Fenton were among the few, but eager, Anglo-American migrants to attempt permanent settlement in Kentucky in 1776. Although few in number, wealthy land speculators saw such settlers as potential problems. They were squatters on land that they hoped to procure and exploit for themselves. Individual settlers faced fierce competition from wealthy investors who hoped to consolidate Kentucky lands for profit. As war raged on throughout the frontier, Virginia gentlemen engaged in a legal assault for property rights that tipped the scales in their favor. This simmering conflict placed the interests of yeoman households against the ambitions of men who could mobilize massive amounts of capital. Investors could broker land deals that would eclipse options for small farmers. They stood poised to wield far greater power over the region than poor men 30

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like Fenton, who had only a crop of corn to secure his status as an independent landholder.58 Early among such speculators was North Carolina’s Richard Henderson, who in 1775 launched private negotiations with the Cherokee to claim a huge portion of Kentucky lands. Although the colonial governments of Virginia and North Carolina immediately denounced Henderson’s largely secret transaction, rival speculators who saw the potential for huge profits in such a scheme viewed him with great envy. Individuals like Henderson followed the lead of investors like the ill-fated Jacob Hite, who had negotiated directly with the Cherokee a few years earlier. Like Hite, Henderson negotiated under the radar of clear governmental authority. Such efforts by independent actors operating beyond the scope of official sanction drew the ire of both legislatures and courts. But the potential for such huge land grabs jeopardized the interests of individual settlers with limited resources most of all.59 Individual settlers perceived such speculation as a threat to their comparatively modest ambitions to establish family farms. In response to Henderson’s scheme, a group of petitioners from Kentucky appealed to Virginia to help protect the rights of small settlers from being priced out of land ownership by such powerful men. They complained that “a Certain set of men from North Carolina, stiling themselves proprietors and claiming an absolute right to these very Lands taking upon themselves the Legislative authority,” have attempted to sell land “at an Exorbitant Price.”60 If small farmers could not afford to buy land, they could not claim the political and social privileges associated with property. For individual settlers, the threats to land ownership posed by elite proprietors within the nascent American state were as considerable as those emerging from Indian forces without.61 Why were these petitioners so agitated by the actions of land speculators? The answer to this question lies in the evolving ways that ordinary men understood the relationships linking land ownership, personal independence, and household mastery during the era of the American Revolution. Traditionally, land ownership represented the cornerstone of personal independence, the foundation upon which the master’s status as a patriarch and a citizen rested. But while European and colonial culture had traditionally required some kind of property ownership for political 31

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participation, the American Revolution brought new urgency to the idea that male independence was vital to the survival of the nation. As the revolution ushered in a new political culture of civic republicanism, Americans began to equate the fate of the nation with the character of its citizens. The survival of the republic hinged on a citizenry composed of virtuous, self-sacrificing, industrious, and, above all, economically independent men. Only those independent men with economic standing were beyond the reach of bribery, persuasion, and corruption. Land ownership provided men with economic autonomy and the legal status to represent their household dependents in civic life. It was the bedrock of their status and manhood.62 In other words, there was far more than just acreage at stake in the speculation blitz that descended upon Kentucky after the colonies declared their independence. Although wealthy investors had long harbored interests in western lands, the threat of unrestrained land speculation became a critical concern for small farmers after 1776. The prohibitions against western migration imposed by the crown in 1763 had curtailed only the actions of large investors. While the British would not authorize land grants beyond the Appalachians, they could do little to stop individual settlers. Thus, in the years before the war, small farmers were able to establish themselves as squatters and claim land through cultivation. American independence changed all this. Suddenly, investors with ready capital, newly released from the royal prohibition against speculation, were eager to make up for lost time. Virginia’s elite gentlemen hoped to pick up where Henderson left off. They threw themselves at Kentucky with a voracious appetite for land.63 The revolutionary Virginia legislature saw that fierce competition over Kentucky lands could easily descend into chaos. For Virginia’s revolutionary leadership, the schemes of land speculators like Henderson signaled the lack of coherent authority in the West. In many ways, declaring independence created a sovereign vacuum in the Ohio River Valley. Where the British once managed negotiations with western Indians, American leaders had no such formal authority. The ambiguity of sovereign power along the frontier created space for independent actors and land speculators to launch ambitious deals of dubious legality. For Virginia’s leadership, many of whom were wealthy men who had waited 32

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long and struggled hard for a chance to profit off of western lands, the possibility that others like Henderson might orchestrate massive land grabs right under their noses was profoundly troubling.64 Thus, with the outbreak of war, Virginia endeavored to assert control over the region of Kentucky more aggressively than they could under colonial rule. In December of 1776, the Virginia legislature created the “County of Kentucky” and assumed authority over the region. Their efforts were intended to end the covert and unregulated speculation by the likes of Henderson and Hite and to ensure that valuable western lands would supplement the Virginia treasury. At the same time, it also secured the western territory for the very Virginia speculators who had had their sights set on Kentucky for decades. By extending jurisdiction over Kentucky, Virginia’s legislature asserted sovereignty over a public domain that many revolutionary leaders hoped would reap private profit.65 Tensions emerged almost immediately between small Kentucky settlers and wealthy absentee landholders over the meaning of land ownership. At the heart of this conflict were white male anxieties over their right to govern their own households. Such tensions centered around two fundamentally different understandings of what it meant to own property. Migrants chafing under Virginia’s land laws asserted that those who worked the earth and risked the dangers of settlement legitimately possessed the land they inhabited. Those who owned land on paper, those who possessed property but had never laid eyes upon it or sunk a shovel into it—they did not deserve the legal title they claimed. Wealthy and well-connected Virginians, in contrast, believed they owned land through purchase and legal title and secured claims to vast acreages throughout the region without any intention of migrating and without ever setting foot in Kentucky. In many ways, both claims were legitimate.66 For individual landholders, however, the difference between these two visions of ownership compromised the foundations of their status and manhood. If the state privileged an investment of several thousand acres that trumped the claim of a small investor with just a crop of corn and his family to his name, the small farmer lost far more than just his land. Ordinary settlers stood to lose their personal status, their very identities as independent men. While large land proprietors had only potential profits to risk, small farmers stood to lose their only claims to status if the state 33

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allowed wealthy investors to swallow up opportunities for men of meager means. The coming deluge of legal titles and land grants threatened to wash away the only measure of worth that gave ordinary, white male migrants claims to mastery equal to their wealthy competitors. Few had resources at their disposal to spend on legal fees defending their titles. For ordinary men, the instability of land rights threatened the very integrity of their households. Virginia leadership took small farmers’ concerns about their status seriously. Legislators sought to resolve conflicts over property ownership by passing a land law that would accommodate small farmers and investors with government titles alike. In 1779, Virginia’s General Assembly passed a law to control the distribution of “waste and unappropriated land” in Kentucky through a system of treasury warrants.67 The Virginia Land Law of 1779 made explicit accommodations for settlers who had made improvements to property before the law passed. The law provided for three different kinds of land purchases. First, it made “settlement” tracts of four hundred acres available at low prices for those who actually lived in Kentucky. Second, those settlers who made improvements to the land, such as building a cabin or clearing a field, could register for a “preemption” claim to an additional thousand acres. Third, all other lands not registered as settlement or preemption claims could be purchased through “treasury warrants” for 40 shillings per hundred acres with no limits to the size of claims. It appeared to be a system that could accommodate both the hunger of investors and the interests of small settlers.68 But as large land investors gathered like storm clouds on the horizon, individual Kentucky settlers began to realize their vulnerability, even with the state guarantee of four hundred acres. In a petition responding to Virginia’s passage of the 1779 Land Law, Kentucky settlers acknowledged the “virtue of the late act of Assembly, in opening and establishing a Land office,” but opined that “at the same time we your depressed petitioners . . . will be intirely deprived of the opportunity of geting so much as one hundred acres of land, notwithstanding the loss of our properties and so many of our lives which we have expended in Defence of this country.” As they watched wealthy Virginians gobble up large acreage all around them, Kentucky petitioners argued that they “think 34

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four hundred acres two [sic] small a compensation, which will be all we have in our powers to procure.”69 The petitions Kentuckians sent to Virginia reflected male settlers’ deep anxieties about their ability to provide for their families and maintain their status as heads of households. They expressed concerns about everything that land ownership represented for white men. The Kentucky petitioners described themselves as independent yeoman farmers. They explained how the current system of land distribution eroded their capacity as patriarchs to protect and provide for their families. They were compromised as husbands and fathers and unable to fulfill their duties as heads of households. They complained of being “reduced . . . so low that we have scarce cattle amongst us to supply, our small Family’s.” Expressing the enormous personal toll assumed in migrating to Kentucky, they lamented that “many of us . . . now at this juncture have not left so much as one cow for the support of our familys.”70 Petitioners explained to Virginia’s leaders that the prospect of supporting a family had motivated them to migrate to Kentucky in the first place. “We think it expedient,” they explained, “to show you the reasons why some of us who first settled in the country will be deprived of geting amends for our losses and troubles first.” Family safety was paramount among those losses. “Many, of our inhabitants both married and single, have been taken by the Indians,” one petition read, “their wives and children left in this destitute situation not being able as yet even to support their indigent family’s some of which never marked or even choose a piece of Land in the country.”71 Above all, the petitioners worried that Virginia’s land policies might force ordinary white male settlers to become dependent men. If they did not received “speedy redress” by their petition, they claimed, ordinary settlers would “lie under the disagreeable necessity of . . . becoming tennants to private gentlemen.” They would be forced to labor in the service of wealthy men, paying rent in cash and crops to serve the rich, without claim to any property of their own through which to stake their personal independence. While elite investors sat at home in their Virginia estates, paying little mind to the danger or hard work incumbent on the frontier, the “tennants to private gentlemen” in Kentucky cleared their land, planted their fields, and improved the value of their property at 35

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enormous personal risk. This, the petitioners appealed, was “too rough a medicine ever to be dejested by any set of people.” Already, agents of those wealthy gentlemen were invading Kentucky on behalf of land speculators. Wealthy investors, they explained, had “men employed at this junction in this country at one hundred pounds per Thousand for running round the land,” claiming vacant property. Their exploitation of unequal policies and vulnerable resources would squeeze individual settlers out of their only shot at becoming independent men. Mastery, they explained, was in jeopardy.72 In many ways, the petitioners were right. By design, the policies put in place in 1779 encouraged inequality. The elite leaders of revolutionary Virginia had had their hearts set on massive speculation in Kentucky since the Seven Years’ War. Although the Land Law made four-hundredacre allowances for small, individual settlers, it also ensured that speculators would have legal rights to more extravagant claims. The 1779 law granted that “any person may acquire title to so much waste and unappropriated land as he or she shall desire to purchase.”73 Thomas Jefferson, who became governor of Virginia the same year the Land Law went into effect, understood that investors’ interests in western lands were qualitatively different from those of ordinary settlers. Jefferson’s pen signed off on the law allowing for the sale of enormous tracts of Kentucky land, bringing to fruition long-anticipated desires of a generation of revolutionary leadership to profit off of western resources. Add to this long-simmering desire for western lands the reality of mounting Revolutionary War debt, and Virginia leadership saw no reason to curtail the sale of land to anyone willing to pay for it.74 When Virginia lawmakers tried to moderate the anxieties of ordinary settlers, they did so by trying to determine the legitimacy of small farmers’ claims to land. In October of 1779, Virginia sent four commissioners to Kentucky to serve as agents of the Virginia Land Office. The Virginia legislature charged the commissioners to hear out testimony and determine who had a legitimate claim to a land certificate. They rode a circuit, stopping at the fortified stations where Kentucky settlers clustered for safety to hear out claimants’ testimony.75 Determining who had legal title to land was not always easy. Although the law was explicit as to who qualified for a four-hundred-acre land certificate, the reality was much 36

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more complicated. Few early migrants lived on the land they claimed in 1779—most were still confined to fortified stations for safety—making proof of settlement difficult to discern. The law claimed that “no family shall be entitled to the allowance granted to settlers by this act, unless they have made a crop of corn in that country, or resided there at least one year since the time of their settlement.” For those who arrived prior to 1778, settlers only had to have “built any house or hut, or made improvements thereon” to be entitled to a preemption land claim.76 To qualify for a preemption land claim, in other words, those who arrived in Kentucky during the dangerous years of 1776 and 1777 had to prove that they had established some kind of permanent dwelling. The requirement of “any house or hut” was a dubious threshold that the commissioners had to examine with some scrutiny. This legal threshold of a “house or hut” was immediately exploited by investors. Opportunistic speculators sent out land agents to claim plots by carving initials in trees and throwing up hasty structures. A “house or hut” could be little more than a pile of logs. It was these men—men hired by investors to start “running round” the land, piling up brush, and chopping down trees to mark their claims—that had petitioners worried when they complained to the Virginia legislature.77 In this murky legal landscape, large investors emerged the clear winners in the contest for acreage. Taking full advantage of the legal tools provided by the 1779 Land Law, wealthy eastern speculators turned their initial attention to treasury warrants. Just one year after their land law took affect, Virginia sold treasury warrants for 1,925,796 acres of Kentucky land. Most of this land was concentrated in the hands of a small group of interested speculators. Nearly one hundred thousand acres of Kentucky land belonged to only twenty-one individuals or investment partnerships.78 But that was not enough. Once out-of-state speculators figured out how to manipulate the law in their favor, there seemed little to stop them from consolidating land. First, they found loopholes around treasury warrants and began staking claims to settlement and preemption warrants. Although the prerequisite to a settlement or preemption land claim was actual improvement of the land, wealthy Virginians continued to stretch the definition of “improvements.” Speculators hired “land jobbers” to 37

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build structures that barely qualified as “improvements.” These land jobbers, complained Kentucky surveyor John Floyd, would “go about in companies and build 40 to 50 cabins,” which often consisted of little more than three or four logs arranged in a square.79 Such rough “improvements” could quickly translate into legitimate claims to forty or fifty thousand acres of preempted lands. Speculators with financial resources, they complained, “only raised a small cabin [and] perhaps never stayed three weeks in the country.”80 Next, speculators ensured that their friends and relatives filled positions as land officers and surveyors in Kentucky who would privilege and expedite their claims. Land speculator John May, for example, had grandiose plans that included appointing his brother to the Virginia Land Office. In 1779, he wrote to his financial backer, Samuel Beall, to explain the details of his somewhat nefarious dealings. “I think the Success of the Scheme will in great Measure depend upon the Secrecy with which the Business is conducted,” he told Beall. He explained that he had “desired my Brother to search out all the Land which belongs to british Subjects, and make himself well acquainted with its Quality Situation and other Advantages; and also to endeavor to get one of my Brothers appointed Escheator in Order to make sure of our Assumpsits being received in Paiment.”81 With a family member in charge of recording official contracts, May had a considerable advantage in Kentucky’s cutthroat land market. May died in the late 1780s as one of the largest landholders in Kentucky. His fortune at death accounted for 831,294 acres of Kentucky lands.82 By the end of the war years, the worst fears of ordinary men were coming to fruition. Ordinary men recognized their disadvantages within the new system and complained about the imbalance of power within the growing land bureaucracy. At the same time that ordinary settlers were fighting a war in the West against the Indians and their British allies, they were also defending themselves against a legal assault orchestrated by wealthy and well-connected American investors. Settlers’ efforts to procure lands and establish households deteriorated in the face of legal obstacles and financial disadvantages. Bitterly resenting these circumstances, early settlers continued to petition Virginia authorities that the land laws stripped rights from those who endeavored to establish households in favor of those who engrossed the land. They argued that many early settlers 38

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were “through illetrisy . . . unable to ascertain the true meaning of the Law” and “have not Enter’d their Lands so special and precise as the Law Requires.”83 By the end of the revolution, the legal mechanisms of land acquisition had become cryptic by design, ensuring that the misfortunes of ordinary men would line the pockets of the powerful. By the end of the war, white male ambitions of mastery had been undermined and compromised by both violence and law. Under siege by Indian armies and British forces, Kentucky settlers abandoned efforts to establish households and pursue dreams of self-sufficiency and personal independence. Instead, they lived a militarized existence within the protective walls of isolated frontier outposts. Families lived together in collective spaces, haunted by death and domestic disorder. As violence ripped through the sacred space of the household, it shattered any illusions of male protection and household stability. And, as they soon found out, the revolution did not end in the West in 1783. Rather, violence escalated throughout Kentucky and the broader Ohio River Valley. American migration increased dramatically after the war and, with it, a growing determination on the part of Indian people to repel further settlement. In the context of western violence and an escalating war, the household ideal remained an elusive fantasy.84 At the same time, dreams of mastery and personal independence were being equally subverted by the politics of land. The land laws and patterns of speculation established during the war laid the groundwork for the widespread exploitation of ordinary people. The combined forces of law and political influence made it increasingly difficult for small farmers and ordinary white men to maintain or even procure a freehold. Within a matter of years, wealthy speculators controlled the vast majority of land in Kentucky, creating some of the starkest economic inequality Americans had ever seen. As we will see in subsequent chapters, the consequences of such inequality undermined the economic autonomy of households and eroded the internal order of families. As migration to Kentucky increased after the end of the American Revolution, ordinary men watched their aspirations of mastery crumble under the pressure of frontier violence and the weight of western land policy. Increasingly, they found themselves living in circumstances that were antithetical to their expectations of the West. Rather than becoming 39

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independent men and heads of households, they risked violence and war to become “tennants to private gentlemen,” paying rent to aggrandize the estates of the wealthy. As landless men living as tenants, paying rents, and struggling to protect their families, they could not make the claims to personal independence or patriarchal authority they anticipated in the West. Ordinary white men envisioned that they would be transformed into masters on the Kentucky frontier. Instead, the circumstances of settlement had turned them into what they feared most: dependent men.

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C H A P T E R T WO “TO LIVE INDEPENDENT”

In 1794, the Kentucky Gazette published a poem about “Susan the Breeches Maker” that described the prayers of a young working girl hoping to find a husband. The poem recounts Susan’s modest wish that she might meet a man to relieve her of her loneliness but also explains how she imagined the power relations in her ideal marriage. The poem read: Beside a lamp besmeared with oil, Sue toiling sat for riches. Her aching heart, a husband fill’d, her lap, a pair of breeches. “Ah me!” with feeble voice she cry’d While sighs oft rose the stiches; “Ah me, and must I live a maid, And only make these breeches?” “Ye Gods!” then raised to heav’n her eyes— “O grant my wish soon, which is

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A husband young, a kind good man, And let me wear the breeches.”1 If Susan ever married, she hoped to wear the pants in the family. To “wear the breeches” meant that she could adopt the male role as head of household and wield the power in her family. As she toiled for her riches by making men’s clothing, she envisioned herself someday wearing those clothes as a symbol of authority over her husband. The fictional Susan did not plan to relinquish autonomy and become a powerless dependent when she married. Rather, she hoped to adopt the markers of personal independence by dressing the part.2 Susan’s gender-bending prayers poked fun at the dark anxieties over households, labor, and power lurking in Kentucky households after the American Revolution. The men and women who descended on America’s eighteenth-century frontiers after the war did so with certain presumptions about the structures of labor and gender in the household. At the heart of these presumptions were expectations about land and the privileges of white male independence that came with property ownership. While land could be quantified, however, the meaning of male privilege was far more diffuse. Concomitant with the desire for land was the anticipation of male independence and female dependence, relationships forged within the order of the patriarchal household. Such household relationships secure not only a man’s social and cultural status but also his place as a citizen in the new republic. As historian Jeanne Boydston has explained, the “true citizen of the Republic was the man upon whom others depended; his economic obligations to subordinates both expressing and solidifying his commitment to the common good of the Republic.”3 Susan’s desire to “wear the breeches,” in other words, turned the household upside down.4 The story of Susan the Breeches Maker spoke to deep systemic problems simmering in Kentucky’s broader social and economic landscape. As migration into the early national West increased after the end of the revolution, structural inequality and social insecurity metastasized throughout Kentucky, rendering male claims to personal independence profoundly uncertain. Throughout the 1780s, Kentucky experienced staggering rates of population growth. The Virginia Gazette estimated that

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between 1786 and 1789, 19,889 “souls” sailed down the Ohio River, bound for Kentucky on 1,067 boats, carrying 8,884 horses, 2,297 cattle, 1,926 sheep, and 627 wagons. And these were only the ones that observers could count. In addition, there were countless others who “passed in the night, unnoticed.”5 Alongside those coming from Virginia, migrants from North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and other points of origin uprooted to try their luck on the American frontier. By 1790, the first census of Kentucky showed a total population of 73,677, including free white males, free white females, enslaved black men and women, and a handful of free blacks.6 In many ways, the frenzied rate of migration made Kentucky look very different from other areas of the post-revolutionary frontier. Nowhere else in the Anglo-American backcountry had experienced such a rapid population explosion; neighboring areas in the backcountry regions of Pennsylvania and North Carolina settled at a more measured pace. Settlement in western Pennsylvania had progressed steadily throughout the colonial period, and migration into Tennessee was comparatively slow after the American Revolution. In its first census of 1790, Tennessee had barely half the population of Kentucky.7 But the differences were apparent in more than just numbers. Settlement in Kentucky also created some of the starkest economic inequality Americans had ever known. In the post-revolutionary decade, the vast majority of wealth quickly became concentrated into the hands of the few. The land policies established in the 1770s described in chapter 1 set the groundwork for a massive land grab by wealthy elites that left the majority of settlers out in the cold. The rates of landlessness that developed in Kentucky throughout the 1780s were unprecedented. Historian Fredrika Teute’s landmark study of tax records in eighteenth-century Kentucky counties reveals that most white men in Kentucky could not claim land ownership by the early 1790s. In the coveted north-central Bluegrass region of Kentucky, over 80 percent of heads of households owned no land at all by the time of statehood in 1792.8 In southern and outlying regions, where poorer settlers and squatters were more likely to migrate, the extent of landlessness was lower but still significant. Almost 70 percent of household heads in Madison and Logan counties, for example, owned no property.9 Vast wealth existed in Kentucky, but it was 43

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concentrated into the hands of a few. The top 1 percent of the population, a select cabal of just 107 men, owned a third of all land in Kentucky. Although touted as the “best poor man’s country,” by 1792 nearly three out of four white men in Kentucky owned no land at all.10 As a result, the vast majority of migrants would end up living lives of tenancy and paid labor. By the early 1790s, most white men in Kentucky would become what they feared most: “tennants to private gentlemen,” paying rents to a wealthy elite or laboring for wages. By working for others or paying rent to landlords, these workingmen—“hands” or “hirelings,” as they were often called—were beholden to others. They were dependent men. In working for others, they occupied a degraded position, one not worthy of republican citizenship. As one historian has noted, for eighteenth-century Americans “independence meant not self-sufficiency but avoiding those activities and jobs that placed one person under the command of another.”11 Landless men and wage laborers could aspire to be yeoman farmers, but aspirations to personal independence quickly vanished out of reach.12 For such men, the markers of patriarchal authority became fraught and elusive. Landless men and wage laborers might rely on the supplemental income of their wives or children. A wife might advertise home products in the newspaper or take in needlework for wages. A father might bring a son along to help chop firewood to sell or allow a daughter to keep house at an inn or tavern for pay. Although drawn to Kentucky as the fabled promised land of personal independence, the majority of white men instead found themselves laboring as dependent workers and putting their families to work to get by.13 Examining the social and economic experiences of the landless majority in Kentucky helps us understand the deeper meanings behind the character of Susan the Breeches Maker. In a world where the gendered meanings of dependence and independence were undermined by economic inequality and disparity, a woman aspiring to wear male clothing and head her own household was a symbol for much larger transformations. It underscored the important connections between one’s daily labors and one’s claim to authority. It spoke to the shortcomings of white male independence in a cutthroat and unsteady economy and linked those deficiencies to the erosion of social status. Above all, it 44

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described a world in which the husband was no longer the head of his own household. Throughout the 1780s, the fantasy of boundless cheap land and upward social mobility dissolved into structural inequality and limited opportunity. In order to understand how dreams of personal independence gave way to realities of chronic dependence, we must also look beyond the mythic homestead of frontier lore and locate the places where landless men sought employment and struggling women produced income. Perhaps no location is better suited for such inquiry than the Bullitt’s Lick saltworks. Bullitt’s Lick was the location of one of the earliest industries in eighteenth-century Kentucky, and it became home to disparate populations of hirelings, slaves, families, day laborers, and itinerant workers. As a case study, the Bullitt’s Lick saltworks sheds light on the deep divides between the idealized expectations of manhood and the actual experiences of economic strife and dependence in eighteenthcentury Kentucky.14 As migration to Kentucky increased through the 1780s, the hierarchies of race and gender that white men anticipated in the household ideal failed to materialize. As we shall see at Bullitt’s Lick, opportunities for landless and itinerant workers attracted a diverse set of women and men that included poor white workers, wealthy female managers, middling overseers, and hired slaves. The vast majority of people who came to the saltworks were laborers who worked for wages doled out in bags of salt.

Detail of Filson’s 1784 map of Kentucky. Shows the location of Bullitt’s Lick, the Salt River’s trajectory off of the Ohio River, and the roads between the saltworks and Louisville. Image courtesy of the Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky. 45

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They participated in commercial exchange in the stores and taverns that cropped up in the vicinity of the salt pits. Following the day-to-day operation of the saltworks illuminates the personal, and often unpredictable, ways that ordinary Kentuckians navigated and defined the new realities of family survival in the early West and explains how they ultimately came to recalibrate their expectations of household order at the edge of American empire. Just south of the crude collection of cabins at Louisville, the Salt River forks off of the Ohio into what looks like a grasping hand of branches and tributaries. Beginning in the 1770s, settlers began processing the saline-rich waters along the creeks and channels of the Salt River to produce a commodity that was essential to their survival. In the early West, settlers needed salt to preserve food and game through the lean winter months. It cured their hams, dried their beef, and preserved their deer. Many of the early Anglo-American hunters and explorers in Kentucky first took notice of Bullitt’s Lick when they tracked animals to its saline-rich waters. Modest operations began to process salt from these waters on a commercial scale by the late 1770s. Within just a few years, the saltmaking operation at Bullitt’s Lick was fast on its way to becoming one of the biggest and most profitable industrial enterprises west of the Appalachian Mountains.15 The Bullitt’s Lick saltworks sat on land that belonged to Colonel William Christian, a prominent Virginia military man with a committed interest in western land investment. He had served as an officer during the Seven Years’ War and had long set his sights on the lucrative potential of the Ohio River Valley. After the war, Christian studied law under Patrick Henry in Virginia, where he met and soon married Henry’s sister Anne. William wasted little time exploring western lands with his new bride. William and “Annie” Christian, as she was known, moved several times in the years before the revolution, always moving further and further west. Before the revolution began, William represented Virginia’s westernmost county of Fincastle. During Lord Dunmore’s War—a conflict pitting the western ambitions of British colonists against the treaty rights of Indian hunters in the Ohio River Valley—Christian commanded Virginia’s western militia, a task that would ultimately lead 46

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to his promotion to the rank of colonel. With the outbreak of the American Revolution, Colonel Christian retained his rank in the service of the patriot cause.16 After American independence, William and Annie moved with their six small children to Kentucky, taking up residence near the Falls of the Ohio in Louisville. They settled along Beargrass Creek and established Fort William to serve in the defense of the vulnerable settlement along the Ohio. They well knew the value of the salt deposits on their property. Captain Thomas Bullitt recognized the salt deposits in 1773 while surveying the property for Christian. Saltmakers began to work Bullitt’s Lick by the late 1770s. By the time that William Christian and his family migrated to Kentucky in 1785, the operation had grown so substantial that a town known as Saltsburg sprang into being at the works to sustain the saltworkers and their families. It became an extremely valuable investment for the Christian family. As early as 1784, Christian reported to his mother in Virginia that “Saltsburg goes on now middling well and I expect to draw some Profit from it this year.”17 The development of the Bullitt’s Lick saltworks became a family affair for the Christians. The Christians’ collective involvement in the development of the saltworks became particularly apparent after William was shot and killed in southern Indiana in 1786, barely a year after William and Annie’s arrival in Kentucky. William was able to make his way back home to the cabin he and Annie shared near Louisville and died in their front yard, leaving a wife and six children on their own in the midst of a war zone, far from family relations and personal security.18 After her husband’s death, Annie Christian took on the task of managing her household on her own. As a woman of means, she had the advantage of close advisors and friends to help sort through her affairs. But she also found herself at the helm of the saltworks operation, a position that gave her authority over what was fast becoming one of the most profitable industrial undertakings in the early American West. In his will, William bequeathed the management of Bullitt’s Lick to his only son, John, but John’s status as a minor left the responsibility for managing the saltworks to his mother. As the head of the Bullitt’s Lick saltworks, Annie Christian hoped to establish economic security for her 47

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family. Writing to her mother-in-law shortly after William’s death, she explained that by generating income at the saltworks, “I hope to live independent.”19 What did Annie Christian mean by her hope to “live independent”? The complex meaning points toward broader cultural shifts in the shape of frontier households. Far more than a desire to live alone or a pledge never to remarry, Annie’s comments spoke of her commitment to support herself and her family on her own. Such commitment to personal independence, however, was seldom associated with women in the early republic and certainly not on the fabled frontier. In the wake of the revolution, personal independence was largely, and increasingly, becoming an exclusively masculine ideal. Women, children, slaves, and other household dependents contributed to and benefited from male independence, but they were excluded from the powers and privileges of such status. When men aspired to personal independence, they sought the ability to live free from obligation, beholden to nobody, be they employers, masters, or landlords. This aspiration to personal independence distinguished them from slaves, servants, women, children, or other laborers who would largely be excluded from such opportunities. Dependents were managed and provided for by masters, husbands, fathers, or employers. Independent men were their own masters.20 Thus, Annie Christian’s hope to “live independent” was also the lifelong goal for many of the men she employed, albeit one that was fading quickly beyond their grasp in the increasingly stratified western landscape. Many of the workingmen who toiled under Annie Christian’s oversight imagined wage labor as a temporary condition, one that would soon afford them inroads toward procuring land, establishing households, and becoming independent men. In reality, many of the poor men, hired slaves, and working women who made their homes at the salt-producing region outside of Louisville saw the saltworks as a throwback to Old World systems of exploitation. Annie Christian and a small circle of elite beneficiaries profited off of the hard work of many. Far from a path to independence, working at Bullitt’s Lick placed itinerant hands and hirelings in positions of dependence alongside women, slaves, and even child laborers.21

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The work itself was dirty, hazardous, and technical. Of the many things that might strike a visitor to the Bullitt’s Lick saltworks in the 1780s, perhaps the most intense would be the smell. One would probably anticipate arrival at the saltworks from a considerable distance by the smell of thick wood smoke that billowed up constantly from the works. Fires burned day and night under the huge iron kettles that boiled saline water. Wood choppers and wagon drivers transported cord after cord of wood from the surrounding forests to feed the flames and fuel production. During daylight hours, the smoke from the kettle fires would mix with the occasional smell of explosives as well-diggers blasted through subterranean layers of limestone to secure access to the remnants of ancient oceans trapped deep beneath the earth. Saltworkers at Bullitt’s Lick sought access to the remains of an inland sea that once covered the Ohio River Valley. Glaciers never reached the region; over several thousand years, layer upon layer of sand and mud deposits trapped salt water in the sandstone and limestone strata of the valley.22 In closer proximity of the saltworks, a visitor might notice the smell of wood smoke tinged with the deep aroma of salt brine. As the brine boiled, the steam mixed the sulfuric, earthy scent of salt water into a thick layer of pungent smoke that filled lungs and saturated clothes. Recalling his visit to the Bullitt’s Lick saltworks in a letter to a friend in Massachusetts, Thomas Perkins made special note of the smell of the operation. “It is remarkable,” he said, “that the water from which they boil the salt is almost as black as ink, owing . . . to its passing through a large pit of coal; and this idea is strengthened by the smell of the water when boiling, resembling that of the burning of coal, with a very strong mixture of sulphur.”23 Visitors to the Bullitt’s Lick saltworks noted the visceral onslaught of smoke and brine in their trips throughout the region, noting the presence of water “impregnated with salt” among the “curiosities” of the Kentucky landscape.24 Others who visited Bullitt’s Lick recognized that the brine buried beneath the earth was far more than an environmental wonder: It was also a highly valuable resource. The saline-rich Salt River that fed Bullitt’s Lick had long been a destination for salt seekers. For centuries, animals flocked to the tributaries of the Salt River to lick the mineral deposits off of rocks and earth. The French traveler André Michaux 49

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observed such a phenomenon in his travels through Kentucky, recording how “the soil is impregnated with saline substances . . . whither the Buffaloes used to go in great numbers to lick the particles of Salt continually exuching [sic] from the surface of the soil.”25 Animal populations attracted Indian hunters who carved out pathways to and from the salt licks in search of game. When Anglo settlers arrived in the 1770s, they quickly recognized the dire need to tap this essential resource. One of the earliest petitions Kentucky settlers sent to the Virginia legislature was a request for assistance to build salt manufactures. In 1777, they petitioned that “bountiful Nature hath plentifully furnished this Country with Salt Springs where at a small expence Salt might be made in abundance.”26 Those who recognized the value of salt to the region marveled at the size and scope of Bullitt’s Lick as the only commercial saltmaking operation in the West. Extracting salt on the scale of Bullitt’s Lick required considerable investments in labor, technology, and capital. Salt makers boiled the saline brine over long furnaces walled with slate and clay. When Colonel William Fleming of Virginia visited the saltworks in 1779, he reported how “a trough holds very near 2000 gals. [of brine] which they empty thrice in the 24 hours. They have 25 kettles . . . which they keep constantly boiling and filling them up as the water waistes.” The intense boiling created an increasingly saturated solution; eventually, salt crystallized out of the concentrated brine. After an initial twenty-four hours of boiling, Fleming noted, saltworkers “put the brine into a cooler and let it stand till cold or near it and draw off the clear brine into the last boilers under which they keep a brisk fire till they observe it begin to grain when they slacken the fire and keep them at a simmering boil till it grains.” The massive production that Fleming observed in 1779 would more than double in size over the next ten years. Eventually, as many as sixty kettles perched above the fires in the pit furnaces, burning night and day.27 As the operations at Bullitt’s Lick grew in size and scope, so too did the demand for human labor. The saltworks were dependent on access to three important resources—wood, water, and people—to pump water, boil brine, chop wood, blast wells, and provision a transient population. The works initially operated alongside the deep saltwater wells close to the Salt River. But as woodcutters depleted the fuel supply from the 50

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surrounding woods, the need for firewood forced the whole production to move from its original location near the wells. When the works moved further away from the wells, saltmakers devised new strategies to transport brine to kettle. They fashioned hollowed-out logs with iron joints to create pipelines that drew water out of the wells and carried it over land to the kettles that were poised over the furnaces. Some of the most backbreaking labor at the works was that of the water-drawers, whose unremitting task was to manually pump water out of the deep wells in order to keep the salt brine flowing.28 Few visitors to Bullitt’s Lick took notice of the menial laborers, noting instead the productive capacity of the saltworks and marveling at the commodified resources. But it was human labor that extracted salt from the deep wells and processed it through backbreaking work. Those who came to make salt were both desperately poor and fiercely ambitious. They came from all walks of life: day laborers, unskilled workers, hired slaves, skilled craftsmen, trained overseers, opportunistic shopkeepers, itinerant traders. Bullitt’s Lick was a hectic place, where landless men, poor families, and hired slaves came and went. Thomas Perkins did not mince words in his opinion of the saltmakers, explaining that the owners of the Lick did not live among their workers. Rather, the investors would “carry on the business of salt-making by negroes and ignorant people, under the direction of an overseer as ignorant as themselves.”29 Indeed, Annie Christian employed a broad spectrum of dependent laborers—the poor, the enslaved, and the itinerant alike—in a demanding industrial setting that challenged the sensibilities of many who visited. One eighteenth-century commentator recalled that the saltworks were known as “a hell on earth.”30 The location of the saltworks on the far western fringe of American settlement made them a particularly dangerous place to live and work. The violence that ripped through the region during the revolution intensified throughout the 1780s, particularly in the exposed western regions near the Falls of the Ohio where Bullitt’s Lick was located. In 1782, William Christian reported that “37 People were taken in a Station upon Salt river about 40 miles from the Falls.”31 Writing to Christian just a few years later, Robert Daniel described how tenants living at the saltworks remain always “cautious of another siege.”32 As Annie 51

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Christian moved to Kentucky, she became acutely aware that “Saltsburg lies much exposed to Indians, & every person expects [an attack] to be made there soon.”33 While the geopolitical vulnerability of the saltworks shaped the general sense of insecurity of life at Bullitt’s Lick, so too did the constantly shifting population and the related absence of social stability. Workers came and left, regularly and often. In this ever-changing and dangerous environment, anxieties over social status simmered just below the surface of daily interactions. The economic vulnerability of poor, itinerant white men seeking work at Bullitt’s Lick starkly devalued the social capital of their race and gender privileges. Far from independent men, the dependent white male saltworkers at Bullitt’s Lick labored alongside hired slaves, then handed their income over to a female tavern owner at the end of the day. In a system much like tenant farming or sharecropping, workers rented salt pits, iron kettles, and other equipment necessary for production. In exchange, the workers paid their landlords rent as a share of the salt they produced. Tenants would then hire white “hands” or black slaves to pump water, haul wood, tend fires, manage livestock, or perform countless other tasks required to bring salt from the earth. Alongside wage workers, the family members who accompanied tenants or itinerant laborers often found formal employment in Saltsburg or engaged in the informal labor necessary to sustain and provision the operations at Bullitt’s Lick. A white widow disbursed wages to woodcutters, a young female slave kept house at a tavern, a white shopkeeper’s daughter managed the store, and roaming hands mingled with hired slaves over steaming kettles of salt brine.34 The expansion of early industries throughout Kentucky benefited from the growing disparities of wealth. As uneven systems of land distribution created widespread landlessness, the majority of white men fell into some form of dependent existence, whether as tenants or as laborers, with limited opportunity for social mobility. While Kentucky boosters like Harry Toulmin continued to assert that “no labouring persons find themselves in that country” well into the 1790s, in truth a cadre of landlords and employers relied on a steady supply of such dependent men.35 When another early Kentucky industry, the Bourbon Iron Furnace, first began development along the Slate Creek just east of Lexington, the 52

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undertaking advertised a desire “to engage Stone Masons, Carpenters, Quarriers, Wood cutters and other labourers.”36 The project required both workers trained in specific trades and “other laborers” without much expertise. When Elijah Craig endeavored to open a ropewalk, he advertised for a number of “Hands,” or unskilled workers, “to assist at the walks” in return for “generous wages.”37 During the boom years of development after the end of the revolution, when labor was relatively scarce, workingmen might actually expect to receive “generous wages.” One scholar estimated that by 1784, on the eve of the post-revolutionary population boom, a common laborer could make as much as twelve shillings a day. But as migrants poured in and the number of job seekers soared, the price of labor plummeted sharply. By 1797, the same workers could expect to receive only two shillings and six pence as a daily wage.38 Such meager wages were certainly not enough to support a household, particularly given the high expense of consumer goods in Kentucky. Cash was notoriously scarce to begin with, and the transportation of goods to western markets forced a considerable markup on imported goods. Visitors to Kentucky remarked on the outrageous prices of consumer goods compared to costs in eastern cities. One observer noted that “what cash there is, soon becomes collected in the shops and returns for goods; imports selling from one to two hundred percent more than the Philadelphia price.”39 In her estimates of consumer costs compared to income, historian Elizabeth Perkins reckons that a common laborer would have to work one day for a pound of coffee, two days for a pound of tea, and over nine days to buy a hat. Country produce cost less than such imported goods but still made a considerable dent in a limited income. Laboring for a day and half would buy one bushel of corn, and one day of work could purchase a yard of country linen. On top of room and board or rent paid to landlords, such daily expenses made it nearly impossible for a workingman to support a household on his own.40 Under such conditions of scarcity and want, “generous wages” rarely meant hard cash. At the saltworks, workers were more likely to receive bushels of salt as payment or gallons of whiskey in exchange for their labors. Notices in the newspaper routinely mention whiskey as a form of currency. Bonds might be specified as worth a dollar amount “payable in whiskey.”41 When an overseer at Bullitt’s Lick asked for payment for the 53

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wagon drivers, he requested that the “Waggoners have Sixty Bushells of Salt,” to which Annie Christian added her note: “PS also let them have a half Gallon of whiskey: AC.”42 Whether paid in whiskey or salt, the formal accounts of the saltworks emphasize a heavy dependence on male labor. Those who were quantified in account books and ledgers were paid wages for the heavy manual work of maneuvering wood and water. The saltworks employed workers of all levels of expertise, from managers and overseers to skilled technicians to unskilled hands. Nicholas Meriwether’s estimate of the expenses required to keep the saltworks running illustrate the centrality of male labor to the operations at Bullitt’s Lick. Meriwether was an early manager at Bullitt’s Lick and ran a tavern near the saltworks.43 His estimation of expenses for every twenty-four hours of salt production included “8 Cord of Wood . . . 12 Men to tend the Furness day & night . . . c. 3 Waggoners, Teems, & Wagg[on] & Geer . . . 5 Kittle tenders . . . 10 Wood Cutters . . . 5 Waggons, Teems, & Drivers . . . provisions.”44 According to Meriwether’s accounts, the industrial nature of saltmaking required expenditures in traditionally male work: felling trees, chopping wood, hauling fuel, managing wagon teams, and hoisting iron kettles over furnace fires. As the saltworks grew in size and scale, so too did the demand for men to work “day & night.” Laborers might know of Bullitt’s Lick through word of mouth or through a friendly tip from another itinerant hand. They might see a notice in the Kentucky Gazette for work: “GOOD WAGES Will be given for three Waggons and Teams, that will start to Bullitt’s lick next week for Salt.”45 Working directly with the salt pits, however, was only one of the jobs that workingmen might find at the works. As the town of Saltsburg grew to accommodate the growing demands of a large workforce, men in need of wages might find odd jobs building structures, repairing fences, or stocking shelves. The wages a workingman made at such odd jobs were hardly sufficient to support a household. In fact, workingmen often found themselves behind on their accounts or in court for debts. Such was the case for John Crutchlow, who found himself in court for debt in the amount of “eight pounds & eight pence half penny for goods, wares & merchandise.”46 Crutchlow owed money for purchases racked up at a store operated by 54

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Andrew Hynes and Company. The supporting case documents illustrate Crutchlow’s efforts to work off his debts by taking on small tasks and odd jobs. In 1797, he entered into an agreement with Moses Moore to shingle two cabins and to build each one a covered porch. For Andrew Hynes, he agreed to work for a spell in a bake shop. In October, he contracted to build a writing desk for twelve shillings and took a job in a storehouse, for which he was paid eighteen shillings for unspecified “work done.”47 Floating from job to job, men like Crutchlow could survive hand to mouth, making enough to get by, but not enough to satisfy their creditors. Crutchlow’s accounts with Hynes list ordinary purchases and an occasional indulgence. In June of 1796, he bought a “tin bucket” and a “quart mugg.” He spent a lot of money on buttons and cloth and occasionally indulged in a pint of port wine and a pound of tobacco. His wages for odd jobs were barely enough to satisfy his basic necessities. The twelve shillings he earned for building a writing desk, for example, merely paid off his credit for whiskey purchased at Hynes’ store.48 Earning wages, working for others, living as dependents: None were ways for white men in the early West to become independent republican citizens of the new American nation. The white men who toiled at the saltworks were not the independent men who would protect the republic from outside influence. They were not Thomas Jefferson’s “chosen people of God.”49 They may have labored in the earth, but it was not for themselves. They were unlikely to marshal enough resources to purchase land in Kentucky’s fiercely competitive market on a few bushels of salt. The gallon of whiskey they could bring home might purchase household provisions, but it was no long-term solution. They would still rely on their employers for sustenance.50 As wage-earning men, such workers were beholden to those who dispensed their paychecks and thus in theory were vulnerable to political manipulation. Well before nineteenth-century political culture would celebrate wage-earning men as breadwinners and household providers, those who worked for others in the eighteenth century were viewed with suspicion, anxiety, and disdain. Working for wages harkened back to the depravity of Europe, where the wretched masses lived in poverty producing luxuries for the rich. As Benjamin Franklin put it, laborers worked “below the Savage State that a few may be rais’d above it.”51 As 55

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dependent men, they also lost the markers of household authority that allowed them to represent members of their family in public life. So long as they shared status with other household dependents, they lost their social authority as true patriarchs.52 Saltworkers and other itinerant laborers often found themselves working side by side those whose race or gender reinforced their lowly status as dependent men and underscored their alienation from the republican ideal. These shortcomings could, at times, become vulnerabilities as workingmen found themselves the subject of ridicule and their status mocked in ways that reinforced hierarchies of race and gender. While waiting for their wages alongside hired slaves in Annie Christian’s storehouse, few white workingmen could afford to make an issue of their racial privilege or their male prerogative. For a wagon driver like Nathan Bass, low status allowed for a litany of humiliations by his superiors, including challenges to his manhood in court. Bass was a hired hand, employed by a man named Thomas Holt who rented a salt pit at Bullitt’s Lick from Thomas Theobald. The court case that unfolded involving these men degenerated into a cycle of finger-pointing, with each trying to blame somebody beneath them. Theobald sued Holt for failing to pay his rent. Holt blamed Bass for the missing rent, arguing that he had not delivered firewood to the salt pits, thereby stalling production and leaving Holt short of salt with which to pay his rent. Bass, in turn, accused Theobald’s wife of preventing him from delivering firewood.53 When the case came before the court, the testimony exposed Bass’s lack of social status. Bass explained that on one wet and muddy winter day, his loaded wagon came too close to Theobald’s home, and his team of oxen splashed mud into the house. Incensed by the muddy mess, Mrs. Theobald stormed out of her house and stopped Bass’s wagon from proceeding to the salt furnace. In the presence of several witnesses, she threatened to scald Bass and his team with boiling water if they attempted to pass by her door. Adding to the insult, Mrs. Theobald scoffed at Bass, telling him that if he wanted the wood, he should drag the wagon himself.54 For a workingman like Bass to blame a woman for his personal failure was a risky strategy that, in his case, merely highlighted his lack of social standing. Bass tried to cast aspersions on Mrs. Theobald’s character and 56

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blame her for bad behavior as a way to shift scrutiny from himself. In his deposition, Bass used strong language to describe Mrs. Theobald. She had “obstructed” him and “ordered” him about. She had threatened him physically, and he believed that she would “put her threats in execution.”55 Despite his efforts to paint Mrs. Theobald as guilty of wrongdoing, his efforts to denigrate her actions as out of line served only to expose his desperation. Thomas Theobald jumped on the opportunity to undermine Bass’s characterization of his wife by taunting the wagoner’s fragile claims to manhood. Regardless of what his wife had done, Theobald argued, “the threats of a woman . . . ought not to have intimidated a man from pursuing his ordinary labor.”56 Theobald’s jab at Bass reveled how labor in the interest of others undermined white male status and authority. Theobald mocked Bass as less than a man, belittled him as one who would shrink at the intervention of a woman. But he also called into question the nature of his “ordinary labor.” For a landholder like Theobald, “ordinary labor” would mean productive work, extracting goods from the earth for personal profit in order to support his family and his household dependents. The kind of labor performed by unskilled workers like Bass was supportive and facilitated profit for others. In the eyes of men like Theobald, the work of a common wagon driver might be intimidated by a woman because it was barely men’s work to begin with. As supportive, peripheral laborers, dependent men were compromised in their masculinity, performing ancillary work closer in importance to that of women and slaves.57 In fact, even though the saltworks relied heavily on male labor to fell trees and drive wagons, the daily existence of Bullitt’s Lick held together through the supportive work of both free and enslaved women who worked alongside these men. Such work was often obscured, not readily quantified in account books or formal business records. When Nicholas Meriwether outlined his projected expenses for operations at the saltworks, for example, he focused on accounting for costs associated with wages for wagon drivers, kettle tenders, and wood cutters. He considered the price of gear for livestock and cords of wood. But he also included a category for the cost of “provisions.” This entry in Meriwether’s account points to a different kind of essential expense—an expense that did not clearly rely on male labor but, rather, depended on the complementary 57

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work of many people. Wives, widows, enslaved African-Americans, and children of saltworkers produced many of the goods and performed a host of the essential services that Bullitt’s Lick depended on. When Meriwether listed “provisions” in his estimation of saltmaking expenses, he was alluding to the peripheral economy that sustained the operation of Bullitt’s Lick. To outfit a workforce at the Lick, saltworkers needed food, drink, clothes, and “geer.” Somehow, they needed access to bacon and bread, whiskey and cider, shirts and shoes, bridles and saddles.58 At all levels of the operation, women supplied essential, though often invisible, labor that kept the saltworks afloat and their families fed. This work—what historians refer to as the work of “social reproduction”— involves the often hidden labor of washing, feeding, raising, maintaining, and sheltering populations in the service of economic growth.59 During the American Revolution, such labor became a matter of intense public concern as women’s work became intricately tied to the cause of independence. After American independence, women continued to work in vital ways that sustained economies and provisioned communities, but with comparatively less political enthusiasm attached to such contributions. As the yeoman household ideal eclipsed the patriotic home in the 1780s and 1790s, women’s work became increasingly less visible. Without politically charged public scrutiny and community support, women’s work became hidden within the home and comparatively limited to associations with childrearing and domesticity. In the wake of the war, women’s domestic production lost much of its patriotic value and became increasingly devalued and obscured behind the celebration of the male household head.60 Such tensions between visible and invisible work and between male and female labor manifested at all levels of production at Bullitt’s Lick. In an economic landscape defined by male labor and reliant on ever-changing populations of workingmen, women’s labor sustained households and facilitated the daily business at Bullitt’s Lick. White women at the saltworks—wives of the workers, daughters of the tenants, or widows of managers or overseers—often occupied informal, though functionally important, positions of power at the saltworks. Some, like Annie Christian, became important figures after the death of a husband left them in charge. Others might take over responsibilities when husbands 58

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were absent, derelict, or negligent at their jobs. Or, in some cases, a few women at the saltworks simply had a better capacity for management than the men formally assigned to the job, so they assumed control of crucial tasks like managing construction or keeping accounts.61 Although, legally, formal contracts for work were between men, this did not always mean that it was the husband who did the work. In the early years of operations at the saltworks, for example, William Christian relied on the judgment of his sister, Mary Daniel, for the planning of Saltsburg. Christian formally contracted with Mary’s husband, Robert Daniel, to manage Bullitt’s Lick. Although the rental contract to the saltworks was nominally in Robert’s name, the records suggest that William listened to his sister’s advice over his brother-in-law’s suggestions. Mary Daniel may have taken over more responsibility at Bullitt’s Lick because the Christians were not particularly fond of her husband. Robert and Mary were married less than a year after Mary’s first husband died in Kentucky. The Christians thought Robert was of an inferior class, and William apparently “tried every way in his power to break of[f] the match but to no purpose.”62 Annie Christian complained that “for Beauty, Sence, Fortune, Family or Education, [Robert Daniel] is possessed of neither.”63 Alongside the Christians’ personal reservations, Robert proved to be ill suited for management and responsibility. Rumors abounded that Robert had a drinking problem that interfered with his daily responsibilities.64 William Christian took on a considerable loss when he finally ended his dealings with Daniel, who left the accounts at Bullitt’s Lick in disarray. In a letter to his mother, William explained that he had no choice but to eat the loss out of family considerations. He said that he “made no inquiry but just closed the Business as it appeared. . . . I did not choose to dispute with a Sister.”65 Despite her husband’s ineptitude (or perhaps because of it), Mary Daniel took on a central role in establishing the saltworks. Mary’s correspondence with her brother details the heavy burden of expenses required to run the saltworks and describes her plans for shaping the industry and the surrounding town. She was deeply involved in the daily operation of the works and in many ways functioned as a head of household when her husband was in his cups, which was often. By the early 59

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1780s, Mary reported that Bullitt’s Lick “can’t possibly provide salt enough for the Inhabitants of this country—there is about 40 bushels a day made and there would be at least four times that much consumed if it could be made.”66 Mary wrote her brother in 1783 that “you can’t possibly form a just idea of the expence that we shall be at in setting the works a going; it will take twelve wood cutters and twelve kettle tenders, besides hands to raise bread and meat and forrage for the horses and oxen.”67 Visitors to Saltsburg found Mary’s influence throughout the works. One observer reported seeing “Mr. and Mrs. Daniel are at Saltsburg; I have heard lately that they are well endeavoring to carry on the business of making salt to as great an extent as they can.”68 Mary helped to “maintain” the laborers at Bullitt’s Lick and planned to open a tavern, which she expected would “be more profit for the first year than the Salt works.”69 Mary Daniel and Annie Christian were not the only women who took over responsibilities in the absence of a husband. Like her husband before her, Annie Christian contracted with various managers to help run the saltworks while she managed accounts at a distance from the worksite. Among her managers was a man named John Hinch, whose wife, Hannah, occupied a central role in the distribution of salt and the management of business affairs. Shortly after inheriting the saltworks, Annie began corresponding with John, who lived in Saltsburg and fielded requests about orders for salt produced at the Lick. Initially, John managed the saltworks for Annie, but when he drowned in a salt well in 1786, Hannah took over the role of receiving requests from Annie about orders for salt produced at the Lick.70 The salt receipts exchanged between Annie Christian and Hannah Hinch reveal a diverse trade with militia captains, slaves, wives, widows, lawyers, and workingmen alike. Simple messages reflect routine exchanges: “Madam, Please to let the Widow Junkins have 3 bushells Salt. I am your hble serv-t, Annie Christian.”71 Annie charged Hannah with organizing her business at the saltworks. In August of 1786, for example, Annie wrote, “Mrs. Hinch, I shall be much obleged to you to take up the old orders for Salt as fast as they come, and also take receipts which you can send me a memorandum off. AC.”72 Her notations were brief, but Annie sent such messages to Hannah several times a day. 60

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Communication from Annie Christian to Hannah Hinch regarding salt, October 11, 1786. Christian sent notices like these from her home near Louisville to Hinch at Bullitt’s Lick in order to place orders and to direct business at the saltworks. Courtesy of the Bullitt Family Papers, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky.

Such small transactions were never recorded by a land commissioner, never stored in a courthouse, and not registered with the state. They were not the work of formal male heads of households, but they constituted the daily directives that helped the saltworks run. That the salt receipts between Annie Christian and Hannah Hinch survived at all makes them somewhat of an anomaly. The two women, owner and manager, passed these notes back and forth between Saltsburg and Annie’s home near Louisville on small torn pieces of paper barely an inch or two wide. Couriers passed them from hand to hand over dangerous and exposed trails. These small, scrawled notations conveyed important messages about how to pay workers, fill orders, and settle debts. They reported how many bushels of salt changed hands, who received salt orders, and what constituted a daily wage.73 The presence of these two women in Kentucky’s early economy could easily go unremarked precisely because of their seamless integration into it. When Annie Christian replaced Hannah Hinch with a new agent, Captain James Asturgus, for example, she posted a formal notice in the Kentucky Gazette announcing the “partnership entered into between Annie Christian and James Asturgus for making salt at saltsburg.”74 Although the announcement listed James Asturgus as Christian’s contractual partner in saltmaking, Annie wrote to both the Captain and “Mrs. Asturgus” 61

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about salt orders. Although Mrs. Asturgus was not part of the legal partnership with Annie Christian, she remained central to the daily operations of the saltworks. Such economic contributions by women had been celebrated during the years of imperial crisis and revolutionary war. But as the migrants to post-revolutionary Kentucky harbored expectations of yeoman households and autonomous family farms, women’s labor became increasingly suspect, associated more with family failure than patriotic zeal. When husbands shared work responsibilities or when heads of households failed to bring home sufficient income, female family members assumed or supplemented deficits out of necessity. Such experiences were not new to Kentucky and, in many ways, have remained somewhat timeless, as few families have ever been able to subsist solely on a single income despite the persistent myth of the male breadwinner. But after the revolution and into the early nineteenth century, women’s labor became increasingly invisible, shrouded behind cultural and legal fictions that confined female work to the home and legitimized male production.75 The social forces that rendered men’s work visible and relegated female labor to the shadows were particularly potent in the celebrated lore of early western households. In the gospel of national expansion, masculine independence and male-headed homesteads were the building blocks of the republic, supported by the unpaid, domestic labor of dependent women who would feed, clothe, and raise the next generation of citizens.76 As Kentucky remained in the grip of war through the 1780s and plagued by economic inequality through the 1790s, breadwinners were not always up to the task. In this context, women’s labor became a sign of male failure and a potent reminder of family disorder. Such was the case of one manager at the saltworks, Jonathan Irons, who was often so drunk that his daughter, Rebecca Johnson, had to take over the business of managing accounts for him. Deposed later, Johnson recalled that she “helped to keep the books” at the saltworks even though her father was formally in charge of renting out salt pits and equipment. When drunk, which was most of the time, Irons would give away most of the salt he took in to those in need—or to those who could persuade him of need. Johnson recalled that “when he was drinking he would often make salt bargains which he would not recollect when sober.” So bad was Irons’s 62

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drinking that “he would not know his children when they came about his bed.” At times, Irons hired an overseer to take care of accounts, but Johnson recalled that she and her mother did the work most of the time. Johnson explained that along with her care of the account books, “my mother attended to some or most of his business.”77 While formal legal arrangements credited white, male settlers with economic ownership, the physical spaces of transactions revealed a more complicated story about gender and household survival. The presence of Hannah Hinch in the salt storeroom, carefully weighing and measuring out wages in bushels of salt, most likely created a far more lasting impression on the saltworkers than the distant contractual owner of Bullitt’s Lick. Such a physical presence gave Hannah Hinch a real form of economic power. Although denied the legal and political benefits of ownership, Hannah controlled the wages of male saltworkers. Their dependence on her access to their daily bread provided a far more visceral understanding of power and hierarchy than cultural abstractions about white male authority and the yeoman household ideal. Even among those who seemed most vulnerable, the hunger for “provisions” at Bullitt’s Lick created opportunities for female-headed households and single women to secure income. The poorest of workingwomen might find work in a tavern or might gain employment keeping house. They might forage for items to trade for staple goods or bring “country produce” such as “butter, cheese, [and] country linen” to stores to sell for cash or necessities.78 Even alone, a particularly resourceful woman might be able to get by on her own labors. When Sarah Garton and her husband, Uriah, ended their marriage in May of 1788 “by mutual consent . . . for diverse causes known to us,” Sarah managed to support herself through small business ventures.79 Though few records exist to document Sarah’s life, she appeared in the Kentucky Gazette four years after separating from her husband to advertise sales of “sixty gallons of cyder,” apparently peddling homemade victuals and surviving without a husband on small-scale, local trade.80 A non-elite woman might aspire to “live independent” as much as a wealthy woman like Annie Christian. When a woman named Barbara Bibbs in Mercer County left her husband, Frederick Baker, she seemed determined to survive on her own. Throughout her marriage to Frederick 63

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Baker and after their separation, Barbara closely managed the income and property she earned through her own labors. On her own and “by her own industry [she] procured a tolerable property which enabled her to live without being dependant.” After their separation, however, Frederick claimed Barbara’s income as his own and refused to return it. When Barbara sued in 1797, she asserted that Frederick retained “nearly all the property she had procured by her own industry and several lay sums of money collected.” In court, Barbara produced evidence to suggest that her marriage to Baker was void. The jury decided in her favor.81 As the politics of land and labor eroded white men’s aspirations of personal independence, the Kentucky settlements created the space for a woman like Barbara Bibbs to aspire to “live without being dependant” as well. Just what a woman like Bibbs might do “by her own industry” to survive varied. She could have joined the legions of female hucksters, black and white, that helped feed and provision the workingmen. What workingmen might buy with bags of salt, workingwomen might purchase with eggs or “cyder.” For both men and women, manual labor and wage work confirmed and enforced their dependent status. The only difference was that for a woman like Barbara Bibbs, this might seem like an opportunity. For a man like Frederick Baker, however, grasping at his ex-wife’s possessions merely reinforced how readily life in Kentucky undermined his status as head of household. Such failures were equally acute when the privileges of race eroded alongside the markers of manhood. In a competitive labor market, poor white men and women were often understood as interchangeable with their black counterparts. When Mary Daniel needed to hire somebody to staff the tavern at Bullitt’s Lick, for example, she complained that she could “get no woman white or black that [is] fit to keep the house.”82 Just as a white hireling might find himself working alongside a black laborer, a white woman looking for work keeping house might have to compete with a hired slave for the same job. Employers might just as easily prefer to hire “A Likely Negro Woman, Well calculated for house business— Cooks, Washes, Sews, and Knitts well,” to quote one advertisement, as they would a white woman to serve as “a Good house wench,” to quote another.83 64

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Such notices reflected the robust trade in hired slaves among Kentucky’s elite that flourished as greater numbers of slaveholders migrated West after the end of the American Revolution. As migration to Kentucky accelerated throughout the 1780s, so too did the number of slaves. The first census of 1790 documented over twelve thousand slaves living in Kentucky, around 17 percent of the total population.84 During the early, dangerous years of settlement, plantation-style agriculture was far too risky an undertaking for ambitious planters. While still confined to fortified stations for protection during the late 1770s and early 1780s, settlers planted crops for personal consumption, mostly corn, tobacco, hemp, or flax. Few ventured to establish farms or plantations beyond the densely settled areas. Those who owned land in outlying regions often chose to rent property inland, closer to the settled areas, until the threat of violence lessened. As Indian attacks escalated in the West throughout the 1780s, however, opportunities to exploit the land with slave labor continued to be fraught with danger.85 Even if they took on the risk to establish large-scale farms, Kentucky planters had no convenient access to markets for staple crops. Until 1795, the Spanish colonies west of the Mississippi barred Kentuckians from transporting goods downriver to New Orleans (a subject discussed more extensively in chapter 4). Planters also remained closed off from eastern markets by the vast expenses required to transport goods through dangerous passages in the Appalachian Mountains. Further, ongoing Indian war made passage along the Ohio River dangerous as well. Effectively boxed in by the mountains to the East, the Spanish to the West, and Indians tribes to the North, planters diversified their slaves’ labor rather than focus on producing cash crops.86 Rather than establish plantations, wealthy Kentuckians found more reliable profits in renting out land and hiring out slaves. Annie Christian regularly placed advertisements to hire as many of her slaves as possible for year-long terms. In 1788, she advertised to hire “a number of negroes consisting of men, women, boys and girls belonging to the estate of Col. Christian.”87 Nearly a year later, she hoped to renew their hire: “to be hired . . . a number of negroes consisting of men, women, boys and girls one of them a good carpenter—the property of Mrs. Annie Christian.”88 Among the slaveholding elite, hiring slaves was more profitable throughout the 1780s and 1790s than using slaves on grand estates.89 65

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For wealthy landholders, the ubiquity of tenant farmers provided a steady source of labor formerly performed by slaves on large eastern plantations. In Kentucky, tenant households became primarily responsible for the arduous work of clearing fields and improving land. A 1795 advertisement in the Kentucky Gazette describes the services that tenants performed for landholders. “Wanted. Twenty tenants,” the ad requested, “who will take leases for four years of cleared and uncleared land, and will engage to clear in the Kentucky fashion during their lease will at least fifteen acres for each family.”90 With tenant farmers rather than slaves engaged in the laborious and dangerous work of clearing of fields and planting crops, Kentucky’s slaveholders found alternative ways to profit off their human capital. The practice of hiring out allowed the slaveholder to generate profit off of an enslaved worker while a third party provided their food and shelter. Hired slaves worked for individual households, helping out during harvest season or performing “house business” for a family. They might work for a shop or engage in some trade if they had skills such as carpentry or blacksmithing. At times, hired slaves took jobs that otherwise might have provided wages to a white worker, for slaveholders could offer more favorable terms to employers than those demanded by a white hireling.91 In fact, employers’ reluctance to pay white wages led many to prefer hiring slaves at a lower rate.92 While skilled workers might establish some advantage in the labor market, the unskilled hirelings and hands that scoured the landscape in search of wages often found themselves competing with hired slaves for work or unwilling to take jobs associated with slaves. At Bullitt’s Lick, white workers were often cheap, but sometimes they were not cheap enough. Mary Daniel reported that those who lived at Saltsburg would give “every hireling two bushels of salt a week . . . till their hire is out.”93 Abraham Drake of Mason County recalled to his son that he would hire a slave, “male or female, by the day from some neighbouring master,” since affordable white “hirelings” were hard to come by.94 Although many employers saw white hirelings and slaves as largely interchangeable, free workers’ expectations of a living wage might also make them a less employable source of labor.95 The demand for labor at early industries such as saltworks, iron works, and rope manufactories created a steady market for work that could be 66

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interchangeably performed by either poor white men or slaves of both sexes. When she did not hire out all of her slaves, Annie Christian put the rest to work at Bullitt’s Lick. In using her own slaves rather than white workers, Christian was quite clear that she considered white laborers and slaves interchangeable. When she and her son-in-law Alexander Scott Bullitt argued over whether to rent salt pits to white workers or to work them with her own slaves, Annie was convinced that her slaves were less expensive than white wage laborers. White workers, she argued, were too careless and depleted the surrounding timber supplies too rapidly: “A much more Saving plan must be fallen upon the present one; the timber I am informed is chiefly cut off the old 1000 acre survey, and the entries adjoining are all desputed; Cou’d we be so fortunate as to be able to work the Lick with the Estates Negros, much timber might be saved, an object of importance to the Heir.”96 Bullitt, however, was resistant to Annie’s point of view. Although he was the executor of William Christian’s estate, Bullitt had no say in the management of the saltworks. One of early Kentucky’s wealthiest and bestconnected individuals, Bullitt was frustrated by his inability to control the lucrative salt industry and often interfered with his mother-in-law’s business with attempts to undermine her authority.97 In 1788, Bullitt went over Christian’s head and negotiated a contract to rent out the works for seven years, leaving her little control over the workforce. She responded to Bullitt’s actions by reiterating her commitment to using her own slaves to fill jobs at the saltworks. She believed that slave labor was more costeffective than white labor and would better allow her to preserve her fortunes for her only son Johnny’s inheritance. Tensions over the management of the saltworks strained Annie’s relationship with her son-in-law (in fact, Annie rarely saw her daughter after she married Bullitt, their dislike for each other was so strong). Writing a terse letter to Bullitt, Annie outlined her plans: “As Saltsburg is Johnny’s whole dependence I wish to carry on the works in a manner most conducive to his interest, and was surprised to hear you had leased them out for Seven years, a term I cannot agree to, I intend to rent them yearly until the debts are discharged, and we can carry down our own hands to work the place.”98 While hiring out slaves or using her own might seem to benefit a slaveholder like Annie Christian, it also could potentially offer certain 67

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advantages to a slave. Slaves were legally dependent people, technically subject to the will and persuasion of their masters. But when they were hired out, slaves might find opportunities to navigate their inherently exploited status through their own agency. While some masters, like Annie Christian, hired out their slaves for a set amount of time and oversaw the terms of contracts on their own, others might allow a slave to hire themselves out and negotiate their own terms. In a competitive labor market like Kentucky, many slaveholders saw advantages to allowing a level of personal freedom for slaves to seek out their own work. They could find opportunities to hire themselves out as wage workers, provided that they turn over a set amount of those wages to their masters.99 For some, this scenario even introduced pathways to a level of economic freedom and perhaps even opportunities for self-purchase. If a slave laborer hired him- or herself out for a set wage but made income over that amount by working extra hours, taking on odd jobs, or trading goods on the side, many slaveholders would allow them to keep and save such income.100 One advertisement in the Kentucky Gazette, for example, described a female slave who ran away with a male slave, possibly her husband, who regularly engaged in his own trading enterprise around the saltworks. The ad described “a likely negro woman, named Mille, about 22 years of age” who ran away with “a negro fellow named Glafeo . . . who trades commonly to the licks to free himself.”101 This advertisement suggests that an enterprising slave was able to raise money for the specific purpose of purchasing his own freedom; further, it suggests that such ambitions were open and “commonly” known. Opportunities to trade in a place like the saltworks might provide slaves with valuable tools for their own advancement. At the licks, Glafeo could have sold his goods to any number of storeowners and merchants who supplied the saltworkers. He may have traded with the many slaves or white hirelings who labored in the salt pits. Whomever he traded with, Glafeo did so regularly and, in subtle ways, shared the same ambition for economic independence as the white men who may have purchased his wares. At an industrial setting like Bullitt’s Lick, with masses of landless workers toiling for wages, aspirations for personal independence were not limited to white men alone. Markers of race and gender did not grant white men exclusive access to economic autonomy in a world of mixed 68

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dependent labor. White women supported households and managed dependent workingmen in the highly transient world of the saltworks. And slave men and women worked alongside itinerant whites in ways that eroded the social boundaries of dependent and independent labor. For at least some enslaved people, the exigencies of the frontier economy created opportunities for personal gain that would have eluded them in the East. But the mixed labor system that emerged at Bullitt’s Lick was a delicate one. For some white men, living and working as dependent labor undermined the race and gender privileges that many anticipated western migration would bring. Working for wages alongside slaves compromised the privileges of white manhood to which they aspired. In 1796, for example, an overseer working for John Breckenridge described his displeasure when he observed the close social relationships between a black slave and a white worker. The overseer claimed that Breckenridge’s stableman was too close to the slaves. “I am very much Displeased with the Conduct of the Groom,” the overseer wrote, “for I saw him walking Lockd arms with the negrows the other day.” The overseer confessed that “if he gows to intimate with your negrows it will offind me vry much.”102 Why would the company kept by a stable boy offend Breckenridge’s overseer? The answer to this question suggests that different groups of workingmen and -women had different levels of investment in racial difference. The groom enjoyed keeping social relationships with slaves, something the overseer saw as a problem. Both the groom and the overseer were among the throngs of white settlers who migrated to Kentucky after the end of the revolution in search of opportunity and status. A lowly groom, however, may have had significantly fewer opportunities for social mobility than did the higher-status overseer. The overseer, who might have aspired to become a property owner with slaves of his own, had greater interest in establishing clear boundaries between himself and hired hands, both black and white. As such, a groom who brazenly defied racial distinctions and openly fraternized with slaves compromised the overseer’s fragile claims to status and authority.103 Throughout eighteenth-century Kentucky, the intense competition for work, the erosion of white male privilege, and the complexity of household relationships in a harsh economy planted the seeds of discontent. The demise of white men’s expectations of personal independence and 69

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authority over dependents forged deep reservoirs of resentment among many white male laborers. Internal conflicts over status and authority created a highly unstable society at Bullitt’s Lick, one in which descent into violence seemed always to lurk in the shadows. Evidence of such tensions over race, status, and labor occasionally surfaced when white workers lashed out in acts of violence against those they considered social subordinates. In 1798, an industrial “accident” at Bullitt’s Lick bore the markers of hostile intent. The manager of the saltworks, Moses Moore, sued to recover doctor’s bills incurred by one of his hired slaves. The slave, Moore claimed, “was accidentally or designedly hurt by some person at the lick by a stroke with an axe.”104 The incident appeared only as a few brief notations in the records of the Bullitt County court. We will never know if the slave was hurt intentionally or not, but Moore was familiar enough with racial tensions at the saltworks to admit that intent was a distinct possibility in this particular conflict. For those competing for work against hired slaves, enforcing boundaries between white and black became one of the few ways to differentiate status. Such an act of violence suggests that defining status became increasingly important for those frustrated by their inability to claim it through land and independence. Financially beleaguered white men without the economic foundation to claim status increasingly enforced social difference to serve this purpose. What they could not claim in personal independence themselves, they could potentially deny to others through violence. Enforcing such distinctions between white workers and hired slaves became one of the only ways that poor white men distinguished those dependents in conditions of servitude from those who were entitled to wages and owned their own labor. As the markers that distinguished the privileged from the subordinate, the independent from the dependent, became blurred and indefinite at the workplace, so too would they obscure the dynamics of power within the home. While white men struggled to define the social status they felt they deserved through their labors, they also grappled with challenges to their authority within the family. As economic inequality in Kentucky festered and worsened into the 1790s, the impact of want and discontent would soon begin to undermine the very structure of family and expose the illusion of household order. 70

CHAPTER THREE “ R U I N P O O R FA M I L I E S ”

As Annie Christian developed her lucrative business making salt at the edges of empire, she seldom encountered a shortage of labor. Throughout the 1780s and 1790s, Kentucky experienced unprecedented levels of population growth as boosters and promoters beckoned eastern inhabitants to enter the garden. When the Baptist preacher Lewis Craig addressed his Virginia congregation before leading them to Kentucky, he ensured them that “heaven is a Kentucky of a place.”1 Migrants heeded the call, and multitudes arrived after the end of the revolution. By 1784, some observers claimed that the population of Kentucky had doubled almost overnight.2 By 1790, the population of free and slave people reached 73,677; over the next decade, Kentucky’s population would triple. Kentucky was fast becoming home to displaced newcomers, men and women, free and slave. Nobody had been there very long, and most had precariously shallow roots in western lands. Many of the newcomers were considerably poorer than earlier migrants. While the outbreak of war had unleashed armies of land speculators and intrepid investors into Kentucky, the end of war brought forth the masses. William Christian noted the desperation that gripped 71

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the Kentucky settlements in letters home. “Money there is none,” he wrote shortly after his arrival in Kentucky in 1785, “and everybody is waiting to get a little from the new Immigrants.”3 A new generation of men and women set their sights on Kentucky after the end of the revolution in 1783, hoping to find cheap land on the storied frontier. Many of the new migrants were former soldiers, men who had received payment for their military service in the form of warrants to western land. They had little to their names but pieces of paper that they hoped would secure title to land for their families and future generations.4 At the same time that a poorer class of migrants began moving west, the population of Kentucky also became noticeably female and remarkably youthful. The first census of Kentucky in 1790 tallied all free white and enslaved black men and women as well as a small handful of free blacks. Of a total population of over 73,000 people, 39 percent of settlers were white women. Slave men and women represented 17 percent. Free white men constituted only 43 percent of the total. This number, however, included both adult men and boys under the age of sixteen. If we remove minors from the census figures, free white adult males made up only 20 percent of Kentucky’s total population in 1790. As a new generation of poorer migrants moved into Kentucky, they also changed the demographic landscape significantly. What had been an all-male settlement on the eve of imperial crisis had transformed into a population dominated by women, children, and slaves in the new American republic.5 These new demographic realities compounded with the growing problems of poverty, placing considerable stresses on frontier families. Kentucky became home to a majority population of traditionally dependent people, with white women making up the largest single group. Further, of the small minority of free white adult males in Kentucky by 1790, few were able to actualize their dreams of land ownership. As discussed in chapter 2, the vast majority of free white men in Kentucky owned no land at all and supported themselves with meager wages or by tenant farming. The number of men who were able to become the fabled patriarchs of booster lore was vanishingly small. The majority of families who came to Kentucky were poor and would stay that way.6 Relocation to Kentucky placed a considerable financial strain on settlers, depleting what precious few resources they had. In 72

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some ways, this benefited wealthy settlers like William and Annie Christian, who relied on a steady stream of poor, itinerant laborers to perform unpleasant and undesirable jobs. But as the influx of settlers steadily increased at a rate of 9 percent per year throughout the 1790s, the poor began to become more of a problem than an asset. By 1800, the population of Kentucky would increase by a remarkable 199 percent to reach 220,955. Within this growth, however, the demographic breakdown of the population would stay largely the same. The percentage of white women remained 39 percent. But as the number of slaves increased, the percentage of adult white men in Kentucky actually declined slightly to just 19 percent of the population by the turn of the century.7 With a growing majority of traditional household dependents supported by a struggling minority of white male tenants and laborers, Kentucky began to look less like an agrarian paradise and more like a preindustrial purgatory. At the local and state level, the persistence of poverty among Kentucky settlers began to raise concerns. Vagrancy, crime, and vice became matters of legislative concern. Husbands left their families without support. Wives turned to public assistance for help. Poor settlers began to prey on each other. As western settlers complained about the financial problems that compromised their frontier ambitions, the issues of land, labor, and poverty became inextricably tied to the stability of households. When Kentuckians petitioned Virginia in 1784 about the perilous consequences of inscrutable land policies, they explained their anxiety in terms of family security. Their plight was not framed by an abstraction about personal independence or individual liberty. What they feared most, rather, was that the struggle for land would “ruin hundreds of poor families.” In their language, the true promise of the frontier would be realized only in patriarchal household stability. As populations increased and economic inequality persisted, white male settlers worried that “the Land upon which we had hopes of supporting ourselves and Families in peace during the Remainder of our Lives will be wrested from us.”8 Visions of land ownership and the familial ideal were one and the same. For this reason, it is crucial that we study not only the land policy and labor conditions but also the changing structure of family in shaping the social and political landscape of the early national West. Men who 73

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migrated to the greater Ohio River Valley after the American Revolution anticipated that a virtuous and enlightened government would secure the conditions of domestic happiness for all white men equally, both as national policy and as individual right. Yet, as one historian observed, the “frontier was a land of equality only in the sense that poverty defined the least common denominator.”9 It was a world shaped by want in which material limitations forced settlers to recalibrate their experiences and expectations of household survival.10 The clearest place to witness the full impact of poverty in Kentucky was at the monthly sessions of the county courts. It was here that local magistrates confronted the wide-ranging repercussions of scarcity and need. Throughout the 1780s and 1790s, the most common cases at monthly court sessions concerned debt. Settlers without land or cash racked up hefty balances with taverns, stores, and landlords to meet their basic needs, and creditors turned to the courts to deal with those who fell dangerously behind. Other evidence of hardship appeared before the courts in the form of petty theft. For a destitute family, a pilfered broad axe might be the key to a job; a stolen bolt of cloth might repair a winter coat. As economic inequality dug in and the gap between rich and poor expanded, the social consequences of poverty grew increasingly public. Perhaps of greatest concern to both local and regional leaders was the impact of poverty on families. Local courts saw the consequences of economic inequality in very human and, increasingly, female terms. Poor mothers sought relief, abandoned wives requested public support, orphaned children needed placement in homes, and destitute widows turned to the courts for help. Demands for public assistance required that magistrates scrutinize the internal experiences of families and make decisions about how best to rehabilitate the coherence of households. During the 1780s and 1790s, the management of households became a matter of public concern.11 The lives of Kentucky’s poorest citizens were transient, ephemeral, and unstable. Historical records tend to be more complete for people who had “stuff ”—that is, possessions worthy of documenting in wills and inventories or financial resources extensive enough to establish relations of credit and debt. People living on the edge did not have much “stuff.” The records that remain to document their experiences reflect the way 74

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they lived. They occupy the historical records like ghosts, as shadowy figures, incomplete outlines of lives, barely visible through the fog of several centuries. Cursory, incomplete, and generally insufficient references place an orphan in a home, announce the birth of a bastard child, document a widow’s struggle. Yet, however unforthcoming the documents may be, the ghosts of Kentucky’s poor haunt the records. From the barest outlines of stories, the broad experiences of poverty emerge.12 The state’s evolving legislative response to poverty illuminates how early western leaders viewed the poor as a growing “problem” in eighteenth-century Kentucky. By the 1790s, legislators began crafting laws regarding poor relief, vagrancy, the placement of orphans, and the administration of public assistance that reflected both regionally specific demands and shifting national trends in the management of poverty. As Kentucky faced unprecedented rates of landlessness and escalating numbers of poor, western legislators had to address the demands of a precarious frontier in their dealings with the needy and the indigent. In their efforts to structure poor relief, authorities scrutinized the internal dynamics of families and intervened when the patriarchal household fell apart. At the same time that they sought to relieve suffering, however, local and regional leaders confronted the growing reality that frontier poverty might lead to western unrest. Economic inequality had sown the seeds of discontent. Nagging poverty, in turn, provided the fertile ground in which such outrage could take root and flourish. In theory, the poor were not supposed to exist in Kentucky. The bounty was so great and the land so plentiful. Said Harry Toulmin in his Description of Kentucky, it was “impossible that we can experience anything like poverty, for no country, perhaps, upon the globe is so rich in the comforts and necessaries of life.”13 In the conclusion of his history of Kentucky, John Filson describes the region as the antidote to poverty, a place so abundant with resources that the poor would be liberated from their condition and live as model citizens of what he called, in 1784, “the extensive American empire.” Filson celebrated the edge of empire as a place that fixed the problem of poverty, where “afflicted humanity raises her drooping head; where springs a harvest for the poor.” Kentucky was “an asylum in the wilderness for the distressed of mankind.”14 75

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The persistent idea that the American frontier might eliminate the problem of poverty had as much to do with conditions in early national cities as with the fantasy of western expansion. In eighteenth-century American cities, poor populations of men and women were becoming more visible, more numerous, more a topic of conversation among civic reformers. As municipal officials developed strategies to contend with the rising costs of poor relief, they pursued more aggressive plans for dealing with men and women facing poverty and hardship. They built institutions to house the poor and almshouses to service the growing populations of needy citizens. The social and civic significance of these new institutional forms of poor relief—almshouses, workhouses, and orphanages—animated public debate throughout cities and seaports wherever poverty spilled over into the streets.15 With poverty on the rise and a new sense of urgency regarding poor relief, fantasies of bounty and abundance in the West satisfied a hunger for solutions. Throughout the Atlantic world, theorists and philosophers grappled with the consequences of industrialization, urban decline, and poverty. Those who proselytized the American frontier were quick to point out how vast western lands would relieve overcrowding and overpopulation and eliminate inequality. As Thomas Malthus linked urban decline to catastrophic population growth, Thomas Jefferson counterargued that America’s western lands rendered such scenarios obsolete. The availability of land on the American frontier meant that men and women would be free from Old World problems like overpopulation and poverty. They would be unleashed from economic and spatial constraints, free to raise large, healthy families on the undeveloped western lands.16 Jefferson’s imagining of America’s exceptional circumstances linked boundless resources with limitless families. “Here the immense extent of uncultivated and fertile lands,” Jefferson wrote in a letter to the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, “enables every one who will labor to marry young, and to raise a family of any size.”17 While cities might continue to blight the American landscape like sores on the body politic, the frontier would release men and women from the plight of urban labor and allow them unfettered access to land and limitless resources for their progeny.18 Nothing could have been further from the truth. While, clearly, Jefferson’s equation utterly and intentionally failed to acknowledge the existence of 76

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Indian families already living in the “uncultivated and fertile lands,” he also mischaracterized the nature of Anglo-American households.19 Kentucky’s imbalanced system of land distribution—the establishment of which Jefferson helped to create—meant that most families would not have land to call their own. The land market favored wealthy investors over individual settlers, leaving the majority of white male migrants without access to property. Only one fourth of Kentucky’s small population of adult white men truly resembled the family ideal that Jefferson described.20 The other three quarters of the white male population would live and labor under somebody else’s roof, whether as tenants, apprentices, or hired hands. Tenancy, in particular, worked to the great benefit of landholders, who were paid in rent while others occupied and cleared their fields. Compelled to pay rent for the arduous labor of clearing and improving land left many tenants in dire financial circumstances. Some fell behind in rent, while others outright refused to pay. Writing to William Christian about the tenants ensconced on his land, Robert Daniel reported that the “tenants now refuse to pay any rent at any rate. . . . I hope you will not be displeased with any of our proceedings relitive to recovering the Rent as I believe they are as grand villians as live on earth.”21 For landless men and tenant farmers with a precarious grasp on financial stability, the descent into poverty was always a possibility. A bad year of crops, a fierce Indian raid, a death or disease in the family might easily drive tenants into irreversible debt or force them out of their rental. Robert Breckenridge, an agent working for Virginia land speculator Samuel Beall, reported that a “number of the Tenants have applied to me to lessen the quantity of rent paid annually, urging that the ground having been Cultivated 10 or 11 years will not produce as much now as formerly by almost one third.” The dual pressures of high rents and poor lands could squeeze tenants beyond their meager capacity. “If any Tenants now on the land should determine to move off in consequence of a high charge of rent,” wrote Breckenridge, “I have not power to alleviate their situation.”22 Life as a tenant was impermanent and uncertain. According to historian Gary Nash, “tenancy held large numbers of farmers in poverty’s grip” throughout revolutionary America, but with unprecedented rates of landlessness, nowhere was this problem more acute than in Kentucky.23 77

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Visitors to Kentucky noted the deplorable conditions of the poor and indigent settlers. Despite the work of evangelists like Filson to depict Kentucky settlers as “polite, humane, hospitable, and very complaisant,” others were less kind in their characterizations.24 When Breckenridge wrote to Beall to describe the circumstances in which people lived, he disavowed him of any illusions of refinement. “The farms are in very bad order,” he wrote, “nor can they be put in tolerable repair but at considerable expense—Indeed such is the decayed state of the Cabins in which they live I am doubtful they will be compelled to quit them—this added to the other inconveniences attending the farms renders the situation of the tenants very precarious.”25 Traveling to Kentucky in 1785, Harry Innes remarked that the region was filled with “indolent, ignorant people” who were “destitute of every convenience of life.”26 Everybody, it seemed, was desperate for cash. Although many used alternative forms of currency such as whiskey, salt, or tobacco as a medium of exchange, settlers alerted anybody heading west from the eastern seaboard to bring cash. Francis Slaughter advised any eastern trader heading to Kentucky to “bring a Certain article call-d Cash . . . as the Scarcity of it is I believe greater than was ever known.” Money was so scarce in Kentucky, he explains, it “is now Estimated more than Gems.”27 The problems created by tenancy, the scarcity of money, and encroaching poverty shaped the lives of all members of a needy household. In many ways, women and children became more conspicuous in their experience of poverty because of their legal dependence on a male head of household. Further, as Indian violence escalated in the West after the revolution, death and disease exacerbated familiar burdens on wives and children.28 The growing numbers of white women and children made new populations of widows and orphans all the more visible. Officials could count the social consequences of the ongoing war in the West in wives without husbands and children without fathers. Well into the 1790s, war continued to rip through the settlements, taking the lives of able-bodied men and leaving needy women and children behind. In 1795, Roland Madison from Logan’s Station wrote Kentucky Governor Isaac Shelby of their “Defenceless Situation” in which “a Circle of Three Miles Includes nearly one Hundred & twenty souls[,] two thirds of which are Women & Children.”29 78

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Faced with a staggering number of landless migrants, war widows, and rootless orphans, Kentucky legislators began to enact measures to manage the growing problem of rural poverty. In an early legislative session, Kentucky lawmakers passed a measure that required all county courts to appoint “a competent number of overseers of the poor” to manage the expenses and monies levied to support the needy.30 Their vision for the Overseers of the Poor reflected a philosophy and practice that historians refer to as a “familial” model of relief. That is, they responded to the needs of the poor by integrating them into an existing social system of family and household. Through the courts, Overseers placed orphaned children into new families and sent the infirm to recover under individual care. They endeavored to relieve the suffering of the destitute and impoverished by providing “out-relief ” in the form of cash, firewood, food, or clothing that might enable the needy to remain in their existing homes.31 This emphasis on the family and the household as the solution to poverty stood in contrast to the new institutional remedies adopted in many eastern seaboard cities. Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, policymakers in urban centers in the East experimented with new forms of poor relief that emphasized the removal of the distressed from their households. In cities like Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, and Charleston, lawmakers and philanthropists tested new models of institutionalized care that housed the homeless and disadvantaged under one roof. While Old World and colonial responses to poverty emphasized out-relief, urban growth in American cities necessitated the new institutional remedies. Authorities built almshouses, workhouses, and orphanages to remove the needy from the view of polite society and worked to reform them through professional care and guided direction.32 While such institutions increasingly came to define the experience of poverty in urban America, the lives of the rural poor remained tied to ideas of social stability rooted in family. In many ways, Kentuckians embraced a much older tradition of poor relief that traced its roots to European and colonial practice. As one historian explains, in this “social system, fundamentally based on family and kinship, remedies for dealing with the community’s unfortunate were familial in form.”33 As such, Kentucky’s Overseers of the Poor doled out poor relief through gendered ideas about female dependence and household order. 79

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By dispensing public assistance to settlers in need—the widows, the children, and the abandoned—they carved out new relationships between individuals and the state and increased the power of local courts to regulate and monitor family structures. Poor Kentuckians entered the courts for a variety of reasons. Some were there of their own choice, using the courts to seek assistance to help ease their poverty. Others were ferried into courts by authorities, as subjects of the Overseers of the Poor. Whatever brought poor men and women before the courts in need of poor relief, they faced an evolving set of practices and policies that distributed public aid in ways that relied on gendered notions of household structure and female dependence.34 Some recipients of poor relief were simply unable to find work or provide themselves with the most basic necessities. In December of 1797, the Jefferson County court provided short-term relief to a poor woman named Sophia Harrington, whom they determined to be “in indigent circumstances, and her children in a state of sufferance.” They ordered that “such necessaries” be granted to “the woman and children . . . until the next Court.”35 Their relief would come in the form of “necessaries” to relieve the sting of poverty and allow Harrington and her children to remain in their place of residence. One month earlier, the court had to provide Jane Waters, “a poor woman,” with “five pounds to be laid out in clothing.”36 The impulse to provide “necessaries” and “clothing” reflected individual needs as much as a reluctance to provide hard money. If nothing else, it granted authorities some control over their female charges. Cash could be spent on just about anything; household goods, on the other hand, could be used in finite ways.37 Some who sought poor relief legitimately could not take care of themselves. Mercer County provided Massie Green, a blind woman, with immediate relief in the amount of ten dollars in November of 1795.38 Others who were unable to work for a living came to the courts for relief from their indigent circumstances. Lincoln County agreed to provide William Weatherford and his wife six pounds per year during their lives “towards their support and maintenance, it appearing to the court that they are poor, aged and infirm and unable to labour to support themselves.”39 Increasingly, Kentucky counties found themselves dipping into public funds to pay for the relief of struggling settlers. In 1793, state legislators 80

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passed an “Act concerning the Poor” that authorized counties to establish a levy “for the relief of such poor persons . . . as by personal debility or otherwise, are incapable of procuring a livelihood.”40 Establishing a poor levy not only recognized the mounting costs of poor relief, it also made sure that the power to remedy such circumstances remained local. Maintenance of the poor, the aged, the infirm, and those left without support would be at the discretion of county courts. They could choose who deserved support, as they did in Mercer County when they ordered that the sheriff pay twenty-five dollars out of the poor levy to the widow of Benjamin Grimes in March 1794. In that same court session, Mercer County officials requested that the sheriff designate twenty dollars out of the next poor levy to Elizabeth Neighbors, a poor young woman living alone.41 The Grimes widow and Neighbors were typical recipients of poor levies. The growing populations of women and children migrating west during the 1780s and 1790s also established that poor relief in Kentucky would become increasingly feminized. This had as much to do with age-old traditions that defined the worthy poor as dependent and, as such, largely female as it did with demographics and scarcity.42 However, it also reflected the way that the pressures of frontier life— pressures that included war, landlessness, financial stress, and highly transient communities—strained the patriarchal household. Without established institutions to remedy such problems, household heads felt the burden of failure in acute and immediate ways. As migrant populations increased after the revolution, Kentuckians started petitioning the Virginia legislature for help with the social problems that plagued settlements in “this remote corner of the State.” A petition from Lincoln County in 1783 asked for specific help with the management of the orphaned poor. They requested a “Law to dispose of the orphans of poor people; which cannot be done at present as we have no church Wardens to bind them out.” They hoped that such a law would help with “the discouragement of Vice & fraud which was too prevalent among us.”43 As state and local authorities began to build up the infrastructure of social relief, they addressed the particular burden of frontier families struggling without a household patriarch. The courts inserted themselves into family life when fathers died or failed. They stepped in where fathers left children without support. They facilitated the placement of children 81

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born out of wedlock. In doing so, they committed to a system of poor relief in which courts assumed authority over dependents in the absence of male household heads. In short, they assumed the role of the absent father.44 In their capacity as guardians of the public welfare, the Kentucky Overseers of the Poor also served as regulators of private households and did so in such a way that bolstered the idea of the household itself. The courts and the Overseers looked with particular scrutiny at single mothers in ways that reinforced ideas about female dependence. The courts’ placement of orphaned children underscored an ideological commitment to the male-headed household. Although both men and women experienced poverty in Kentucky, the courts approached only the female subject from a position of patriarchal responsibility. In the absence of a male protector, the Overseers of the Poor stepped in to assume relief and oversight. One of the primary social welfare functions of the early Kentucky courts involved the placement of fatherless children. These wayward children were a mixed lot. Some were the offspring of deceased parents; some were children born out of wedlock or had a living parent who was unable to provide for them. Some were placed as infants, and others were old enough to enter the court and select their guardian before the magistrates.45 For children left alone after the death of a parent, the courts most often described the placement of orphans of deceased fathers. If a father died, the courts tried to assign guardianship to another male relative. Such was the case with the Jackman sisters, who were left orphaned after the death of their father, Adam. On February 18, 1785, the court in Lincoln County assigned the five girls—Mary Ann, Sarah, Molly, Liney, and Elizabeth— to the legal care of a male relative, Richard Jackman.46 It was not always possible to keep siblings together. In 1790, at July court in Lincoln county, the court placed three sisters in different homes after their father, Thomas Feland, died. Two girls, Catherine and Ann were placed with a relative, James Feland. The third sibling, Mary Feland, went to live in a different household apart from her sisters.47 Some children were old enough to have some input into their adopted families. Throughout all of the early orphan placements, the courts 82

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recorded instances when the child came into the session to “make choice” of its guardian officially. Isabell Wilson, the orphan of Berry Wilson, came into came to Mercer county court on October 27, 1791, to select Isham Tolly as her guardian. When William McAfee passed away in Mercer County, two of his three daughters were able to make their own choice of guardian. Ann went to live under the care of William Curry, and “Margarey” McAfee selected James Curry as a guardian. For Mary McAfee, who was perhaps too young to speak for herself, the court appointed George Buchanan to care for her after her father’s death.48 Of course, not all children had connections. Many children of recent migrants had no local family at all. In such cases, the courts placed orphaned children in homes at their discretion. Most of the children placed in arbitrary homes faced a life of relative anonymity. For some, it meant a future of rootlessness, as life without a family could mean a life of transience. For an orphan like Sarah Braxdale, arbitrary placement meant the likelihood of being bounced around the system. In 1785, after her father, John, passed away, the Lincoln County court placed Sarah in the care of John Reed. Two years later, she appeared again before the court for placement in a new home. In 1787, she became the charge of William Baird. Braxdale hopped from home to home, living with people she may or may not have known.49 Although the courts’ objective in providing relief for women and children was to care for and protect those they deemed most vulnerable, in practice much of the courts’ activities condemned poor orphans to lives of low-status labor. In some cases, an apprenticeship meant more stable circumstances for orphans and fatherless children, but such placement also served to sustain and perpetuate a population of poor and dependent laborers. The state mandated that orphans without friends or relatives should be placed as apprentices “until the age of twenty-one years if a boy, or eighteen if a girl.”50 These children entered the homes of those who could afford an extra mouth to feed and would likely labor as household servants until adulthood. As such, the local courts’ efforts to relieve poverty also served to replicate an existing laboring underclass.51 Consider the case of a young servant girl named Elizabeth Morrow who in 1792 ended up in court for giving birth to a mixed-race child. Elizabeth Morrow came to America from Ireland in 1784 as a servant 83

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indentured in Bedford County, Pennsylvania. As was customary, Morrow would work off her passage to America with several years of service in exchange for “sufficient meat, drink and apparel, washing and lodging.”52 In 1787, Morrow’s master sold the remainder of her indenture to a man named Benjamin Parkinson, who promptly moved to Jefferson County, Kentucky, with his new servant. In 1792, Parkinson appeared before the justices of the Jefferson County court to request an extension of Morrow’s service, claiming that she “has lately had a mulatto child” and asked that the court “adjudge what time the said servant shall serve additionally for her breach of law and contract.”53 The court assigned Morrow eighteen months’ additional time for services lost during her pregnancy.54 Morrow would not keep her child. Rather, the courts promptly bound out her “mulatto” son to the care and service of another household. The court charged the Overseers of the Poor “to bind out Robert, bastard child of Elizabeth.”55 In doing so, they directed the young Robert Morrow to follow in the footsteps of his mother and live out a life of lowstatus dependent labor. After their brief encounter with the law, both mother and child disappeared behind the walls of somebody else’s home to work anonymously in the service of others. Orphaned children or bastard offspring like Robert Morrow were placed in homes as servants, apprentices, or field workers and labored throughout their lives in relative invisibility. They became a shadow workforce, maintaining homes and businesses as domestic workers or shop assistants. In many ways, the placement of orphans created a steady supply of household or field laborers for those willing to take them in. When the court placed an orphan in a new home, the expectation was that the child would work for his or her own support. Most orphans placed in homes disappear quietly from the records after their brief appearance in court, but the case of Delphy Boston suggests the faintest outlines of what a child might experience. In 1793, Boston’s guardian, John Hiatt, came to court in Lincoln County to demand compensation for her upkeep. The court provided Hiatt with seven pounds per year for the “maintenance of Boston, an orphan, it appeared she is infirm and unable to work for her maintenance.”56 Delphy Boston was an orphan, placed in a home with the expectation that she would “work for her maintenance.” The courts placed Boston in 84

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a private home to ensure that she would not become a burden on the public coffers. In doing so, they ensured that she would most likely remain poor. She would provide cheap labor under the auspices of charity. After a child’s first experience of being “bound out” by the court for a term of labor, he or she would likely remain in positions of dependence for the remainder of the child’s life. In the case of a young child, the courts and the Overseers would work together to find a suitable guardian until the child grew to a working age. For those orphans old enough to work, the court ordered the Overseers to bind them out to a master or mistress for a term of service. Some children were bound out for unspecified house labor, becoming domestic servants or field hands. Others were bound for the purpose of learning a particular trade or craft.57 The laws passed by Kentucky legislators to manage orphans granted the Overseers of the Poor extensive powers to evaluate the suitability of parents and households. The 1793 “Act concerning the Poor” empowered the county courts to place children of families “whose parents they shall judge incapable of supporting and bringing them up in honest courses.”58 This meant that single mothers like Elizabeth Morrow were routinely judged incapable of raising their own children. Through the Overseers of the Poor, authorities were able to determine the outlines of legitimacy. If a father’s identity was known, the Overseers orchestrated payments for the maintenance of the bastard child. Month after month, the magistrates at county court sessions would bring women before a grand jury to interrogate the circumstances of their illegitimate children. If the mother appeared to identify the father (often, she did not), the court ordered the Overseers of the Poor to arrange payments. In Lincoln County, Jane David identified David Johnson as the father of her child. Johnson made an appearance to respond to the complaint, and the court empowered the Overseers arrange a payment of “5 pounds per year for four years to support bastard child whereof the said Jane was delivered and made oath that the said Johnson did begat.”59 The Overseers of the Poor engineered households so that children were removed from single mothers and guided into specific training. In Lincoln County, the court ordered that the illegitimate child of Mary Taylor be bound “to some proper person to learn some trade.”60 By law, a suitable home would instruct poor children in the knowledge of 85

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“some art, trade or business . . . as also reading and writing, and if a boy, common arithmetic.”61 Determination of an “honest course” for a poor child was at the discretion of the Overseers. The case of the Adkins children of Lincoln County illustrates the intentions of the Overseers to turn poor orphans into productive workers. In 1789, Jesse Adkins “left his children without support.” He may have died without leaving provisions for his family, or he may have simply abandoned them without security. Either way, the courts empowered the Overseers of the Poor to bind out John, Betty, Polly, and Henry Adkins. The two Adkins boys were placed in homes to learn specific trades: John was sent to live with Jane Montgomery “to learn the trade of a wheelright,” and Henry was appointed to live with Jane Jackman “to learn the trade of a weaver.” The two Adkins daughters were simply bound into homes without any specific apprenticeship plans.62 The courts made clear gender distinctions when binding out male and female children. Even in dealing with those who would most likely live out their lives as dependents, they remained committed to a gender division of labor that specified a marketable trade for boys but rarely prescribed work for girls. When the Overseers found homes for girls, they only occasionally mentioned a trade. If they did send a girl to a home for the purpose of training, they generally specified some kind of needle trade. After her father, Thomas Cannon of Jefferson County, died, the courts bound out the orphaned Nancy Cannon to William Miller “to learn the mystery of a seamstress.”63 In Mercer County, young Nancy Spalding bounced around from home to home with the mandate to “learn the art of . . . spinning and knitting.”64 Such specificity was unusual, however. Most young girls accompanied brothers into new homes without a charge to learn any specific skills. Their brothers, on the other hand, embarked on explicit training programs. The court assigned young Alexander Hanna, the son of a single mother, to a home where he would learn the trade of stonemason. Oswald Thomas’s guardian came to court to consent to the child’s binding out to be trained as a tanner. The options in Kentucky may have been greater for skilled craftsmen than for others, especially in an increasingly competitive labor market. In many ways, a skilled worker might have an advantage over the hordes of itinerant workers who 86

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flocked to the saltworks or sought seasonal labor. While still a far cry from living the agrarian ideal, a skilled wheelright or a weaver might secure a decent living.65 But such a living was hardly a solution to the deeper problems of poverty that plagued the Kentucky settlements. The presence of poor women and children seeking out the assistance of the courts was a regular and visual reminder of the patriarchal limitations of frontier households. It also underscored the reality that most Kentucky settlers— male and female, young and old—were facing lives of dependent labor. They would most likely remain chronically poor and personally vulnerable. But as poverty deepened and economic inequality increased, the state became one of the few places to which poor settlers could turn to relieve their struggling households.66 As such, for many poor families or single mothers, the possibility that binding out a child might improve their prospects led them to the Overseers of the Poor of their own volition. Repeatedly in the court’s order books, mothers registered their consent to release their children into another household. In Mercer County in 1794, Polly Skinner’s mother came into the court to consent to the binding out of her daughter to Edward Willis.67 A similar situation placed Sarah Sconce in the service of David Demeree of Mercer County. In 1796, her mother came to the court session in Mercer County to register the “consent of Mary Sconce” to allow her daughter to be “bound out as the law directs.”68 That these mothers came to court to consent to the binding out of their children suggests that they were their sole living guardians. For a single mother trying to support a child alone, binding out might be the only financially reasonable solution to management of poverty.69 A poor mother might turn to the courts for assistance, to remedy poverty, or simply to try to find a better life for her children. Elizabeth Westfall of Jefferson County, for example, turned to the courts after her husband, Jacob, died and left her with sole responsibility of two children. In 1796, Elizabeth came to court to register an indenture that would bind out her son and daughter to a relative, Hezekiah Westfall. The terms of the indenture specified that her son would “learn the trade of a cooper.” At the end of his term of service, the court recorded, “Hezekiah will furnish the boy with necessary and sufficient tools to carry on his trade.”70 87

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Westfall almost certainly saw the option of binding out her children to someone who might provide them with better resources and train her son in a trade as an alternative to poverty. In this sense, poor women might have viewed the Overseers of the Poor as a positive resource that might provide relief for otherwise grim economic circumstances. But, of course, the question of consent is difficult to evaluate. Certainly, some single mothers may have looked at the chance to relieve themselves of a mouth to feed or to secure a trade for their child as a positive opportunity. On the other hand, the authority of the courts to break up families represented a considerable level of official power. The practice of binding out children of poor women to terms of service created a steady stream of cheap, dependent labor. The young girl or boy bound to a master could be groomed to a life of servitude and dependence for a lengthy term and would likely be confined to a life of low-status labor. The ability of the Overseers and the courts to orchestrate and manufacture the life paths of the poor and underprivileged was considerable. A mother who chose to have her child bound out for a term of service as an apprentice knew that such a life had considerable limits. At the same time that poor mothers came to court to have their children bound out to a master or mistress, they might also have to listen to the laments of servants who came to court to register complaints. In Mercer County in 1789, Mary Burks came to court to complain that her master, Jonathan Jenkins, beat her and physically abused her. She received little assistance from the magistrates. The court demanded that Burks return to work and issued Jenkins a warning.71 The following year, the servants of John Crow ventured to court to complain of poor treatment and meager provisions. The servants presented a complaint “setting forth their want of clothes and diet.” The court issued a warning to Crow to provide “a good wholesome diet in the future” and sent the servants back to work.72 Whether by choice or by force, a mother surrendered a son or daughter to a term of servitude with the knowledge that the power dynamics of this relationship made her child extremely vulnerable.73 The harsh treatment of indentured servants and apprentices became enough of a problem that state legislators had to outline specific protocols for the local courts to help manage complaints. During the legislative session of 1796, the state approved a new law designating powers to the 88

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county courts. Among the new powers delineated was a measure outlining how the courts should “hear and determine according to law, the complaints of apprentices and hired servants . . . against their masters or mistresses.”74 Of course, the ability to complain did not always mean that those in subordinate and vulnerable positions could do so, particularly if they were children raised into a life of servitude from infancy. To bolster their position, the state passed an act the following year “concerning Guardians, Infants, Masters, and Apprentices” that endeavored to protect vulnerable children further. They outlined a number of abuses against children that would result in the termination of their indenture, including “neglect, mismanagement,” and “ravishment.” While few complaints from servants made it to a formal court hearing, measures to prevent such abuse in state law suggest a distinct awareness of the physical and sexual vulnerability of bound children.75 The state law also explicitly granted the county courts the “power from time to time to control guardians.”76 Thus, in many ways, the courts and the Overseers of the Poor possessed enormous powers to intervene in the private and personal lives of Kentucky families and engineer their vision of legitimacy and social order. As such, the Overseers of the Poor looked with particular scrutiny on mothers, both single and widowed. While some mothers came to see the courts as a remedy to a child’s poverty, others had children forcibly removed. Both the Overseers and the courts assumed the task of deciding what constituted “proper” care of a child. In Lincoln County, the Overseers ordered the courts to bind out Lucy Campbell to Edward Tompkins, claiming that her father, Thomas Campbell, “does not take proper care of her.”77 Similarly, in 1789, the courts empowered the Overseers of the Poor to bind out young Betsey McKinney “to proper masters or mistresses” after her father, Rowland McKinney, “left her without support.”78 When the authorities intervened to “control guardians,” they projected a gendered vision of the household that evaluated the role of fathers as providers and single mothers as helpless dependents.79 At the same time that courts placed a growing level of scrutiny on female poverty, they also began to focus on poor men. Their intentions in dealing with poor men, however, were qualitatively different than those in 89

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relieving the burden of poor women. While the state and the counties pitied female poverty, they began to view poor men with increasing levels of anxiety, even to the point of criminalizing male indigence. The expanding populations of unemployed or underemployed men in Kentucky signaled a multifaceted crisis. In the abstract, the growing populations of what European thinkers referred to as the “laboring poor” challenged the very underpinnings of the revolution itself, suggesting that the new republic was beset with the same symptoms of Old World political and economic corruption that they had just fought a war to leave behind. More urgently, however, the increasingly conspicuous presence of poor, out-of-work men in the backcountry was a harbinger of potential unrest. Authorities did not view poor men in Kentucky as objects of charity but as unruly, disorderly, and potentially dangerous.80 By the mid-1790s, Kentucky authorities began to criminalize male poverty through vagrancy statutes, emigration laws, and corporal punishments. In 1795, the Kentucky legislature passed “An Act to prevent the increase of Vagrant and other idle and disorderly Persons within this state.” In their delineation of offenses, authorities defined the crime of vagrancy as an exclusively male problem. It not only included the unlawful acts of “loitering,” “rambling about,” and “begging” but also implied that those guilty of vagrancy had voluntarily “quit their habitations” and left “wives or children without suitable means of subsistence.” The problem of vagrancy, they suggested, was a failure on the part of idle men to fulfill their roles as household heads. In the absence of a husband and father, dependent women and children would likely “become chargeable to the county” and force the courts to step in where men had failed.81 The official concern over male poverty revealed the deepening problem of unemployment in Kentucky. Whereas some poor men might be able to secure day jobs, short-term labor, or odd jobs, the explosion of new migration into the state made even temporary employment increasingly competitive. Lawmakers noted that “there has been of late a great encrease of idle and disorderly persons, having no visible estate or employments, who are able to work, and who frequently ramble from one county to another, neglecting to labor, or betaking themselves to any lawful calling to procure a livelihood.”82 The implication was that a man who 90

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did not have a job was unemployed by choice. Kentucky’s governing elites—many of whom were the same large landholders that relied on the presence of tenants for income and labor—refused to acknowledge the deep structural inequalities that created a poor underclass of unemployed men. Rather than remedy the problem of male poverty, they authorized physical punishment for those unable to find work. If the county courts found that “no person . . . will hire a vagrant or vagrants,” the Sheriff could “order . . . any number of lashes on his or their backs.”83 Lawmakers in Kentucky imagined themselves under siege by poor men. Many of them perceived the early national West as a dumping ground for the nation’s poor. By the end of the 1790s, the burden on county poor levies had become so heavy that legislators began to look for some way to relieve local communities from sole responsibility. In 1798, the state amended their poor law to hold individuals responsible for escorting poor migrants into the state. Lawmakers observed that “unfair practices are used by introducing from other states into Kentucky, friendless, indigent persons, who are abandoned to all the miseries of penury and want.” Anybody who transported a poor or impoverished person that appeared “like to become chargeable to the county” would be required to appear before the court to pledge support for their maintenance.84 The problem of poor men in Kentucky was far more than a charitable responsibility. By the turn of the century, Kentuckians found themselves at a political crossroads that had implications for the nation itself. The deeply rooted inequality, struggles over land use, and encroaching poverty were ominous reminders of ongoing unrest that had plagued the eighteenth-century backcountry since the Seven Years’ War. Since midcentury, backcountry settlers in nearly every colonial region from Maine to South Carolina had been clashing violently with eastern leadership and landholding powers in protracted struggles that would, in many ways, define relations between East and West for years to come. Throughout these western rebellions, the issues of economic exploitation and inequality remained central to frontier discontent. As early national lawmakers watched Kentucky’s problems with poverty unfold, they worried about the potential for violence.85 Long and established patterns of western rebellion framed such fears. At the end of the Seven Years’ War, the Paxton Crisis awoke the 91

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Pennsylvania colony to the violent potential of disgruntled frontiersmen, who vented their discontent by murdering peaceful Conestoga Indians. In South Carolina, western settlers defied eastern leaders during the Regulator Movement by organizing into militia units to oust land surveyors and to obstruct law enforcement. In the wake of the American Revolution, discontent along the frontiers seemed to reach a fever pitch as Liberty Men in Maine and outlaws in Vermont brandished weapons against agents of the infant American state. Their insurgence challenged the very idea of nationhood. When Shays’ army marched on courthouses in western Massachusetts in 1787 to protest the oppressive debt burden on backcountry farmers, it signaled the existence of a widespread crisis. Western unrest was not just episodic grumbling, it seemed; it was a “wildfire” that threatened to spread throughout the backcountry and lead to national self-immolation.86 It was with this history of backcountry rebellion in mind that local and national leaders cautiously watched Kentucky’s explosive growth and creeping poverty unfold. From all perspectives, Kentucky appeared to be a tinderbox awaiting a spark in the late 1780s and early 1790s: As George Washington would observe in the wake of Shays’ Rebellion, there seemed to be “combustibles in every state, which a spark might set fire to.”87 The same inequalities that had fanned the flames of backcountry insurrection for decades seemed to compound in Kentucky. Regional and national leaders alike anxiously watched as absentee landholders, uneven land distribution, widespread tenancy, soaring poverty, and a perception of neglect by eastern policymakers sewed all-too-familiar seeds of discontent. After Shays’ Rebellion, James Madison warned of similar troubles on the western fringes of his own state of Virginia, cautioning that “symptoms of a leveling spirit . . . have sufficiently appeared in a certain quarters to give notice of the future danger.”88 The greatest threat to the nation, it seemed, was its own citizens. The unchecked greed of wealthy land speculators and the simmering outrage of impoverished settlers might very well tear the new republic apart. The question of what to do about female poverty could be answered within a familiar framework of charitable relief. Poor women may have posed a threat to the social fabric of the early national West, but female poverty was a problem that lawmakers were prepared to address. Poor 92

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men, on the other hand, were ticking time bombs. Kentucky had become the “best poor man’s country,” but in all the wrong ways. Within a few years of the revolution’s end, anxiety over poor men in Kentucky created a true crisis in masculinity on the early American frontier. The empire for liberty in the West was intended to be the province of the yeoman farmer, whose personal independence would protect the republic against despotism. Without personal independence, the republic was imminently vulnerable. Poor men could be convinced of anything. Dependent women, slaves, and servants were expected to bend to the wills of independent men. But a dependent man was something altogether different. Unlike those intended for a life of dependence, the wayward, aimless, able-bodied men who wandered about the Kentucky settlements were ripe targets for coercion and intrigue. Unlike their wives and household servants, it was poor, angry white men who represented a true threat to American liberty. As frustrated white men in Kentucky continued to express anxieties about their inability to provide for and protect their households and families, their complaints would soon become much more than issues of domestic policy. On a fragile frontier surrounded by British troops, Spanish diplomats, and Indian warriors, Kentucky’s disgruntled poor also posed a threat to national security. State and national leaders alike recognized that many alienated Kentucky settlers harbored precariously fragile loyalties to the new American state. A hypothetical frontier of independent men would be safe from outside influence, but actual settlements populated by unhappy dependents were poised for foreign agitation. Alongside such inauspicious demographics was the knowledge that the western settlements were known to harbor all kinds of political radicals—British Loyalists, political separatists, and lawless “banditti.”89 The western fringes of empire had become home to populations of politically and economically marginal people. By the late 1780s and early 1790s, the problems of frontier poverty and broken homes made Kentucky the focal point of the western crisis of empire.

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In 1793, Gilbert Imlay published a novel called The Emigrants that described the journey of an English family and their efforts to start a new life on the Kentucky frontier. Imlay wrote the book on the heels of his wildly successful first work, Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America, which captivated audiences throughout America and Europe. Written in the same epistolary form as Topographical Description and other popular works in the western genre like Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, the correspondence in The Emigrants documents the English family’s impressions of the post-revolutionary frontier against the backdrop of an excruciatingly sappy eighteenth-century love story. Like John Filson before him, Imlay wrote his tale of frontier love and adventure for the purpose of promoting western settlement (a prospect in which he was heavily invested). Unlike Filson, however, Imlay’s work also contained a pronounced critique of the American state and an unapologetic salute to the masculine citizen-soldier as the cornerstone of enlightened government.1 Imlay had himself been an officer in the revolution. Along with so many other high-ranking military men, he secured his warrant for a tract 94

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of land in Kentucky as soon as the war ended. In 1784, he arrived in Kentucky and began to write promotional literature and to encourage migration. He became acquainted with some of the region’s luminaries, including the notorious James Wilkinson, who soon partnered with Imlay in land speculation. Wilkinson also initiated Imlay into his somewhat restive political leanings and provided a real-life model for the separatist characters that shaped his novel.2 Imlay weaves together two distinct themes into his travelogue in The Emigrants. The first is an impulse for social and political separatism. Disillusioned by the failure of eastern leadership to uphold the ideals of the revolution, the characters devise a plan for a utopian settlement in the West in which they can perfect the agrarian ideal and establish enlightened government unfettered by Old World corruption. The characters leave behind the East, which they consider to be as hopelessly evil as England. Since the end of the revolution, the characters lament, the eastern states have become a place where “effeminancy has triumphed” and “tyrants” trample on “the laws of reason and humanity.”3 The second theme at the core of Imlay’s work concerns the manly responsibility to protect women. Multiple subplots in the novel document tales of women who are tricked into marriage, swindled out of money, or publicly humiliated by their brutish husbands. One story even describes a man who tries to prostitute his wife in order to pay his debts. The characters come to understand that Old World governments are fundamentally corrupt because they do not protect women, but rather allow women to be trapped by men who are unfit to be husbands. Only real men are capable of standing up to despots and embracing the virtuous responsibility to shelter vulnerable women. One character, facing a long-suffering wife, professes that he can “either have retreated like a coward, and abandoned the empire of the world, or by a stroke of manly courage, cross the limits of despotism” to rescue the woman “from oppression and tyranny.”4 The community that the emigrants hoped to establish in the West would be one in which leaders were manly and virtuous, deserving of their wives’ love and obedience, and secure in their authority. An “empire of the world” has no room for cowards. Imlay’s novel equates the expectations of manly authority with the impulse for political separatism. His characters’ commitment to female 95

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vulnerability confirms for virtuous men of the new republic their rightful place as household patriarchs. His band of separatists intend to form a more perfect union in which deserving men are secure and dependent women are shielded from hardship. Their utopian community would be comprised of military men, veterans of the Revolutionary War, who would each receive an equal parcel of land and would each have an equal voice in governance. This idealized world of masculine citizensoldiers shapes their vision of domestic authority rooted in reciprocity and protection. The unfit and abusive husband has no place in their western utopia. Abusive husbands, Imlay’s protagonists claim, are the products of Old World governments, of regimes that produced men whose “impotence was as disgusting, as their caprices were unbounded.”5 The dual themes at the heart of Imlay’s work—the celebration of the masculine citizen-soldier and the threat of political separation—reflected real concerns simmering in the eighteenth-century West during the critical years after the American Revolution. As white male Kentuckians increasingly felt themselves politically marginalized by eastern governments, talk of separation from the American experiment signaled a true crisis of authority in the West. Like the characters in Imlay’s novel, western men believed that patriarchal household authority was a fundamental right for white male citizens under an enlightened government. A government that failed to secure such authority for virtuous men was fundamentally corrupt, little different from the monarchical regimes they had risked their lives to leave behind. In the turbulent Kentucky settlements, the connections between household order and state sovereignty were self-evident: virtuous governments would secure the conditions of patriarchal authority. Of the many failures of the American state, perhaps none was more acute, widespread, or personally felt than the inability to provide security for the household head.6 During the 1780s and 1790s, conflicts over manhood and national belonging coalesced in separatist plots and talk of disunion. Rumors of western disunion engulfed the region in conspiracy and intrigue. Local leaders reported that westerners had become utterly ungovernable. Desertion in the military became epidemic. Individual settlers walked away from the American experiment and pledged allegiance to foreign powers. The Kentucky settlements were vulnerable from within and 96

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compromised from without. In all directions, Indian and European powers jockeyed for the chance to retain power and control in the region. Cherokee, Shawnee, and Delaware Indians surrounded the Kentucky settlements and mobilized military power to limit American incursions onto their lands. The British remained a menacing presence to the North, lingering in military outposts and forging potentially powerful alliances with Ohio Indians over shared hostility to American settlers. And to the West, the vast Spanish Empire exerted enormous power over trade along the Mississippi River, a vital route for Kentucky farmers and merchants hoping to access the port of New Orleans. With little difficulty, Kentuckians could find allies if they chose to turn their backs on the American state.7 After the American Revolution, a true crisis of empire emerged out of discontent brewing against American leadership. Western settlers harbored no great love for—or faith in—the sovereignty of the United States.8 In Kentucky, ordinary men who struggled to perform their anticipated roles as household heads began to equate this with a failure of American governance. Eastern authorities provided little military protection against an ongoing and increasingly bloody frontier war.9 Absentee landholders enlisted tenants to serve as human shields, taking the physical impact of frontier violence to protect the interests of the wealthy. For the minority of male settlers who were able to secure land and establish households, the relentless threat of Indian raids rendered it nearly impossible for a male patriarch to protect his family. The consequences of ongoing violence were on display at every monthly court session, as locals witnessed the ordeals of orphaned children and impoverished widows. And even though many male migrants had recently served as soldiers in the Revolutionary War, American independence had left white men dependent in the Promised Land. At the most vulnerable periphery of the new nation, competing visions of manhood came into conflict—one in which military and political leaders expected deference from subordinates and another in which ordinary white male settlers expected to be treated like men. In this volatile context, radicals and opportunists found willing audiences for plots and schemes to break away from the United States and seek protection elsewhere. Concerns over political sovereignty, national 97

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citizenship, and white manhood threatened to tear East and West apart. The crisis of leadership in post-revolutionary Kentucky revealed how concerns over household order could become issues of national security. Perhaps nobody saw the crisis in authority on Kentucky’s horizon more clearly than George Rogers Clark. Although heralded as the “Washington of the West” for his military conquests against British and Indian forces in the Northwest Territory during the Revolutionary War, Clark struggled constantly with his troops. After the outbreak of revolution, the western theater became a focal point of conflict as British and Indian forces escalated raids on the American settlements in Kentucky. After the French lost control of the Great Lakes region due to their loss in the Seven Years’ War, the British had entrenched themselves in military forts throughout the Northwest and forged fragile and, at times, tense working alliances with Indian forces in the region.10 With the support of Virginia’s wartime governor, Patrick Henry, Clark orchestrated a risky expedition into Illinois country in 1778 intent on undermining British power in the region. Defying expectations, Clark’s troops conquered British outposts in Kaskaskia and Vincennes in present-day Illinois and Indiana, respectively. With just a handful of Virginia militia recruits, Clark took over valuable British outposts north of the Ohio River and established an American military presence in the Northwest Territory.11 The consequences of Clark’s victories were mixed. On the one hand, the conquest of British forces in the Northwest signaled an important early turning point in the war. As a result of Clark’s early victories, Virginia’s leadership took a more aggressive interest in asserting authority in the West. Emboldened by his actions, ordinary settlers migrated to Kentucky with high hopes that Clark’s occupation of the Illinois country signaled the end of violence in the West. On the other hand, the expanding influence of settlers in the Ohio River Valley provoked unequivocal retaliation by Indian armies committed to halting American expansion. In many ways, Clark’s victories signaled the beginning, rather than the end, of western violence. At the same time that western settlers imagined Clark’s victories as the harbinger of Indian defeat, confederacies of Shawnee, Miami, and Delewares were consolidating forces to drive Americans off their lands.12 98

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In this context of escalating violence, Clark struggled to maintain the support of western settlers. Without any substantive help from the Continental Army, Clark relied almost exclusively on Kentucky recruits to fill his ranks. His reports to Virginia officials recount a litany of problems, the biggest of which was the chronic desertion among his soldier volunteers. On multiple occasions, Clark had problems calling out the Kentucky militia, and he had even more trouble keeping them in one place because the troops “continue to desert.”13 At one point, he threatened to throw deserters in jail, but fear of incarceration did not prevent the disarray.14 The problem of desertion plagued Clark’s efforts and frustrated his plans. What was worse, it seemed that Kentucky’s general population was aiding and encouraging militia desertion. Many settlers preferred that men defend their own homes rather than defeat the British in the West, and they frustrated Clark’s designs and undermined his authority at every turn. Clark fully realized that his missions could have been “executed . . . with the greatest ease” but for the obstruction of the public, who “through a spirit of obstinacy . . . combined and did every thing in their power to stop the Men that had Enlisted, and set the whole Fronteers in an uproar, even condescended to harbor and protect those that Deserted.”15 By 1783, Clark could see the long-term impact of authority breached. After several years of sustained desertion, he reported, the troops that were “formerly a Barrier” were “reduced to a handfull.”16 Clark expended enormous energy fighting insubordination within the militia. Throughout the war, Clark tried in vain to recruit enough Kentucky soldiers to march against the seat of British power in Detroit. He was never able to lure enough volunteers away from their families to make the dangerous expedition. In one particularly exasperated moment, Clark resorted to standing guard against his own men in order to prevent desertion. In a letter to George Mason in 1779, he described how he monitored his soldiers’ movements. “I knew that my case was desperate,” he wrote, as he tried to convince his men to join his campaign against untold numbers of Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, and British forces. He realized that he would be unable to “stop the desertion I knew would ensue upon the Troops” once they learned their destination. Determined to suppress the insubordination, Clark “encamped on a small Island in 99

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middle of the Falls [of the Ohio]” and kept “strict Guard on the Boats,” lest anybody try to escape. Despite the armed guard, several of the troops did manage to escape, and only a few of them were found the next morning.17 The image of Clark sitting in the middle of the Falls of the Ohio, standing guard against his own troops, speaks volumes about the limits of authority in Kentucky and, more importantly, highlights the struggles over masculinity unfolding along the national border. Encamped on an island, watching to make sure that the troops who were supposed to follow his orders did not run off into the night, Clark faced rampant insubordination that was shaped by two competing visions of manhood. Clark and his officers saw themselves as leaders, men selected to command expeditions to protect the frontier who possessed the authority to demand obedience from their subordinates. As military officials, they claimed superior rank, class status, and political pedigree to merit deference.18 For militia volunteers, such markers of authority paled alongside their own interests in providing security for their families. If they stayed and followed orders, they worked to protect the interests of wealthy men whose hunger for land ensured that the poor would remain landless tenants. If they fled and returned home, they preserved their manhood by defending the markers of their personal independence.19 When military leaders described their difficulty assembling and maintaining troops, they often cited men’s unwillingness to leave their families. William Christian described such hesitation in a letter back home to Virginia. “The Settlements are so much scattered,” he wrote, “that it is difficult . . . to collect a Force together, particularly to go any Distance from their own Families.” The difficulties of the western situation had “cast a Gloom over the whole Country, and indeed . . . [settlers’] Distress is so great that I need not attempt to describe it.”20 Western leaders who complained of desertion and lamented their evaporating forces recognized that Kentucky men privileged the protection of their families over the abstract authority of the American state. In April of 1782, surveyor John Floyd wrote from Jefferson County of “the immediate danger in which every one conceives his own Family, . . . the authority of militia officers at such a distance from Government grows every day weaker and weaker.”21 100

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Concern for family safety was not without cause. The pages of the Kentucky Gazette were filled with stories of violence against vulnerable women and children. No place was more vulnerable to attack than an unguarded home. Newspaper reports recounted the depredations of Indians with lurid attention to the violence unleashed against helpless dependents. These stories reported the graphic impact of Indian war against those imagined to be the most vulnerable and highlighted the devastation that targeted those left unprotected. In 1792, “Indians took a boy near the Falls of the Ohio”; when pursued, they “tomahawked and scalped the boy, and made their escape.”22 Near Clarksville, Kentucky, the news reported that a young girl, “scalped and tomahawked some time ago,” was “still alive, and is truly an object of pity.”23 Two young boys were taken in Jefferson County by captors who “tomahawked one of them, and cut and mangled the body in a savage manner.”24 In 1793, readers learned of “women pregnant, and others with little children, massacred and stripped, some scalped, others shot, with children tomahawked.” Stories of vulnerable infants, children, and pregnant women were seared into the mind, the “dreadful spectacles offered to our view.”25 The gory details, the vivid depictions, and the particular emphasis on the most vulnerable settlers were not without design. Nor was the use of graphic language in accounts of Indian conflict particular to eighteenthcentury Kentucky. In fact, since the seventeenth century, the use of emotional and heart-wrenching scenes to raise the alarm and foment outrage against an Indian enemy had become a high art. Reflecting a literary genre that historian Peter Silver terms the “anti-Indian sublime,” the relentless attention to scenes of household slaughter turned “farmhouses into little theatres of love and pain.”26 As a language of war, the anti-Indian sublime used high emotion and pathos to define friend and foe, to galvanize collective outrage, and to dehumanize the enemy.27 For Kentucky settlers and a national audience alike, the security of the frontier region and the settler household were one and the same. The vulnerability of the home mirrored the insecurity of the region itself. When Daniel Boone narrated his story to John Filson in 1784, he introduced national audiences to the perils of an unguarded Kentucky home. Describing a home invasion by a party of Indians, he explained how one of them 101

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boldly entered the house of a poor defenceless family, in which was only a Negro man, a woman and her children, terrified with the apprehensions of immediate death. The savage, perceiving their defenceless situation, without offering violence to the family attempted to captivate the Negro, who, happily proved an over-match for him, threw him on the ground, and, in the struggle, the mother of the children drew an ax from a corner of the cottage, and cut his head off, while her little daughter shut the door. . . . In the mean time, the alarm spread through the neighborhood; the armed men collected immediately, and pursued the ravagers into the wilderness.28

Boone’s story drew clear lines around that which Anglo-Americans considered “savage” violence and legitimate retaliation. The mere act of “boldly” stepping into a frontier home constituted an act of violence on the part of the Indian invader. In Boone’s telling, an Indian who entered a home without a white man present was a “ravager,” while a mother who chopped off a man’s head with an axe was “defenceless.” The use of the word ravagers in this context, however, speaks most clearly to the evolving Anglo-American conceptualization of household defense. Specifically, it articulates the idea that white women needed protection by white men against the crime of rape at the hands of Indian invaders. Such rhetoric cast Indian violence as a violation of white women’s virtue, reflecting a deeply gendered and racialized understanding of the household itself. In many ways, such language defied long-held beliefs that Indian warriors had little interest in the sexual conquest of Anglo-American women. In fact, historians have argued that the crime of rape in war was a uniquely European import to North America, one that Indians found to be an outrageous violation of the unspoken rules of combat.29 Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the emerging genre of captivity narratives secured the belief that white women were largely safe from sexual attacks by their Indian captors.30 Defying such beliefs, the depictions of household massacres during the years of ongoing Indian war in Kentucky emphasized the physical violation of the family. On the one hand, the scenes of defenseless families underscored men’s duty to protect the weak. When a party of “9 men, 2 women & eight children” were attacked by “a party of Indians 102

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supposed to be about thirty,” the men performed their manly duties and “dismounted and defended the women and children.”31 But at the same time, the rhetoric of violence against women and children also highlighted men’s incapacity to prevent the physical molestation of their wives, sons, and daughters. The scalping, the butchering, the mangling depicted a public invasion of women’s and children’s bodies through a rhetoric of horror. It publicized a breach of the household ideal and sensationalized, in bloody detail, the consequences of an absent male protector made impotent by the state’s failure to provide support.32 Kentuckians came to measure the consequences of war in terms of family suffering. They quantified the war in households exposed. Writing to Kentucky Governor Isaac Shelby, John Breckenridge requested protection for “not less than 100 Families in number” who were exposed to “Hostilities of both Northern and Southern Indians.”33 Letters home documented when “Indians have Murdered some few scatering Frontier families” or “[w]hole families have perished.”34 Those in the crosshairs of war assessed casualties in terms of homesteads. Those who documented the impact of war saw not only the individuals within but also the household unit itself as the victim. Using household and family protection as the measure of western war served multiple purposes, not the least of which was to justify and excuse Anglo-American violence against Indian families. Since midcentury, backcountry residents had embraced an ideal of family protection to defend acts of vigilante and extralegal violence against Indian people. In the name of the Anglo-American household, backcountry militants targeted their Indian counterparts, unleashing savage acts that denied the sanctity of Indian households and specifically targeted Indian women and children. In 1763, backcountry residents in Paxton, Pennsylvania, shocked the colony with brutal attacks on peaceful Conestoga Indians, killing six adults and eight children, then burning their homes to the ground. In their communications with colonial authorities after the attacks, the vigilantes rejected the label of “Paxton Boys,” insisting that they were now “Paxton Men” who had valiantly defended their frontier households from Indian treachery.35 In a another gruesome act in 1782, backcountry residents slaughtered nearly ninety Christian Indians in the Moravian mission village of Gnadenhutten, Ohio. The militants beat, 103

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scalped, and burned the bodies of their victims, including twenty-nine women and thirty-nine children.36 In the context of ongoing and escalating frontier violence, the ideal of Anglo-American household protection and the commitment to white male patriarchal responsibility propelled settlers’ militancy and justified unspeakable carnage against Indian families. Characterizing Indians as murderers of helpless women and innocent children emboldened white men with the manly sense of purpose to protect white womanhood and defend household dependents. The rhetoric of Indian savagery served to dehumanize the enemy and eclipse any sense that Indian people were just as concerned with protecting their own families and households. By negating Indian agency and interest in protecting their own land, homes, and families, backcountry residents embraced a racist ideology of Indianhating that portrayed the enemy as savage, predatory, less than human. Liberated from the burden of Indian humanity, white male militants unleashed violent attacks on indigenous women, children, and infirm in the name of Anglo-American household protection.37 As the war dragged on through the 1780s and into the early 1790s, however, the relentless brutality of western war muted the clarion call of frontier protection. At the same time that western men endeavored to protect their own homes using any means at their disposal, western leaders were increasingly hard-pressed to rally ordinary men to serve in defense of an abstract state. As the violence continued with no remedy in sight, desertion among militia and army ranks reached epidemic proportions. Some left as recruits, absconding from their training in Louisville; others left their stations in the Northwest Territory and took flight for Kentucky. The weekly Kentucky Gazette became a repository for notices of runaway soldiers, as commanding officers alerted the public of deserters bound for Kentucky and offered rewards for their return. Officers complained of soldiers deserting from Fort Washington, Fort Jefferson, and Fort St. Clair in western Ohio.38 In the wake of Arthur St. Clair’s defeat in 1791, soldiers abandoned their posts and fled their officers in droves. That year, President George Washington authorized St. Clair—then governor of the Northwest Territory—to launch an aggressive campaign against Indian forces for 104

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control of lands north of the Ohio River. St. Clair had leaned heavily on Kentucky militia volunteers to fortify his campaign against Shawnee, Miami, and Delaware Indians and had a difficult time keeping them in line. Supplies were limited, support was paltry, and desertion was rampant. The poorly managed campaign proved to be a near-total failure for the Americans and a resounding victory for Indian troops. Few American volunteers escaped with their lives. Estimates of St. Clair’s defeat suggest a total and humiliating loss: nearly 1,000 of his 1,200 troops and thirty-seven of his officers perished.39 After St. Clair’s epic defeat, the enthusiasm of Kentucky volunteers began to wane; desertion became a chronic problem. The men who deserted left no statements behind to help us understand their motivations. No diaries record the sentiments of ordinary men who abandoned service in the throes of military crisis in the war-torn western settlements. Instead, the reports of deserters largely reflect the interpretations of the complaining officers. Not surprisingly, they often include significant judgment as to the character of deserters. John Rylye’s commanding officer declared that the deserter “in no measure possesses the qualifications of a soldier.”40 Officials seeking the return of John Smith, who escaped from Fort St. Clair, described him as a “dirty, clownish looking fellow.”41 Officers described military deserters in the same deeply critical language of slaveholders reporting runaways.42 They publicly degraded both the physicality and fortitude of the deserters. They document physical characteristics and mannerisms: One man was “somewhat lame in one leg,” while another “speaks as if he was in haste all the time.”43 The objective behind notices of desertion was to denounce publicly breaches in authority and to make sure that soldiers were “brought again to their duty.”44 Desertion notices provide key insights into the nexus of tensions between officer and soldier, authority and subordinate. In the same way that slaveholders degraded runaways as a means to reclaim authority, officers described militia deserters as fundamentally unfit for service to assert their command and control over their subordinate soldiers. Military leaders lamented that the frontier recruits were sad excuses for soldiers. The Kentucky volunteers, they suggested, were hardly up to the formidable task of defense. Writing in 1792, Arthur Campbell described the Kentucky militia with hopeless disdain. Of one company 105

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of sixty men, he described, “I am sure thirty of those are very unfit for service.” Another company of forty men had “no better appearance.” The Kentucky militiamen were a detestable lot, and their company was no place for a man of quality. “A respectable Farmers son,” Campbell explained, would have no reason “to be in a Company, that so many is composed of the dregs of Society.”45 In their frustration with the Kentucky recruits, military leaders attempted to bolster their fragile authority over their soldiers by ridiculing those in their command.46 Although desertion notices provide limited information about the intentions of deserters, they do reveal trace outlines of just who these men were. Some deserters were young volunteers, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three; others were older, in their late twenties and early thirties. Those who were a bit older often had established professions. William Stearns, who fled Fort Washington, was “a blacksmith by trade.”47 Robert Elliot, a “shoemaker,” fled his recruiting officers in Louisville with two other men.48 Officers in Fort Washington sought the return of the appropriately named John Lawless and claimed that “his vocation was that of an Holster.”49 Some of these young men had families to provide for, and their hesitance to leave wives and children behind was multifaceted. Alongside their fear of violence, many men may have had concerns about leaving behind their families because their dependents were not to be trusted in their absence. An unguarded home was an unregulated one. In the absence of a male head, wives took new lovers, children were conceived out of wedlock, slaves and servants ran away. A man might return from service to find that his wife had abandoned him. Such was the case of John Bell, who returned to Kentucky from his service in the Continental Army and learned that his wife had left him. In 1794, Bell published a notice in the Kentucky Gazette to ensure that his wife did not continue to charge bills on his credit. He announced that “my wife Rachel Bell, (during my service in the United States Army) hath without any just cause absconded herself from my bed and board.”50 Leaving for an extended tour of militia service meant that a soldier might not return to the home he left behind. Stories of infidelity, separation, and spousal abandonment surfaced in Kentucky courtrooms and filled the classified section of the newspaper. According to historian 106

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John Mack Faragher, a “genre of tales about separated couples” later emerged to explain and soften the very real “problems of frontier marriage.” Perhaps the most famous of such tales involved Daniel Boone, who returned from nearly two years away from his young wife, Rebecca, to find that she had recently given birth to a baby girl. Considering the length of Boone’s absence, it was clear to all that the child had been fathered by another man. Whether men left for military service or to hunt, leaving wives, servants, and slaves without a white male protector meant exposing the household to certain risks.51 Despite such risks, some still viewed the military as a way to establish themselves in the new republic. Young men may have seen the army as a way to become citizen-soldiers of the newly independent United States, to prove themselves on the field of battle. Military service had long been a marker of citizenship, and nowhere was this connection clearer than in the new nation.52 Americans’ framing ideology of virtue and self-sacrifice meant that, for young men, the opportunity to fight might secure status and, in the case of the Continental Army, a steady paycheck. It might signal adventure or the opportunity for personal improvement. When John Robert Shaw (who later became an itinerant laborer in Kentucky) decided to join the military as an aimless young man, he saw service as a way to make something of himself. He and his friends “proposed that we should all go and enlist for soldiers, get clear of work, and be gentlemen at once.” The military was a place where young men like Shaw might find adventure, see new places, and discover untold riches. Shaw’s recruitment officer beckoned him with promises of a life of ease and wonder if he enlisted: “Come on, my fine boy,” he explained, “I’ll show you the place where the streets are paved with pancakes; and where the hogs are going through the streets carrying knives and forks on their backs, and crying who will come and eat?”53 Young recruits like Shaw may have seen military service as source of steady wages or possibly as a chance to secure wealth in the form of a land warrant in the western territories they were helping to defend.54 But as the war dragged on and conquest of the West faced devastating setbacks, soldiers and settlers alike began to lose faith. Complaints about American leadership in the West often revolved around interpretations of manly responsibility. Among ordinary male settlers, ideas about manhood 107

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framed the perceived divide between rich and poor, landholder and landless. Writing to the Virginia Assembly in 1782, Kentucky petitioners described the plight of the landless settler who was asked to defend the property of absentee investors. They cast their plight as a conflict between real men and cowards. Their meager force of “only fifteen hundred men,” they wrote, defended “a tract of Country of five Million of acres.” Most of this land, however, was “nearly secured under rights from Virginia” by the “Engrosser . . . whome ease and Cowardice prevent settling.” Wealthy investors were unmanly cowards, they argued, who rested comfortably in Virginia while real men braved the dangers of war.55 When the expectations of soldiering came into conflict with the realities of war, troops who anticipated status resented commanding officers’ expectations of subordination. Such was the case in 1782, when a group of militiamen thought their superiors had degraded their status as soldiers. Stationed at the mouth of the Kentucky River, militia captain Robert Patterson ordered his men to work gunboats stationed in the river. The Kentucky militiamen refused to board the boats and complained that work on the water was beneath their service. In an exasperated report, Captain Patterson claimed that “the Militia Men refused to come on board; alleging that Militia could not be made sailors of, with other like Excuses; and there [sic] officers declared that in their opinion . . . the Men would sooner light than come on board.”56 The militiamen’s refusal to board the gunboats reflected the common perception that sailors were the lowest, most degraded class of free labor. As historian Marcus Rediker explains, sailors in the eighteenth century constituted “a vast and lowly proletariat” whose labor was exploited, discarded, and often valued beneath that of slaves.57 Often referred to as “white slaves,” sailors were widely considered the “very dregs of the community.”58 The militiamen refused to “be made sailors of ” in protest of the degradation of their status as soldiers. They perceived the request as being beneath their status as military men. Rather than withstand such degradation, these citizen-soldiers would sooner desert. Their commanding officers seemed powerless to prevent such insubordination. Reports explained that “this party has been nothing but . . . mourning and grumbling on their part . . . they must be allowed to march on the shore and not work at the boat.” Even with the concession, these soldiers 108

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opted to desert anyway. After “every Indulgence they could desire . . . they have determined to at last go off at all Events.” By the following morning, twenty-eight of the men were missing, and a remaining ten contemplated leaving as well.59 Throughout Kentucky, acts of defiance involving ordinary settlers revealed deep veins of resentment against the American leadership in the West. In one case, men openly cursed the American Congress in resistance to a military draft. One division collector sent to muster men met an angry mob assembled in opposition. The report to Thomas Jefferson, governor of Virginia at the time, describes the actions of their ringleader, a man named John Claypole, who “interrupted” the collector’s efforts to gather men and supplies. An obstinate Claypole declared that “if all the men were of his mind, they would not make up any Cloathes, Beef or Men, and all that would join him should turn out.” With such a declaration of defiance against military collection, he proceeded to gather “all the men present . . . and Got Liquor and Drank King George the third’s health, and Damnation to Congress.” Eventually, Claypole rallied “sixty or seventy men embodied, with arms,” before capitulating. Several men were arrested, but the sentiment lingered. The day after the confrontation, officials learned that 150 men gathered, among whom were “several Deserters . . . which they support and conceal.”60 The popular defense and protection of military deserters confirmed a collective support for the status of soldiers as honorable men.61 While white men worried about the way that relationships between citizen and state would unfold after the war, it was evident that their masculinity would be an important part of the equation. Militiamen wanted their status appreciated by their authorities and their service accorded masculine respect. They wanted to be treated like soldiers and not sailors. So long as the traditional markers of status such as land, citizenship, and personal independence remained unreliable, ordinary western men placed enormous stock in less tangible markers of manhood. The vast inequality in Kentucky merely exacerbated the growing resistance to authority. Increasingly, settlers asked to sacrifice for frontier protection considered themselves part of a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight. Early in the conflict, George Rogers Clark knew that this 109

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would become a problem beyond his control. Woefully underfunded, he constantly complained to eastern leadership that their neglect would have dire consequences. After years of escalating conflicts with Ohio Indians, Virginia never matched settlers’ costs in military supplies. Wartime Governor Benjamin Harrison tightened the purse strings and transferred the responsibility to the settlers themselves when they requested better fortification of western garrisons. “You will probably ask,” Harrison wrote in response to Clark’s request for support, “how the Business required to be done can be carried on without money. The answer indeed is difficult. We have nothing to depend on for the present but the virtue of the people.”62 As violence compounded with social and economic disorder, it became painfully apparent that “the virtue of the people” was a highly subjective matter. Not only were poor men asked to fight to protect the investments of the rich, but war itself made money for those with the resources and capital to supply the army as well. Certainly, somebody like Annie Christian would profit from ongoing military demand. Her inventory of salt would be essential for preserving food to provision soldiers on long expeditions north of the Ohio River. She and Hannah Hinch routinely exchanged notes about salt orders for military officers: “Madam: Please to let Capt Hord have 4 bushells of salt on my Account.”63 Similarly, in a particularly unguarded moment, wealthy Kentuckian Samuel McDowell Jr. explained how war was good for his personal profit. When he learned in 1792 that “the Indians intend to bring the war into our Cuntry this spring,” he said, “I wish they may for my part.” He remarked candidly, “I dont care the war lasts this twenty years or my lifetime while the war lasts we have a ready sale for our beef flour bacon and old horses.”64 Kentucky’s elite men and women would make money as wartime suppliers while poor men died for their profit. Such iniquity among Kentuckians merely compounded the sense of neglect settlers perceived from early national leadership. Throughout the 1780s, westerners continued to request financial and military assistance from the East but saw little improvement or renewal of effort. In 1788, for example, Virginia spared only 350 troops in response to requests for protection.65 Without backing from the eastern states, political and military leaders in Kentucky began to think that “we should have to seek 110

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protection else whare.” Expressing separatist sentiments that would haunt the region throughout the 1790s, George Roger Clark observed that “if a Cuntrey was not worth protecting, it was not worth claiming.”66 As resentment simmered through the early 1790s, Kentucky became a haven for those who had grown skeptical of the American experiment. Many of the military deserters found refuge among the disgruntled and disaffected westerners. Military officials regularly suspected that runaway militiamen fleeing outposts north of the Ohio River were headed to Kentucky. Describing several deserters, Captain Thomas Lewis noted that he had “every reason to think they will pass through Kentucky.”67 Another captain noted that his missing soldiers would “endeavor to obtain employ in some parts of Kentucky.”68 As the closest secure settlement to the Northwest Territory, Kentucky became a natural haven for runaways. As a result, however, Kentucky also became a place of refuge for those disenchanted with America’s capacity to protect and secure the broader western region of the Ohio River Valley.69 As westerners embraced deserters and dissenters alike, they created the seedbed for radical, antigovernment, separatist activities. Officials in Kentucky observed what they considered to be a dangerous level of autonomy in the hands of western settlers. During the 1780s, rumors surfaced in Lincoln County of “a powerfull party indeavoring to subvert the government.”70 Letters to Virginia warned that the residents of Kentucky were not “well affected to its Government, and are sowing sedition among the Inhabitants, as fast as they can.”71 Kentucky’s first district attorney, Walker Daniel, predicted that unless government took action, the residents of Kentucky would soon “beget an unwillingness to obey any Law at all.”72 Particularly daunting was the arrival of antigovernment literature from the pen of Thomas Paine specifically addressed to Kentucky settlers. Paine, of course, was the internationally renowned radical whose 1775 publication of Common Sense helped propel the America colonies into revolution. Paine’s accessible and impassioned language animated the revolutionary generation unlike any other single piece of writing. The impact of his work roused ordinary colonists to political action, and the size of his audience was unprecedented—Common Sense became the 111

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bestselling book in American history and was largely responsible for communicating the logic of American independence to the general public.73 After his success in galvanizing a generation of American patriots, Paine turned his attention to the ongoing struggles of western settlers in Kentucky. In 1780, Paine published a pamphlet called Public Good in which he argued that Virginia’s claims to western territories were invalid. Virginia’s elite were outraged that Paine had used his influence and popularity to meddle in a conflict that could likely undermine investments in western lands that they had worked hard to secure.74 Virginia land speculators certainly had reason to worry. Paine’s pamphlet spoke to an audience of westerners who felt exhausted and exploited by eastern investors. To have the power and influence of America’s most beloved revolutionary writer working to undermine Virginia’s authority in the western settlements was like tinder for a smoldering fire. Paine argued in Public Good that the distance of western settlers from eastern authority made them impossible to govern and thus a hotbed of sedition and lawlessness. As a result of “the distance the settlers will be at from [Virginia] . . . she will render her frontiers a refuge to desperadoes, and a hiding-place from justice,” to the great peril of the republic.75 And Kentucky’s regional elites knew that he was right. In a 1782 plea to Virginia legislators for “Redress of their Grievances,” petitioners from Kentucky noted with alarm the “Considerable Desentions amongst them, which an Inflamatary Pamphlet intitled publick Good has augmented.”76 Within just a few years of American victory over the British, a distinct separatist impulse had taken root in Kentucky. By the late 1780s, the possibility of losing America’s territorial fringe was no longer hypothetical. And Kentucky was not the only problem. Populations of settlers all along the nation’s peripheries embraced aggressive measures for selfsovereignty. On the northern frontier, Vermont declared itself an independent republic. In western North Carolina, residents formed their own state of Franklin. In 1794, settlers in western Pennsylvania took up arms against the state, referring to themselves as “citizen[s] of the western country.” As Kentuckians hatched their own local conspiracies and separatist designs, they became part of a much larger problem that threatened to destroy American visions of territorial expansion.77 112

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The reality of western separatism weighed heavily on the minds of national leadership. George Washington was well aware that the wrong move “would ultimately bring on a separation between its Eastern & Western Settlements—towards which, there is not wanting a disposition at this moment in that part of it, which is beyond the mountains.”78 Writing to Madison in 1787, he cautiously advised that “without good and wise management,” the West might prove “troublesome.”79 Using less caution with his words, Thomas Jefferson speculated that without immediate attention to conditions in the West, a “separation was possible at every moment.”80 Management of western lands occupied the legislative agenda for the Confederation Congress, but the land ordinances that emerged out of such debates anticipated the future more than they responded to the immediate crisis.81 National leaders worried first and foremost that Kentuckians might foster an alliance with the British, who remained stubbornly ensconced in the Northwest Territory. In addition to its status as a magnet for antigovernment discontent, Kentuckians had also gained a reputation as a haven for British sympathizers. Through the American Revolution, Kentucky attracted Loyalists from all areas, particularly those migrating from North Carolina.82 Throughout the course of the war, estimates of several hundred squatters abandoned Kentucky to seek refuge in British territory north of the Ohio, rendering the boundary between American and English influence increasingly porous.83 Although the threat of Kentucky’s association with the British was perhaps exaggerated slightly in the moment, the vulnerability of Kentucky during the revolution heightened the importance of potential western sympathies for England. From Washington County, Arthur Campbell speculated about Kentucky’s precarious position in relation to their enemy as a window of opportunity for British designs. “What if it should be the policy of the British Ministry,” wrote Campbell, “to drive in from the other side of the Apalachian mountains before signing the preliminaries of peace.”84 Reports of Kentucky’s vulnerability to British designs convinced Virginia that its western claims were “in the greatest danger of being annoyed by the British.” In their characteristic concern for land investments over settlers’ loyalty, the Virginia House of Delegates resolved that “the consequences would be fatal to our interest in that part of 113

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the country as the people must either desert it or [submit] to British government.”85 Alongside the threat of a British alliance, the Spanish Empire also posed a daunting menace. Since the end of the revolution, diplomatic relationships with Spain had deteriorated steadily. In 1784, Spain closed off navigation of the Mississippi for American trade, a move that outraged Kentucky settlers and effectively barred westerners from the vital port of New Orleans, leaving them without any affordable access to market.86 Overland travel across the mountains was dangerous and expensive, and the Ohio River bordered the ongoing Anglo-Indian war zone. Kentuckians relied desperately on the Mississippi. Despite collective outrage with the Spanish, American diplomats seemed unable to remedy the problem. When John Jay, then secretary of foreign affairs, traveled to Spain to negotiate a resolution to the issue in 1786, he returned with a treaty that essentially bargained away trade rights on the Mississippi in exchange for terms that favored eastern states. Although the Confederation Congress never approved the treaty, the action outraged westerners. At best, they saw their interests abandoned for those of eastern merchants; at worst, they perceived American diplomacy as too impotent on the world stage to protect them.87 If neither American government, nor military power, nor diplomatic energy could defend them, Kentuckians began to consider an alternative alliance with a political power that could. In this context, Spanish officials began to court western settlers with promises of trade and patronage. Among the exasperated and ambitious, the separatist opportunities were tempting. In the most sensational of the Spanish plots, General James Wilkinson brazenly attempted to negotiate a separation of Kentucky for an alliance with Spain. In 1787, Wilkinson set off from Kentucky on a flatboat headed for the Spanish-controlled port of New Orleans. At his personal expense, Wilkinson had loaded down his barge with Kentucky produce—tobacco, hams, bacon, and flour—with which he hoped to strike a deal with Spanish officials in Louisiana to open trade along the lower Mississippi. He stayed for several months, all the while working diligently to convince Spanish authorities of the potential advantages they might have by expanding their interests in Kentucky. Kentuckians, he explained, were frustrated by the inability of the newly independent 114

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United States to fulfill their needs. Disaffection with the new Congress was high in the West, he claimed, and Spain might do well to embrace Kentucky’s commercial potential as a way to strengthen their interests against further American expansion. Ostensibly operating alone, Wilkinson worked for several months laying the groundwork for a lucrative plot to separate Kentucky from the United States and embrace Spanish authority.88 By the end of the summer, Wilkinson moved his campaign for disunion one step further. In August, Wilkinson officially signed a declaration of expatriation and pledged his allegiance to the Spanish crown. He broke all ties to the United States and pledged to serve the “good of [Spain] and the interest and aggrandizement of the Spanish Monarchy.”89 In a remarkable statement sent to Spanish Governor Esteban Miró, Wilkinson explained that Congress’s neglect of the Kentucky settlements had sowed the seeds of outrage and disaffection, leaving the region poised for radical change. It was just a matter of time, he explained, until such unrest “will be able to alienate the Western Americans from the United States . . . and throw those (Western Americans) into the arms of Spain.”90 Wilkinson chose his words carefully. He described the disaffection of Kentuckians in a language of manly protection. The United States had driven westerners to seek sanctuary from a more capable power. The implication was that the American state had failed in its obligation to protect the western settlements. Like the obligation of a household patriarch to protect his dependents, the purpose of the state was to shield its citizens from harm. Failure to do so justified abandonment and separation. Westerners would break from the Americans and throw themselves into the arms of another, leaving the indifferent United States for the loving embrace of Spain. It was rhetoric infused with the spirit of manly responsibility, rhetoric that his fellow western separatists would understand.91 Wilkinson was not the only westerner to abandon the American experiment. Others quietly crossed the Mississippi and took up residence under the Spanish crown. Throughout the frontier territories, individual agents began to campaign surreptitiously for the removal of the western settlers to Spanish protection. In the summer of 1786, a former North Carolina congressman and land speculator, James White, began meeting secretly 115

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with the Spanish minister to the United States, Don Diego de Gardoqui, to discuss an alliance between the settlers of the Tennessee Valley and Spain. White began quietly contacting his powerful business connections and “leading men” throughout the Tennessee backcountry, urging them to swear an “oath of allegiance to the [new] King . . . if it was their wish to come under the protection of Spain.”92 At the same time, John Sevier of the short-lived State of Franklin movement also began a correspondence with Gardoqui, expressing his desire that his band of western separatists receive Spanish protection. In 1787, Gardoqui struck a deal with a former trader in the Illinois Territory, George Morgan, for an enormous land grant alongside the Mississippi River and a sizable salary with which to recruit American settlers. Those who sought out Spanish protection would be welcomed into the new colony, which Morgan decided to call “New Madrid.”93 By 1796, Spanish agents were distributing pamphlets throughout the American West promising lavish land grants and no property taxes if they chose to settle in their territory across the Mississippi River.94 As Kentucky settlers conceptualized potential alliances with foreign powers, the language of protection and responsibility shaped their sense of political obligation. But, as western leaders would soon discover, this language could also undermine the separatist impulse by casting foreign alliances as unmanly abandonment. In divorce petitions from women whose husbands had left for the Spanish territories, abandoned wives sought protection from the state to remedy the neglect of their disloyal husbands. While men might use the language of protection to justify disunion, women could harness such rhetoric as well. In divorce petitions, women proved as savvy at manipulating the gendered rhetoric of the household to secure protection from the American state. A divorce petition from a woman named Polly Rogers, for example, describes how domestic politics shaped the conflict over disunion. Rogers submitted a petition for divorce in 1799 that described multiple levels of disunion—the failure of her marriage and her husband’s elopement to Spanish protection. Rogers outlined a litany of abuses that befell her when her husband dragged her across the Mississippi River from Kentucky to Spanish territory. According to her petition, Polly married Robert Rogers in 1796. The following year, Rogers took Polly with him when he “moved to the Spanish dominions on the Mississippi.” In her 116

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petition, she described herself as captive to a tyrannical master who abused her both physically and financially. Once across the river, Polly claimed that Robert began to treat her “in the most brutal and cruel manner, and at length drove her off and obliged her to return to Kentucky.” Not only did Robert abuse his wife, he also “possessed himself of the greater part of her property.” Addressing the Kentucky Assembly, she claimed that Robert “had abandoned her altogether” and prayed that “a law may pass to dissolve her marriage.”95 The petition of Polly Rogers evoked the fragility of the new nation’s western boundary even as she embraced its protection. In her telling of events, the Mississippi River itself acted as a moral and political threshold that ran between a regime that tolerated domestic tyranny and one that privileged female protection. Rogers depicted the political border between the United States and the Spanish Empire through gender ideology: One government secured women’s safety in marriage while the other institutionalized women’s exploitation by their husbands. She suggested that once her husband crossed the Mississippi and allied himself to the Spanish king, he entered a place where a monarchical form of government cared little for the exploitation of women. Once over the Mississippi, Robert Rogers began to treat Polly with brutality and cruelty. The subtext of her plea was that an enlightened state would protect women from abuse by emancipating them from unfit and unmanly tyrants. A divorce petition submitted by Margaret Richeson in Kentucky in 1795 also captures this tension. Richeson petitioned for a divorce from her husband, James, on the grounds that he had deserted her for the kingdom of Spain, just across the Mississippi River from the Kentucky settlements. She claimed that James “hath become a Spanish subject since such desertion” and demanded that “the marriage between said Margaret and James shall be totally dissolved.”96 Read before the newly constituted state assembly just three years after Kentucky’s admission to the federal union, Richeson’s petition presented a number of vexing problems for western legislators. She employed a combination of arguments that fused together ideas about marriage and loyalty and evoked real political and diplomatic problems still plaguing the frontier. With great subtlety, Richeson suggested that her marriage failed because 117

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the American state had not adequately secured political and diplomatic legitimacy. Several potent symbols stand out in Richeson’s petition that would have resonated with Kentucky legislators. She characterized herself as an abandoned wife and capitalized on images of female dependence within marriage.97 While Richeson used familiar imagery about marital dependence, however, she also introduced new commentary about the viability of the national border. James Richeson had not only left his wife, he had also left his nation. For this reason, the most alarming aspect of Richeson’s petition was the use of a single word: “subject.” The word stands out in defiance of everything the American Revolution stood for. The American Revolution was, in many ways, the culmination of several decades of shifting political thinking that gradually replaced hierarchies of subjecthood with the egalitarianism of citizenship. American patriots articulated a revolutionary logic that rejected the monarchical “subject” in favor of the liberal, democratic “citizen.” Margaret Richeson made it clear in her petition that her husband had turned back the clock. He rejected the American Revolution itself and cast off the privileges of citizenship for the familiar comforts of subjecthood.98 As Kentucky legislators reviewed such petitions, they learned that the language of household could bolster their authority in the West just as readily as it could tear it apart. If the language of manhood could serve to uproot West from East, so too could it function to hold the region together. The crisis in authority that ordinary Kentuckians made apparent after the American Revolution underscored just how powerful the idea of household order had become to western men. They went to great lengths to secure their patriarchal authority, even if that meant abandoning their loyalties to a nation many had just fought to create or deserting their officers to protect their families instead of fighting Indians. Ordinary men found themselves faced with a choice: Risk your life in frontier defense to protect a sovereign power that provided little for your safety or fight to secure your own personal independence as a male patriarch under whatever political authority that would have you. By the early 1790s, many western settlers were considering the latter alternative. Ultimately, political leadership in the East and the West came to realize that securing the household—and the race and gender hierarchies 118

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within it—were of dire consequence to the future of American territorial expansion. Securing the borders of empire required stabilizing order within households. As regional and national leaders tried desperately to conceive of remedies to the crisis of disunion in the West, they knew that they had to find a language that could unify disparate interests. Throughout the 1780s and into the 1790s, Kentuckians had come to imagine themselves and their western concerns as distinct from those of the East. Their ability to protect their households had been so eroded by eastern policymakers that they came to think that separation was the only solution. If only there was a way to find common ground with these disgruntled setters. Specific actions might help—better frontier defense, a more equitable distribution of land, navigation rights to the Mississippi. These might bring about some sense of resolution. But to regain the trust of westerners required something more—a powerful, unifying ideal, an abstraction even—that would truly repair the damage done and establish common cause between East and West, rich and poor, captain and soldier, and help to secure authority in the West and inspire loyalty to the state. As policymakers faced the turmoil that engulfed the Kentucky settlements, they began to see the outlines of a remedy. It had been there all along, and they finally began to take note: Kentuckians wanted assurance that manhood had meaning.

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CHAPTER FIVE “A N E W R A C E O F M E N ”

When Crèvecoeur published Letters from an American Farmer in 1782, he raised a poignant question that, in many ways, could not yet be answered. “What then is the American, this new man?” he asked, as he attempted to understand the character of the people being forged in revolution.1 In his many reflections on life as a Frenchman farming in rural New York, Crèvecoeur attempted to define this “new man.” Americans, he suggested, were independent, egalitarian, hard-working, and free from the stultifying baggage of European pageantry and hereditary wealth. He imagined that there was something special in the American soil itself, something transformative and animating. Americans were like the plants and the trees, he suggested, particular and organic to the American landscape. Different ethnicities and cultures blended together in the American soil to become something new, something unique, something the world had never seen.2 But it was still just a question, an unresolved puzzle: “What then is the American, this new man?” In 1782, there was no clear answer. Even as the revolution ended, Americans would remain unsure of their collective identity and ideological direction. They could not yet be sure who this 120

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new American was. To some extent, a level of clarity emerged in 1789 with the inauguration of a new federal government. As well as it could, the new Constitution attempted to delineate the rights of citizens and outline the privileges of the individual within the republic. The Bill of Rights defined broad principles that applied to every citizen. Ratification empowered the new government to define itself on the world stage with military and diplomatic force. State governments implemented plans that conjoined regional demands with national ideals. Such collective work began to give legal meaning and ideological substance to the question that Crèvecoeur asked in the final years of revolution. But as would readily become apparent, the true meaning of what it meant to be an American was still a work in progress. Nowhere was this clearer than on the frontier. In fact, Crèvecoeur’s celebration of America’s purity of purpose utterly dissolves when he writes about the frontier. His vision for this new American falls apart when he confronts the western settler. His narrative becomes infused with dread over the fate of the noble American experiment. In Crèvecoeur’s telling, the “back settlers” are “ferocious, gloomy, and unsociable.” They live in a kind of “lawless profligacy,” and their “wives and children live in sloth and inactivity.” They have descended into a savagery of its own special incarnation—“the manner of the Indian natives are respectable, compared with this European medley.” This place, this frontier, this home to perversions of nature—“our bad people,” as he calls them in disgust—is where the American ideal goes to die.3 Indeed, prospects in the early West certainly looked grim during the period that the new national government took shape. The growing tensions between the haves and the have-nots marginalized ordinary settlers and galvanized antiauthoritarian sentiments. The inability to secure Mississippi navigation from Spanish control fueled the perception of neglect and indifference among westerners. Failure to resolve the ongoing Indian war undermined what little sovereign power the national government exercised on the frontier. Devastating military losses eroded settlers’ will to fight, and frontier populations embraced those who fled from service. An impulse for disunion took root in fertile ground throughout the western frontier, and many in Kentucky agitated to make the threat of separation a real possibility.4 121

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Yet, at the same time that some mobilized forces for separation from the United States, others marshaled energies in support of connection. It was this latter contingent that propelled the movement for Kentucky statehood and, in doing so, shrewdly worked out a tacit compromise in the simmering conflict between settlers and speculators. Talk of statehood emerged as early as 1784 among a small handful who thought that autonomy from Virginia was the only way to ensure safety and stability. Over the next several years, Kentucky would hold multiple conventions to discuss the issue of statehood and to debate the shape of government. Local movements organized to plan and design governments. They imagined ways for westerners to help define America’s role on the frontier.5 It was an utterly unprecedented moment, as no new area of settlement had ever applied for admission into the United States. Even at the national level, there was significant confusion over how to actually go about admitting a new state. Under the Articles of Confederation, Congress spent considerable energies trying to manage western lands. In 1784, Thomas Jefferson authored a sweeping land ordinance that imagined the region west of the Appalachian Mountains divided into fourteen new states—a plan that had much to do with cartographic fantasy and little to do with realities on the ground.6 The plan created enormous problems, as it introduced the basic premise of new states but provided little practical guidance as to what statehood actually entailed or required. In many ways, the 1784 Land Ordinance empowered western separatists to invent impromptu, unauthorized movements for selfsovereignty. To national leaders, such unregulated separatist impulses threatened to undermine the very idea of the union. Congress tried to undo the confusion let loose by Jefferson’s plan with subsequent land ordinances in 1785 and 1787 that outlined more measured and specific requirements for statehood. But by the time Kentucky applied for statehood in 1792, nobody had actually yet to try it. With an enormous amount at stake, the fate of the western settlements walked a fine line between chaos and resolution.7 The task at hand seemed nearly impossible. Somehow, the design for government had to accommodate the interests of the elite, who expected to inherit the reins of power, and those of the poor, who showed little inclination to defer to wealth. Then, of course, there was the enormous 122

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problem of poverty in Kentucky. Nearly any plan of government that the elites would tolerate involved a property-based system of political participation. In the same way that property ownership was the cornerstone of personal independence, so too was it the precursor to political life. However, with such an overwhelming majority of landless and propertyless men in Kentucky, such a qualification risked disenfranchising the most numerous and most volatile population of western settlers. Somehow, the poor, the angry, and the disaffected had to be persuaded that they would have a place in the new political order. If Kentucky statehood was to happen at all, the new plan for government had to convince the landless that what they had in common with the elites was more valuable than what they had in conflict. Finding this common ground was not easy, for few of Kentucky’s elites could foresee a solution that did not involve relinquishing their hold on wealth and power—a concession they were loath to support. But, in the 1790s, a small, highly persuasive group of western leaders began to find a middle ground between rich and poor. Rather than focus on the material conditions that antagonized rich men and poor, a few articulate leaders began to promote the symbolic ideals that united them. In the 1790s, Kentuckians forged a political consensus that privileged whiteness and manhood over wealth and land ownership as the prerequisites for civic life. In the Kentucky Constitution of 1792, the new state enfranchised all men, regardless of land ownership or personal property. On the surface, it seemed a radical step toward egalitarian democracy. Yet, in practice, the concession was largely symbolic and changed little in the lives of poor tenants and laborers. As such, it was not enough to secure loyalty completely. In the ensuing years, however, Kentucky lawmakers recognized that white racial privilege was equally crucial to stability in the West. By 1800, Kentuckians would revise their slave codes to restrict the lives of African-Americans in ways that elevated the status of poor whites. They would revise their state constitution to make explicit the political exclusion of “negroes, mulattoes, and Indians.”8 They would give white men political capital in their race and gender as a way to unite the interests of rich and poor and secure the region for American interests.9 The new political order that emerged in Kentucky was one in which white manhood took on a new centrality and a new power. The political 123

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landscape that emerged in the 1790s was rooted in the expectations of ordinary men and forged in the failure of the frontier to accommodate their dreams. As heads of households became dependents and poverty alienated settler families, white men demanded recognition of their social authority as a precondition of loyalty. What unfolded in Kentucky during the 1790s was a new political culture that seared abstractions of whiteness and maleness into the project of national expansion. The debates over Kentucky statehood created what Crèvecoeur referred to as “a new race of men.”10 It created men whose race and gender privilege would become as organic to the West as the plants and trees themselves. Enthusiasm for Kentucky statehood was slow to get off the ground. In the mid-1780s, a small handful of regional leaders talked privately amongst themselves about a possible separation from Virginia, but the general public had little interest in such things. The reasons for the lukewarm enthusiasm varied. Most Kentucky settlers did not follow discussions about abstract questions of statehood and sovereignty when they were struggling to find their next paycheck or to hold their families together. Others were more cynical: If regional elites advocated for statehood, that probably meant it was a bad thing. Kentucky’s wealthy minority had done little to protect and much to exploit ordinary settlers, so their opinions on governance were not to be trusted. One observer reported that the general sentiment about statehood was that it “is not so much the wish or voice of the people generally, as the uneasiness of the great landholders, who wish for power and offices in the government.”11 Although difficult to gauge, popular opinion appeared neither strongly for nor strongly against the prospect of statehood. The real battle lines in the West were drawn in far more tangible ways—between rich and poor or between American and Indian. These were conflicts that affected the lives of all western settlers and Kentuckians in particular. For those inclined toward separatism and disunion, statehood meant a commitment to a government that had proved unable to remedy poverty and violence. But when the idea of statehood became a reality, people began to recognize that inclusion in the union stood to alter the dynamics of all of Kentucky’s most pressing problems. Potentially, statehood might serve as an opportunity to remedy the 124

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problems of economic inequality, frontier war, and Mississippi navigation. It might also undo some of the social problems that had politically marginalized westerners.12 When Congress officially approved Kentuckians’ petition for statehood in 1791, western settlers began to take the prospect of building a government seriously. Charged with the task of writing a constitution by their scheduled admission date in June of 1792, Kentucky settlers exploded into debate. Suddenly, everybody seemed to have an opinion about what the government should look like. The election of delegates for the constitutional convention brought people of every rank and status into the political fray. One observer, Francis Slaughter, was struck by the “great Clamor respecting our Separation from Virginia.” Political hopefuls took every opportunity for politicking. “Our different Candidates for different posts,” Slaughter described, “are as Numerous as Stud Horses at a Court House on an Election day.”13 Embarking on the nation’s first experiment in western state-building energized Kentucky’s political culture. The approaching constitutional convention of 1792 galvanized local people and regional leadership alike. Ad hoc constitutional committees organized in at least five counties—Bourbon, Fayette, Madison, Mercer, and Mason—though they were likely more widespread.14 The pages of the Kentucky Gazette were consumed by letters setting forth opinions and plans for government. The newspaper carried notices of open forums for county committees to survey the public and gauge opinions for the upcoming convention. Announcements like that for the Fayette County committee broadcast “an invitation be given to the religious societies and districts of militia companies . . . to attend the next [committee] meeting” to gather public input for their convention delegates.15 The outpouring of enthusiasm for the new government reflected the aspirations of those with the most at stake. The Kentucky Gazette published propaganda that was infused with language that championed the virtue of the “common man.” For poor men in Kentucky, the formation of a new government provided an opportunity to remedy the erosion of status they had suffered in western migration. This was the moment that ordinary men could claim for themselves. As the committee of Bourbon County declared, the new government would finally “let us boldly step forward and assert our rights as men, and as free men.”16 125

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Many of the published plans designed by local county committees advocated the importance of government by the ordinary man. The Bourbon County committee promoted a system in which “the farmer, the mechanic, and even the common labouring man have a voice . . . equal to the lawyer, the colonel and the general.”17 They emphasized representative democracy and localized power. One committee plan proposed that freemen would elect local appointments and militia officers at the rank of colonel and lower. Another suggested that members of a one-house legislature would appoint all other government officers. Still another plan claimed that government servants should receive their salaries in country produce.18 Alongside the celebration of the common man, county committees reflected the deep-seated hostility to the elite influence on government. One observer, writing to the Kentucky Gazette under the name “Salamander,” commented before the convention that “the fewer Lawyers and Pick pockets there are . . . the better the chance honest people have to keep their own.”19 Local committees demonized lawyers, elites, and gentlemen as corrupt and dangerous to democracy. One county committee suggested that the new government require that “all immoral men ought to be excluded from all places of power and trust.”20 Lawyers received the lion’s share of scorn. Such sentiments reflected the hostility of landless men who felt swindled out of opportunity by inscrutable land policies and the lawyers who exploited them. They championed the cause of “people in low circumstances” who only wanted to “[possess] that golden key which can open those doors of access otherwise barred and fast locked through the influence of lawyers and attornies.”21 Along with lawyers, the learned and educated man came under attack as the root of corruption and bad leadership. The county committees denounced “men of Fortune, learned men, the Judiciary and Barr” and instead touted the virtues of government run by “plain honest farmers.”22 One observer derided an opinion written by “so many learned fools and empty gentlemen.” The author critiqued the premise that wealth made for good leadership. Rather, “much learning hath made them mad, for they seem to allow that riches and learning give wisdom.”23 True intellectual virtue was found with the common farmer, who spends his 126

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days at honest labor, rather than frittering away his faculties like so many rich and aimless men. The author asked the public to “recollect how the greater part of the wealthy spend their time, and then think whether the farmer who can afford himself books and candles at night, and follows his farm in the day, has not a mind most free and fit for improvement.”24 Of course, the rhetoric that celebrated “the farmer” and “the common man” mythologized an ideal for a public still largely made up of tenants and laborers. But, as such, it fundamentally altered the axis of political privilege from the wealthy to the worker. Public appeals to the virtue of labor elevated the dignity of the poor and landless. More than simply inviting the disenfranchised into the political process, the public reverence for the common man granted poor Kentuckians moral leverage over those who suppressed them. They became more worthy than those too corrupt for the reins of government. They became the most fit to govern. This became particularly clear in assertions that the household was a mirror of governance. One commentator who claimed to be a woman made a special appeal to the women of Kentucky to look at their husbands as models for government. The writer, who called herself “The Medlar,” claimed to be drawn into the subject of politics through “female curiosity.”25 Although the only self-proclaimed female voice in all of the constitutional debates, it is fairly clear that the author was not actually a woman. Rather, the name “Medlar” was likely a bawdy play on words that points more to male misogyny than to female insight. On the one hand, the name is intended to demonstrate a woman who is “meddling” in male affairs. At the same time, since the seventeenth century, the term medlar had been slang for the female genitals and was also a word used to refer to prostitutes or women of ill repute. Thus, the voice of “The Medlar” was almost certainly an inside joke between men, one that affirmed male authority over the bodies of women.26 The letter from “The Medlar” outlines the difference between virtuous and despotic governance as a literal reflection of the husband’s authority within his home. The author inserted “a word to my female readers” that implored them to look to their own households in order to judge how the state should best be governed. “I hope a number of you have the happiness of being joined with men possessed of every qualification fit to govern the domestic state,” the author wrote. A worthy male patriarch 127

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should be capable of “distributing equal justice among their subjects, encouraging virtue and suppressing every vice, who can reward without profusion and punish without cruelty.” On the other hand, those with bad husbands understand how poor governance can oppress those who need protection: “I make no doubt but others of you feel even in your families all the evils of despotism.”27 Such were the two models for state government—the virtuous husband and the corrupt tyrant. The new Kentucky Constitution could either be made of unworthy men who would abuse citizens like bad husbands abuse their families, or it could be made of men “fit to govern the domestic state.” Placing two households side by side—one with a virtuous patriarch and the other a despot—“The Medlar” implored female readers to “balance the two together and see how happy or unhappy our state is like to be.” The answer was obvious. In order to ensure that the state of Kentucky would be governed by honorable men, women needed to “use every method that your best thoughts can invent to persuade your husbands to rouse up and quit themselves like men.”28 Not all Kentuckians welcomed the grassroots dynamism. Backlash against the fervor for popular democracy revealed elite Kentuckians’ deep anxieties about losing control. The war of words that unfolded in the wake of the publication of the letter, however, made clear that the elite’s greatest vulnerability was not their power but their manhood. “The Medlar” elicited a response from a critic who mocked her opinion that ordinary men might have the intellectual capacity to govern. The response, which came in the form of a poem addressed to “Mrs. Medlar,” lampooned the premise that the common farmer could create wise laws. Writing under the name “Henry Hudibras,” a reference to the seventeenth-century satirical poem by Samuel Butler, the author said that a government of common men would “Make Laws so simple and so good, So plain and easily understood, That every fool may comprehend them, And at his will may make or mend them.”29 Political participation by common men, in other words, would create a government of simpletons in which any fool could make or alter laws on a whim. When “The Medlar” responded with a poem of her own, the main thrust of her reply was to emasculate her critic.30 She scolded “Henry Hudibras” like a young child: “But I suppose you some untutored lad, 128

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That cannot yet Distinguish good from bad . . . O fie for shame! Rash boy, lay down your pen. How [dare] you The Medlar thus engage? Did not you know, Respect was due to age?” She continues to belittle her critic as an impetuous youth: “Such things as this, Will your good name destroy; Take better care again. Be a good boy.” Charges of youth were not enough to disarm her opponent entirely. In order to expose his deficiencies, “The Medlar” had to equate him with blackness and womanhood. Not only did she deride her opponent for being juvenile, she also asserted that he would be better suited to the work of women and slaves. Clearly, “Henry Hudibras” was not a man suited for political posturing, so perhaps he should consider tending the fields or even take up spinning: Good manners looks So pretty in a youth. Ask men of sense, They’ll tell you this is truth. If you’ll do this, I freely will you pardon: ’Til blacks are freed, I’ll let you tend my garden. At leisure times, Then you my thread may reel, When I shall re-assume My spinning-wheel. The patronizing tone in this response exposed the heart of the conflict over governance. The debates over what the government should look like were fundamentally contests over the meaning of manhood in the new republic. With deep sarcasm, “The Medlar” soundly rejected the premise that only “learned men” should inherit the right to govern. To the contrary, such men were as ill suited for the task of government as slaves and women. To underscore this point, “The Medlar” mocks “her” own performance as a man hiding behind a female identity. With selfreflective irony that merely serves to confirm male authority, the author writes: “He thinks I am a man, I know not why, If men will hear this, Surely so may I; For sure no man Of courage or good sense, Would hide behind A woman for defence.”31 The subtext of the public humiliation of “Henry Hudibras” served up by “The Medlar” was that the elites who did not trust the ordinary farmer to govern were deficient in masculinity. They were more like impetuous children, dependent women, and degraded slaves and therefore not fit to rule. The public enthusiasm for popular government, however, created 129

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enormous anxiety for those who saw such democratic fervor as dangerous. Privately, the elites were horrified by the popular enthusiasm for politics. One observer remarked that “the People of Kentucky are mere Fanatics in Politics—Constitutions are forming in every Neighborhood.”32 Alexander Scott Bullitt, who became Annie Christian’s son-in-law and one of Kentucky’s wealthiest residents, complained how “Politically Mad the whole District of Kentuckey has become at the Approach of our Convention—I might tell you how Numbers who never felt the ‘Amor Patria’ before have suddenly Commenced Patriots & Politicians, how half bred Judges & Lawyers who were never bred at all now Preachers of the Gospel . . . are writing printing & publishing Plans for the better Government of the Good People of this District.”33 The anxiety that the new constitution would be written by the “half bred” inspired many of Kentucky’s elite men to organize around their own interests. They formed political associations to plan and discuss strategies for the upcoming convention. They wrote to their friends and associates in Virginia for advice about constitutional design. They wrote to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison for guidance and insight. With relatively few professionally trained lawyers and experienced statesmen among them, the task at hand required outside input. The cantankerous Humphrey Marshall, a cousin of Chief Justice John Marshall, complained that there were virtually no “qualified constitution makers” among the ranks elected to the Constitutional Convention.34 In this political landscape, those with connections and legal expertise quickly became valuable resources. Those with the intellectual weight to carry the debates formed what one historian referred to as “the articulate center” of the conversation.35 Many such men met regularly to discuss strategy. In Danville, a group of some of Kentucky’s leading citizens formed a political club to discuss everything from the merits of statehood, the nature of elections, and the form of representation to the requirements for suffrage. Men such as Harry Innes, who would become Kentucky’s first federal judge; John Brown, who later served as U.S. senator from Kentucky; and Christopher Greenup, who was elected as Kentucky’s third governor, filled the ranks of the Danville Political Club. Such elite leaders met regularly to draft state constitutions and discuss strategy in anticipation of the convention.36 130

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Kentucky’s powerful men—educated and well-connected men who considered themselves the most suited for leadership—were particularly wary of expansive political rights. At one meeting in March of 1787, the members of the Danville Political Club posed the following question for their evening discussion: “In a free government ought there to be any other qualification required to entitle a right of suffrage than that of freedom?” The members of the club resolved that “some other qualification to be required,” though they did not seem to agree on what else to require.37 Some said property, others suggested education, the latter of which would likely have implied some landed status. They all agreed, however, that the popular forces celebrating the virtue of the common man needed some kind of check. Their resistance against a universal free vote was largely in keeping with contemporary thought, though the political winds on the issue were beginning to shift in the 1790s. Throughout most of the eighteenth century, suffrage was ideologically uncontested—it was unequivocally reserved for property owners, as only property owners had sufficient personal interests in their communities to make decisions about the laws that would affect them. In most of the colonies, this meant real property in the form of land and buildings. Dependent populations of propertyless men, women, children, slaves, and the poor were thought to be sufficiently protected by propertied men.38 This basic framework for voting rights was received wisdom with deep roots in English tradition. In the late 1760s, William Blackstone explained that the logic behind property requirements for voting stemmed from personal independence achieved only through land ownership. Although in theory, Blackstone explained, all should be able to share in the franchise, only men with property were sufficiently independent to act without undue influence. The poor, the enslaved, the propertyless, and dependent women and servants were deemed “in so mean a situation that they are esteemed to have no will of their own.”39 Those in positions of dependence were deemed too subject to outside influence to escape manipulation. Dependent voters could potentially be bought or swayed by the wealthy classes. Only property owners who possessed the means to personal independence could truly act autonomously. 131

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When the delegates arrived in Frankfort in the spring of 1792 to write Kentucky’s first constitution, in fact, none of them thought universal political rights were a good idea. That was, until one man, George Nicholas, made a compelling case for universal male suffrage. A recent immigrant from Virginia, Nicholas was highly educated and arguably the most politically experienced member of the convention. He left his stamp on nearly every aspect of the final document. Nicholas had been a member of Virginia’s constitutional convention, and he carried strong opinions about political design with him when he moved to Kentucky in 1790. He was not pretty to look at—notoriously overweight, he was once described as “a plum pudding with legs,” a comment that reportedly made his friend, James Madison, laugh so hard he cried.40 Even though Nicholas was round, bald, and somewhat monotone as a speaker, his judgment was highly respected among Kentucky’s political elite. When members of the Danville Political Club first sought advice for drafting a state constitution, for example, they wrote for outside assistance and solicited counsel from experienced lawmakers. Alongside Jefferson and Madison, they consulted the wisdom of George Nicholas.41 At the convention in Frankfort, Nicholas presented the idea of universal male suffrage as a practical necessity. At the heart of the matter, he claimed, was the high rate of landlessness among Kentucky’s population. Imposing property requirements in a state where the vast majority of the population owned no land was political suicide. It risked alienating the very people needed to secure and sustain western lands. So long as three quarters of the population remained landless, Nicholas argued, Kentuckians could not afford to impose a property requirement for suffrage. Until the government caused “the land to be settled by proprietors instead of tenants,” he argued, “and enable poor proprietors to improve their lands,” suffrage would provide landless men with a stake in society where none existed.42 It would give struggling men the status they craved. Universal male suffrage, Nicholas argued, was the only way to secure broad support for the new government. More important, it provided poor men with status without any redistribution of land and resources. This seemingly radical gesture, thus, was actually an effort to capitalize on popular sentiment for economically conservative ends. Existing structures of land ownership, Nicholas argued, would face a far greater threat if 132

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Kentucky’s volatile, landless poor were excluded from the franchise— and thus tempted toward rebellion—than if they were incorporated. Maintaining property requirements for political participation would have ensured a system of government run by a small landed minority. Doing so would tempt Kentucky’s landless poor toward popular uprising— a scenario all too familiar in the eighteenth-century backcountry. Incorporating the discontented into the body politic seemed the only way to avoid another Shays’ Rebellion, to suppress a popular uprising the likes of which residents of Maine, Vermont, and North Carolina still held fresh in their memories.43 Granting the vote to all free male citizens was a radical concession to poor men that would ultimately preserve orderly government. Nicholas’s arguments delicately balanced real and symbolic power. In his public and private comments about the suffrage question, Nicholas appealed to the common man and elite interests at the same time. In public, Nicholas went out of his way to champion the radical idea of universal male suffrage. His speech to the convention advocating expansive and inclusive voting rights was by far his strongest of his many public statements. While most of his other speeches to the delegates were defensive comments about principles of government, his suffrage speech was a forceful performance on the nature of individual liberty. He refuted William Blackstone’s idea that landless men were dependent and had “no will of their own.” Rather, he argued that “independence does not depend on what a man has but on what he wants and his means of acquiring it.”44 Such language was remarkable in theory but perfectly designed in practice. Nicholas understood what Kentucky men wanted, and he validated their aspirations for status, legitimacy, and authority as free men. In doing so, he strategically positioned himself as the clearest champion of the common man. In private, however, it became clear that his advocacy of poor men was merely symbolic. Nicholas was, in fact, quite sure that the reins of government would remain controlled by men of property. His close friend James Madison thought his plan to enfranchise the landless patently insane. Madison was committed to the idea that property requirements were utterly necessary for a functioning republic.45 Nicholas assured Madison that democracy could be controlled, explaining that 133

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granting universal male suffrage would not actually create a government of ordinary people. “Notwithstanding all have a right to vote and to be elected,” he wrote Madison, “the wealthy will nineteen times out of twenty be chosen.”46 No matter who qualified for the vote, Nicholas believed that wealthy and deserving men should and would always prevail at the polls. “I will give up my opinion,” he wrote, “as soon as I see a man in rags chosen to that body [the legislature].”47 Nicholas persuaded his fellow delegates. The convention adjourned on April 19, after just over two weeks of deliberations, with an expansive suffrage allowance that gave poor men political status. The Kentucky Constitution of 1792 gave “all free male citizens” the right to vote.48 The contradictory public and private comments of George Nicholas betray an important subtext to the seemingly radical transformations ushered in by Kentucky’s state constitution. On the surface, abolishing property requirements for suffrage was a radical act that promised to transform political participation in fundamental ways. At the same time, it was a highly symbolic gesture designed to preserve traditional political hierarchies. Universal free male suffrage in Kentucky was a concession to poor men that rested on the underlying cultural importance of male privilege. The new constitution recognized that political inclusion could secure the loyalties of alienated western men who were hungry for recognition. Kentucky’s constitutional convention had taken an important step in creating a “new man.” George Nicholas won a clear political victory in the Constitutional Convention of 1792, but he was not particularly proud of the results. Writing to James Madison shortly after the convention, he reported with lukewarm enthusiasm: “We have formed our government which I believe you will think is not the worst in the Union.”49 The Kentucky Constitutional Convention had launched a plan for government that Nicholas considered incomplete and unrefined. As such, one of the ideas that he emphasized during the convention of 1792 was that the public be given the opportunity to revise the constitution in the near future. His thinking was that, within a few years of statehood, Kentucky would attract a migrant population of well-educated, elite men who could better handle the task of reworking constitutional design. He suggested that a 134

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constitutional referendum be conducted in 1797 to gauge opinion and, if approved, a new convention would be convened to revisit old questions.50 Nicholas immediately regretted this move. Within a year of the first constitutional convention, public outcry began for a revision. The same forces of popular anger and democratic rallying initiated a new conversation over another constitutional convention. In a letter to the Kentucky Gazette in 1794, an author who dubbed himself “A Farmer” submitted a letter “To the Plebeians” of the state. He railed against “these gentlemen” who “by the inattention and simplicity of us, the Plebeians, got themselves thrust and squeezed in again to constitute our form of government.” Calling for a constitutional revision, “A Farmer” asserted that “as a free people we have a right at any of all times to alter, reform or abolish our government or constitution.”51 This was not at all what Nicholas had in mind. Despite his regrets, a poll taken in 1797 revealed sufficient interest in a constitutional revision. After much grumbling in the Kentucky legislature, a second constitutional convention was scheduled for 1799 to revise the work done just a few years earlier.52 Of all the issues facing Kentucky’s second constitutional revision, perhaps none was more daunting than the issue of slavery. The question of slavery had proved intensely controversial during the first convention of 1792. Among the delegates elected to the 1792 convention, emancipationists represented a sizable and powerful group. The core of the antislavery delegates to the first constitutional convention came from religious institutions. Kentuckians elected six ministers to the first convention who, as a powerful minority, articulated a forceful critique of slavery and advocated for the emancipation of slaves in the constitution. Other antislavery voices at the convention included delegates who were active laymen in their congregations. These sympathizers vigorously opposed any endorsement of slavery in the constitution. The debate over slavery was so heated that it was the only vote tallied for the official record. Despite their powerful presence, the antislavery contingent lost the struggle for emancipation in the first constitution by a vote of twenty-six to sixteen. This did not mean that they abandoned the fight. The second convention of 1799 offered another chance to advance an antislavery agenda.53 For many reasons, but particularly for the perceived vulnerability of slavery, elites once again looked at the approach of another constitutional 135

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convention with considerable anxiety. They worried about the sanctity of their property and the security of their slaves. In some ways, the guarantees that Nicholas bargained for with universal male suffrage in 1792 seemed poised to backfire. In 1792, elites managed to hang on to their controlling influence within a limited electorate. At the time of the first convention, only 23 percent of Kentucky’s population owned slaves, yet over 90 percent of the delegates elected in 1792 were slaveholders.54 Now that all men could vote in elections, it seemed unlikely that the wealthy could hold on to the same level of control. As the public once again rallied behind the common man, elites began to have profound doubts about their ability to stave off the emancipationists a second time. As the constitutional convention of 1799 approached, the gentry class imagined that Kentucky’s celebrated “common man” was coming to repossess their property, including their slaves. Speaking on behalf of the wealthy interests, John Breckenridge scoffed that all the people wanted was to “come in for a better share of the loaves and fishes than they now enjoy.”55 Breckenridge had trained as a lawyer under George Nicholas and strategized closely with his mentor as the convention approached. Nicholas had largely opted to stay out of politics in the interim. When Nicholas died suddenly in 1799, Breckenridge inherited his legacy as the intellectual pillar of the second convention. As the mouthpiece of the elites, Breckenridge was convinced that the antislavery forces conspired with those hostile to large landholders to undo the very idea of property. “If they can by one experiment emancipate our slaves,” he wrote, “the same principle pursued, will enable them at a second experiment to extinguish our land titles.”56 To Breckenridge, it was all criminal: “Where is the difference whether I am robbed of my horse by a highwayman, or of my slave by a set of people called a Convention?”57 Kentucky’s elite had every reason for concern. Slavery had never been a foregone conclusion in the western settlements. Early settler populations contained strong and vocal pockets of antislavery interest. Among the early western settlers were vehemently antislavery Baptists who fled persecution in Virginia and remained outspoken in their opposition to slavery.58 Scattered evidence suggests that abolitionists encouraged and possibly helped slaves to escape. In 1786, for example, William Pope, the court clerk for Jefferson County, issued an arrest 136

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warrant for “a certain McElwee”—most likely William McElwee of Lincoln County—“for encouraging a number of Negroes to Elope from their Masters.”59 As well, many slaveholders learned how the comparative lack of regulation and scrutiny of slavery in Kentucky presented bondsmen and women with new opportunities for escape. When John May brought his “most valuable slave” to Kentucky in 1780, for example, he learned how conditions for slaves differed on the early frontier. May reported that his slave man “fell in with some worthless Negroes who persuaded him to run away and attempted to get with the Indians.” His slave was gone for ten days but eventually returned. Nonetheless, May warned his business associate that Kentucky was “a bad place to bring Slaves to, being so near Indians that they will frequently find their way to them.”60 The Kentucky Gazette regularly ran advertisements from slaveholders posting notices about slaves escaping to Indian country north of the Ohio River.61 Such conditions contributed to slaveholder insecurity as they approached the second constitutional convention. Breckenridge and his fellow elites mobilized their forces to prevent the bedlam they imagined would ensue in the 1799 convention. They took to the newspapers to unleash their hostility upon those they imagined would rob them of their slaves. One author, who signed his name “A Slave Holder,” could barely contain his contempt for “those who want to deprive us of our property” in slaves. The author vigorously defended slaveholders as “those who have earned such property by the sweat of their brow.” He lashed out against those who “envy them the possession of what they are too lazy to gain themselves.” In his contempt for the “lazy” poor, he blasted their access to voting rights as the root of the problem. Wishing to roll back the expansive franchise, “A Slave Holder” threatened to take back that which he perceived as a gift from the elite to the poor in the 1792 constitution: “I wish . . . they would have inserted into the constitution ‘that no man should have a vote unless he has either a tract of land or a slave.’ ”62 The paranoia among the elite over the question of slavery was largely a fear of their own imaginations. In many ways, wealthy slaveholders misread the political winds. In their anxiety about the end of slavery, they failed to acknowledge how rich and poor were far more likely to find common ground in support of slavery than in opposition. They did not 137

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possess the political vision that Nicholas had so skillfully deployed in 1792. What Nicholas saw in 1792 was an opportunity to secure the status of wealthy men by inviting the poor to share in—and thus support—the privileges of propertied men. Nicholas understood that the “common man” did not want to tear down the structures of economic inequality— he wanted to claw his way in.63 What Breckenridge and his fellow elites failed to understand in 1799 was that the specter of emancipation was, in many ways, just as threatening to poor white men as it was to wealthy slaveholders. After experiencing years of intense competition for wage labor, many white workingmen did not see themselves as allies with slaves. If anything, they feared—and resented—the reality that their labor was often interchangeable with that of slaves. Workingmen at Kentucky’s saltworks, iron works, and ropewalks labored alongside slaves every day. Just as often, they saw the value of their labor diminished as the result of black competition. For such men, the prospect of alliance with freed slaves meant equating their labor with a denigrated class. At the same time that workers and artisans throughout the early republic were beginning to embrace a white racial ideal to distance themselves from black labor, so too did poor men in Kentucky champion whiteness as a measure of status. Rather than imagine themselves as part of a racially mixed working class, white men in Kentucky were more inclined to embrace ideas of white supremacy in order to distance themselves from the degraded labor of slaves.64 White racial privilege gave poor men far greater cause to support the slaveholder than to dismantle his claim to human property. One advocate of emancipation wrote in the Kentucky Gazette about the possibility of this proslavery alliance between rich and poor. Identifying himself as “Spectator,” the author explained the “two fold . . . prejudices of the people” with regards to emancipation. First was that of the slaveholder who opposed abolition “from fear of the loss of property.” The other prejudice shaping public opinion was that emancipation would “awaken a fear also in the breast of the poor industrious husbandmen” who perceived that “any attempt to effect an emancipation must be accompanied with a tax upon his labour.”65 Poor white men in Kentucky were not worried about the morality of slaveholding—they were worried about the possibility that freed slaves would devalue their own labor. 138

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In fact, throughout the 1790s, lawmakers had been incrementally passing measures that would bolster racial hierarchies and elevate the status of white workers above black. In 1798, they formalized this racial order into a comprehensive slave code—the first set of such regulations in the West. The restrictions outlined in the slave code of 1798 set out to control slave movement and economic autonomy. They stipulated that a slave could not stray from the home of his or her owner or employer without a pass or token giving permission to do so. They were to carry passes with them at all times. If an individual was caught without a pass, he or she could be whipped with ten lashes on the back. Slaves were not allowed to loiter at the houses of others without explicit permission to do so. The law stated that no slave was allowed to buy, sell, or receive any money or commodity without permission from the slaveowner. If any person transacted with a slave without explicit permission from his or her owner, the individual could be imprisoned. Most importantly, the law cracked down on the ability of slaves to trade or hire themselves for wages as “freemen.”66 The 1798 slave code sought to separate the social worlds of white and black. The law prohibited “unlawful” meetings among slaves, free blacks, and white people. It banned slaves, free blacks, and mulattoes from serving as witnesses in any court cases unless they involved other people of color. Lawmakers also empowered ordinary settlers to police the racial boundaries they imposed. If an individual learned that five or more free blacks or slaves were associating at the home of a white person, the homeowner could be fined five shillings for each unauthorized person there. The content of the slave code indicates a desire to separate social and economic life racially. Personal freedoms were stripped from people of color and transgressions of racial lines by both white and black people were condemned. The law not only regulated the lives of slaves, it also imposed fines on white people that made association with people of color prohibitive.67 Such measures deliberately sought to reverse the racial fluidity that had characterized over two decades of settlement. Throughout early settlement, slaves experienced a far greater level of physical mobility than their Virginia or other eastern counterparts. Many large landholders had sent slaves out ahead of them to prepare land for settlement. Other settlers granted slaves physical freedoms to take care of business under conditions 139

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that the settlers themselves thought were too dangerous. As well, slaves often participated in frontier defense and were allowed, on occasion, to carry guns. The particular kinds of restrictions that lawmakers delineated in 1798 were efforts to curtail such early permissiveness.68 In ways that slaveholders did not anticipate, the delegates elected to the convention of 1799 embraced the opportunity to entrench hierarchies of black and white in their constitutional revision. Despite the preconvention anxiety over emancipation, the “free male citizens” who selected delegates to the second constitutional convention were far more inclined to elect men who would preserve their status as white men than liberate slaves. The elected delegates in 1799 had different ambitions than those in 1792. As a group, the delegates were far more politically experienced and ambitious than their 1792 counterparts. Among the fiftyeight delegates elected in 1799 were many more professional lawyers than there had been in 1792. Many of these were sitting judges in Kentucky’s higher courts. Some had studied the law in Virginia, while younger delegates received their training in Kentucky. Further, the men elected as delegates in 1799 were considerably wealthier and owned more land and slaves than those in 1792. Elite fears that expansive suffrage rights would create a government of unqualified and uneducated men had not come to pass. Although economic inequality remained entrenched in Kentucky at the turn of the century, expansive suffrage laws brought a decidedly more elite group of framers to the convention in 1799. The rhetoric of the “common man” had proved to serve the interests of the elite.69 Early on at the convention of 1799, the issue of white racial privilege became a far more important subject of debate than the abolition of slavery. One of the issues the convention discussed was the constitutional language granting “free male citizens” the right to vote, which technically enfranchised free black men. Enfranchising free blacks was certainly not unprecedented. Only a few years before, in 1796, the new state of Tennessee deliberately enfranchised free black men in their first state constitution. Reflecting longstanding traditions, they decided that free blacks who owned land qualified for the vote on the basis of property rather than race. Tennessee borrowed the practice from their parent state of North Carolina, which had also enfranchised free black men. Before 1799, only three states distinguished race in their constitutional 140

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suffrage clause—Delaware, South Carolina, and Virginia—each of which specifically limited the vote to “white” men.70 At first glance, it is not entirely clear why the convention bothered to revisit the suffrage clause. Demographically, the power of the franchise for free blacks was negligible to nonexistent. The number of free blacks in Kentucky had grown considerably during the 1790s, though their populations remained relatively small alongside the number of enslaved men and women. The census of 1790 reported a free black population of only 114 people.71 By 1800, this number had grown considerably to 741 free blacks, but this was still a tiny number compared to the total enslaved population of over forty thousand.72 Whether or not any of these freed people tried to exercise their right to vote is not known. Nonetheless, the delegates to the 1799 convention understood that the broader political power of white supremacy was about far more than a few votes.73 The journal of the convention suggests that there was no clear consensus among the delegates over the question of race and rights. The delegates to the 1799 convention resolved early on to revisit the suffrage clause. The committee met as a whole for several days and raised a number of issues to take into consideration. They hammered out a number of resolutions before breaking up into smaller committees for discussion. Among these resolutions was a proposal to “insert the words ‘except Indians, negroes and mulattoes’ ” into the suffrage clause.74 Word of this revision got out to the public, and before the delegates ever voted on the issue, the newspapers announced new rights for white men. On July 30, 1799, the convention released a broadside to the public indicating that the committee had resolved to specify the suffrage as a right for all free “white” men.75 Summer issues of Kentucky’s two major papers, Stewart’s Kentucky Herald and the Kentucky Gazette, both reported that the convention would specify the rights of suffrage for all “white” men.76 Within the convention, however, the issue was not yet clearly resolved. Apparently, some of the delegates wanted to keep the original 1792 language that enfranchised free blacks. The convention selected a committee to draft a constitution based on the suggested resolutions. To lead this committee, the convention selected Green Clay, a seasoned but iconoclastic politician who was a cousin of Kentucky newcomer Henry Clay. The committee produced a draft on August 12 that did not have 141

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any changes to the suffrage clause at all and left the vote open to all “free male citizens.”77 Given earlier convention debates over racial restrictions, that Clay’s committee changed nothing at all suggests that at least some supported retaining a free black vote (though, admittedly, it is entirely possible that Clay was the only one with this interest, as he had a reputation for embracing unpopular positions, often just for sport).78 When the draft came to the floor, the convention had to face the suffrage clause a final time. And, ultimately, they resolved to restrict the vote by race. The convention voted and approved a final draft of a constitution that specifically prohibited “negroes, mulattoes and Indians” from the franchise.79 They stripped all people of color of political rights, but in doing so, they ensured that white men in the West would embrace and support the nation-state. Kentucky’s first constitution was a triumph for western men. The second constitution made it clear that manhood was racially exclusive. After over two decades of conflict, rich and poor men had come to a compromise. Using race and gender as a way to define and deny rights for some, white men in Kentucky forged an alliance that naturalized male authority and white supremacy with the force of law. In the process of writing two state constitutions, lawmakers in Kentucky created a West where all white men were created equal. In over two decades of volatile settlement, western elites had learned to craft policies that would safeguard household order, patriarchal authority, and white male privilege in order to secure social stability and political legitimacy. By no means did the new political privileges of white manhood eliminate economic inequality or social division—quite the contrary. The idea that all white men had rights helped sustain and uphold the very forces that kept western populations stratified by wealth. It allowed those in power, shielded by a rhetoric of egalitarian democracy, to perpetuate inequality. In the crucible of Kentucky statehood, the racial identities and the gender privileges that bolstered the position of white men over their extended families gained a new power—a power that would ultimately exist independent of the politics of slavery or the dynamics of household. The ideals of whiteness and manhood would become, like the West itself, a journey’s end. They entrenched a tense and contradictory relationship 142

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between nominal rights and real opportunities into the very fabric of settlement. As lawmakers fused abstractions of race and gender with the privileges of citizenship, they forged a new fraternal order that made it possible for the poor to trust the rich and the rich to rely on the poor. The revolutionary legal and social transformations that unfolded in eighteenth-century Kentucky created an organic identity—a “new race of men”—that marked the new generation from the old and secured order in the national family.

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In so many ways, the new generation was indeed different from the old. What the revolutionary fathers had torn down, the American sons endeavored to rebuild. Take, for example, the Nicholas family. In 1776, revolutionary leaders in Virginia selected a committee of men to design a state seal that would honor the occasion of their independence from the British and represent them in the new republic. One of those men was a senior Virginia statesman named Robert Carter Nicholas. The image the committee came up with was crystal clear in its intention. The seal depicted a personification of Virtue standing astride the slain figure of Tyranny. On the ground lay a crown, toppled from the head of the royal tyrant. In the hand of the fallen king is a broken chain, a severed symbol of monarchical restraint of trade, of rights, of westward expansion. Virtue stands with her foot victoriously on the chest of the slain monarch, under which are written the words “Sic Semper Tyrannis”—“thus always to tyrants.” In 1776, the colonies had overthrown their king and stood triumphant over his broken body. Barely a decade and a half later, legislators in the new western state of Kentucky set about the same task of designing their own great seal 144

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for admission into the federal union. The image that they designed in 1792 spoke of a very different world from that of their revolutionary predecessors. It spoke to the compromises orchestrated by the son of Robert Carter, George Nicholas, to craft a new regime. The original design, according to Kentucky’s first senator, John Brown, was supposed to depict “two friends, in hunter’s garb, their right hands clasped, their left resting on each other’s shoulders, their feet on the verge of a precipice.”1 The actual engraving abandoned the hunter’s attire and the handshake. Instead, the official seal depicted two men, dressed in tailcoats, locked in an embrace. Their bodies seem fused together, their heads overlap and become one. Around them are the words: “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.” In 1792, the image produced in Kentucky was of two men standing on the edge of a cliff and holding onto each other for dear life. The contrast between these two images—one depicting solitary Virtue over a dead king, the other bringing two men together in mutual dependence—tells a visual story of the revolutionary struggle for “rule at home.” It depicts the process of tearing down and putting back together and captures the nature of what happened the in years between American independence and the consolidation of power in the early national West. This process of casting off authority and forging common cause was unsteady, uneven, and at times profoundly unsure. But this struggle for order is itself coded into our founding documents. In 1776, the active verbs in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence intended to rupture and divide. The words themselves “dissolve,” “abolish,” and “throw off ” former systems of government. In 1787, in contrast, the Constitution, sought to bring together, to unite. The document seeks to “establish,” “insure,” and “provide” for a more perfect union. But it was not a perfect union for all. The republic that early national leaders forged in both the East and the West was one that celebrated egalitarian inclusion on a foundation of selective exclusion. Rights for white men in Kentucky rested on deliberate cultural, political, and legal ideas that excluded white women, African-Americans, mixed-race people, and Indian populations from citizenship. The processes of deliberate political exclusion that took root and blossomed in Kentucky would soon spread across the early republic. By the mid-nineteenth 145

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century, most states had revised their constitutions specifically to exclude nonwhite populations and all women.2 The expansion of democratic rights for white men alongside the abridgment and denial of rights for a demographic majority is the great paradox of America’s founding. Creating rights by negating others was a pattern woven into the fabric of the Anglo-American empire. As Edmund Morgan famously argued about colonial Virginia, the very idea of American freedom required the existence of slavery.3 In much the same way, the substance of American democracy took shape through the absence of rights for those deemed unworthy of citizenship. Rather than celebrate a true, inclusive liberal democracy, the history of American citizenship has depended on what Rogers Smith calls “myths of civic identity” that empower specific populations, populations that political elites aspired to lead. While in theory, American liberal ideals empower all equally, in practice they tend not to lean toward equality but instead to foster the conviction that certain groups are more worthy of leadership than others.4 And yet, this calculus does not fully explain the nature of what happened in Kentucky. It is one thing to understand why Kentuckians like George Nicholas gambled with the fate of the western settlements by hedging their bets on the political potency of white manhood. It is quite another to explain how political rights for white men became the law of the land or how such ideas became so utterly naturalized into the American experience. How can we explain how ordinary white men continued to support—indeed, to protect and defend with violence—a set of rights that did not necessarily improve the material conditions of their lives and even preserved the institutions of their oppression? How can we make sense of this seemingly obvious internal conflict within American democracy that predicated citizenship for some on the disfranchisement of others? This paradox only fully makes sense when we recognize that the basic premise guiding American democracy hinged on the power relationships forged within the family. The household itself is inherently and historically an unequal institution. For centuries, the organization of Anglo-European households was predicated on a set of legal and cultural relationships that consolidated the rights of family members under those of a single male 146

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authority.5 The very concept of a household constructs a mythology of human relationships that manifests inequality in ways that seem organic and natural. In the early republic, civic society embraced the ideal of family order as a tenet of American exceptionalism and, in doing so, mapped its internal inequalities onto the body politic. Only by understanding inequality within the household can we see how the denial of rights for huge swaths of the population did not constitute a dark exception to democratic aspirations but rather a triumph of original design. Indeed, one could argue that the very premise of American territorial expansion required a mythologized family. In a context of sustained and ongoing American conquest, the ideological defense of family rendered racial violence legitimate. As white men conceived of their roles as citizens through the lens of household protection, they bolstered increasingly militant policies against nonwhites as imagined threats to the safety and sanctity of the domestic realm. Increasingly perceived as threats to the idealized white family, African-American and Indian families became the subjects of scorn and suspicion and, ultimately, sanctioned targets of both vigilante and state-sponsored violence. As agents of American expansion hammered their way across the continent, the nation’s territorial destiny became a triumph of the domestic order over the wild and savage frontier. The family itself became the marker of civilization, and the defense of white womanhood justified displacement and slaughter.6 The processes that began to unfold in Kentucky would gain fuller political articulation in the years to come. When Thomas Jefferson won the presidency in 1800, he elevated the figure of the yeoman farmer into a national aspiration. Jefferson imagined that small farmers would secure the fate and future of the nation, that these “chosen people of God” would preserve the purity and virtue of the republic through independent households on an expanding frontier. Jefferson, who as governor of Virginia during the revolution had overseen the chaos of land speculation and political unrest unfold in Kentucky, sought to remedy those early mistakes in his visions for westward expansion. In his design for settlement of the Northwest Territory, Jefferson planned an ordered world that stood in stark contrast to his own experiences watching the settlement and statehood of Kentucky. Jefferson’s stamp on the Ordinances of the 1780s impressed neat, square plots of land into the Northwest Territory 147

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that, by the nineteenth century, stood in visual and conceptual defiance of the organic free-for-all of land claims that muddled the landscape of eighteenth-century Kentucky. Within a few years of his election to the presidency, Jefferson would purchase the Louisiana Territory and add western land claims that equaled the size of the original thirteen colonies. And in 1803, he charged a Kentuckian, William Clark— younger brother of George Rogers Clark—and Meriwether Lewis to explore this territory on behalf of the United States and to assert the authority of American sovereignty over a vast western frontier. Of course, the rhetoric of the “common man” that Kentuckians exploited in their debates over statehood would reach their clearest expression with the election of Andrew Jackson. The ascendance of Jacksonian Democracy fused the cultural capital of rugged frontier individualism with the political potency of white male democratic participation. The Age of Jackson represented a period when the nation instantiated universal white male suffrage in all new and existing states and embraced the gospel of citizenship as a natural extension of race and gender privilege. At the same time, the apostles of egalitarian democracy also used such privilege as a blunt tool of oppression, drawing clear lines around citizenship to eject American Indians from their land, strip African-Americans of opportunities, and confine female domesticity to the home. And, of course, the expansive franchise celebrated throughout Jacksonian America did little to remedy the economic exploitation of ordinary white men, as great wealth and immense poverty spread throughout the urban centers and rural landscapes of a rapidly expanding United States. We now know that a household premised on such stark inequality would not stand forever. The forces that sought to combat inequality proved mightier than those that sought to preserve it. We know how the story played out on the national stage: The glaring inequalities preserved by the myths of household order could not simultaneously be sustained alongside a commitment to liberal democracy. Slavery proved too great a challenge for the patriarchal ideal to contain under one roof. Unlike Kentucky’s admission to the union in 1792—an event that ushered in a triumphant consensus—sustained expansion into western territories throughout the nineteenth century increasingly brought anxiety, division, and violence.7 148

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It began when Missouri applied for statehood in 1820. The possibility that a new slave state of Missouri might offset the number of free states sent panic into the hearts the nation’s founding fathers. Thomas Jefferson awoke, filled with terror, as “a fire bell in the night” alerted him that his house was burning down. In the coming decades, the crisis would smolder.8 As western expansion continued, fueled by the forces of agriculture and industry, the delicate balance of power between slave and free states proved increasingly untenable. When the nation finally exploded into civil war, the bonds of brotherhood that had been forged in the years after the American Revolution stretched beyond repair and ruptured. It is perhaps fitting, therefore, that the two leaders of the divided nation both had deep roots in the revolutionary frontier of Kentucky. Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, was born in 1808 in Christian County, Kentucky—a county named after Colonel William Christian, who established the Bullitt’s Lick saltworks and passed them on to his wife Annie after he died. Davis’s father had earned a warrant to Kentucky land through his service in the Continental Army and became part of the massive post-revolutionary migration west. One year after Davis was born, in 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born just south of the salt-producing regions near Louisville. His grandfather had migrated to Kentucky from Virginia in the early 1780s. His father, Thomas Lincoln, was the youngest of three brothers to witness their father’s death in an Indian raid in 1786. As a young adult, Thomas struggled to find work in Kentucky and wandered the region as an itinerant laborer, seeking odd jobs for poor pay. Through manual labor and carpentry work, he managed to save enough money to purchase a small farm in Hardin County, Kentucky, where his son Abraham was born.9 Lincoln’s father came of age during a time when ideals and metaphors about households and families seared themselves into the national narrative. By the time Abraham Lincoln was born, the political ascendance of white manhood was fast becoming a foregone conclusion. The mythology of the yeoman farmer had become the stuff of destiny, an organic plotline in the origin story of American identity. But, as he began his political career, Lincoln worried that the American family was falling apart. Coming of age in a time and place infused with the politics of 149

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family rhetoric, Lincoln understood the powerful symbolism of households as he looked toward the challenges ahead. As he began his political career, Lincoln gave a speech accepting his party’s nomination for a Senate bid, his first attempt at national political office. In addressing the enormous national challenges that lay ahead, Lincoln recognized a political reality that gestured forward as it acknowledged the past: “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” The language of household obscures as much as it reveals about the American experience. It emerges during times of crisis and manifests in moments of triumph. It conceals people behind an imagined veil of legal and social privacy at the same time that it articulates the ambitions of empire. While the ideals and realities about families and households became central to the American narrative from the era of the nation’s founding, such ideas have had a mixed and complex legacy. Few institutions in American history have been at once as consistently controversial and timelessly universal as the family. For at the same time that definitions of households and families can explain universal ideals and egalitarian impulses, so too can they exclude and oppress. The role of the household ideal in eighteenth-century debates over citizenship in Kentucky helped secure the early national frontier and shape the character of sustained territorial expansion. Revolutionary transformations in the early West forced the real and symbolic meaning of white, male, patriarchal authority to the center of discussions over nationhood and belonging. The political power of such authority helped secure the bonds between East and West and establish a place for the frontier in the new nation. Were debates over household order and family protection unique to eighteenth-century Kentucky? Not at all. Indeed, the ideal of family has permeated the American experience from the colonial period well into the present. In many ways, the inequalities of race and gender embedded within the dynamics of households continue to shape our national story today. Will sustained efforts to remedy these inequalities and embrace a more honest picture of household experience help us attain a more inclusive democracy? This remains to be seen. Well over two hundred years after the nation’s founding, we can but hope that it does.

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Bullitt Family Papers (FHS) Filson Club Historical Quarterly Special Collections, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives, Frankfort, Kentucky Kentucky Historical Society Robert Emmett McDowell Collection (FHS) Virginia Historical Society William and Mary Quarterly

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Acknowledgments 1. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) 642.

Introduction Epigraph: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed., J. P. Mayer, trans., George Lawrence (New York: Harper and Row, 1969) 292. 1. John Filson, The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke (Philadelphia, 1784; repr. New York: Corinth Books, 1962) 50. 2. Filson, Discovery, 50. 3. Filson, Discovery, 43. 4. Filson, Discovery, 81. 5. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, ed. Harold P. Simonson (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1963). Few concepts in American historiography have elicited such longstanding debate as the frontier, which Turner equated with American exceptionalism at the turn of the twentieth century. For good overviews the language of frontier, backcountry, and border, see Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104 (1999) 814–841; Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika Teute, Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the

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Mississippi, 1750–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) 1–15; John Mack Faragher, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: The Significance of the Frontier in American History, and Other Essays (New York: Henry Holt, 1994); Gregory Nobles, American Frontiers: Cultural Encounters and Continental Conquest (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997) 3–18; Gregory Nobles, “Breaking into the Backcountry: New Approaches to the Early American Frontier, 1750–1800,” WMQ 46 (1989) 641–670. 6. In a variety of contexts, scholars have examined the role of household structure, the regulation of sexuality, and the ideology of domesticity as a strategy of settler colonialism. For an exploration of such ideas in the North American context, see Cathleen Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Ann Marie Plane, Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Virginia Scharff and Carolyn Brucken, Home Lands: How Women Made the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). For such perspective in a more global context, see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Ann Laura Stoller, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Ann Laura Stoller, Haunted by Empires: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). On race and gender as catalysts for Anglo-American conquest and colonialism more broadly, see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 7. Much has been written about Boone and his significance to the American frontier. Among the best reliable biographies are John Bakeless, Daniel Boone: Master of the Wilderness (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Meredith Mason Brown, Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1993). 8. John Adams to Thomas B. Adams, October 17, 1799, quoted in Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992) 147. 9. On the role of family as a colonial model for the English Empire, see Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York: Vintage, 1997). On challenges to the family model during the age of Atlantic Revolution, see Richard Godbeer, The Overflowing of Friendship: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) 144–150; Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal

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Authority, 1750–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). The best case study of the household in crisis during the American Revolution is Rhys Isaac, Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 10. Kentucky’s settlement and statehood have long been subjects of scholarly inquiry. After Filson’s Discovery, the earliest history of Kentucky was written in 1812 and reprinted in 1824: Humphrey Marshall, The History of Kentucky: An Account of the Modern Discovery; Settlement; Progressive Improvement; Civil and Military Transactions; and the Present State of the Country (Frankfort: George S. Robinson, 1824). Later histories include Mann Bulter, A History of the Commonwealth of Kentucky (Louisville: Wilcox, Dickerman, and Co., 1834); Lewis Collins, Historical Sketches of Kentucky (Covington, KY: Collins and Co., 1874). Important twentieth-century histories include Thomas Perkins Abernethy, Three Virginia Frontiers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1940); Thomas D. Clark, A History of Kentucky (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1937). More recent works that deal specifically with the settlement of Kentucky include Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Ellen Eslinger, Citizens of Zion: The Social Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999); Craig Thompson Friend, Kentucke’s Frontiers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Craig Thompson Friend, Along the Maysville Road: The Early Republic in the Trans-Appalachian West (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005); Craig Thompson Friend, ed., The Buzzel about Kentuck: Settling the Promised Land (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008); Elizabeth Perkins, Border Life: Experience and Memory in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Fredrika Teute, “Land, Liberty, and Labor in the Post-Revolutionary Era: Kentucky as the Promised Land,” Ph.D. diss. (Johns Hopkins University, 1988). 11. A number of works have looked at the transformation of the backcountry throughout the colonial and early national periods, most notably Richard Beeman, The Evolution of the Southern Backcountry: A Case Study of Lunenburg County, Virginia, 1746–1832 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); Andrew R. L. Cayton, The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1986); Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 605–782; David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly, Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000); Warren Hofstra, The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 12. Abernethy, Three Virginia Frontiers, 13. The subject of families in the West has been the subject of a number of scholarly works and seems to be gaining new attention in recent years. Some of the earliest studies emerged alongside the field of women’s history. See John Mack Faragher, Men and Women on the Overland Trail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Joan Jensen, Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750–1850

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(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Lillian Schlissel, Far from Home: Families of the Westward Journey (New York: Schocken, 1989). More recently, see Anne Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011). 13. The related subjects of imperial conflicts of Kentucky, the Ohio River Valley, and western territorial expansion have received much recent attention, including Stephen Aron, American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Peter Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Nobles, American Frontiers; Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 14. The classic study of western lands during the revolutionary era is Thomas Perkins Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution (New York: Russell and Russell, 1959). On visions and conflicts over western expansion during the American Revolution and early republic see Cayton, Frontier Republic; Griffin, American Leviathan; Hinderaker, Elusive Empires; Drew McCoy, Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996) 121–132; Peter Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 15. The term “Long War for the West” is from François Furstenberg, “The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History,” American Historical Review 113 (2008) 650. 16. The best description of Kentucky lands in the coming of the American Revolution is Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999) 3–38. On postwar population growth, see Aron, How the West Was Lost, 56; Eslinger, Citizens of Zion, 183. 17. On Vermont’s statehood trajectory, see Peter Onuf, The Origins of the Federal Republic: Jurisdictional Controversies in the United States, 1775–1787 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983) 127–145. 18. For work that addresses Kentucky’s statehood specifically, see Joan Wells Coward, Kentucky in the New Republic: The Process of Constitution Making (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1979); Lowell Harrison, Kentucky’s Road to Statehood (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992); Patricia Watlington, The Partisan Spirit: Kentucky Politics, 1779–1792 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972). On the influence of federal power in the trans-Appalachian West, see William Bergmann, The American National State and the Early West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Onuf, Origins of the Federal Republic, 158–162.

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19. Carl Lotus Becker, The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760–1776 (1909; repr. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968) 22. 20. For a good discussion of these ideas, see Eliga Gould, “The Question of Home Rule,” WMQ 64 (2007) 255–262. 21. Richard Maxwell Brown, “Backcountry Rebellions and the Homestead Ethic in America, 1740–1799,” in Tradition, Conflict, and Modernization: Perspectives on the American Revolution, ed. Richard Maxwell Brown and Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Academic Press, 1977) 76. See also Stephen Aron, “Pioneers and Profiteers: Land Speculation and the Homestead Ethic in Frontier Kentucky,” Western Historical Quarterly 23 (May 1992) 179–198. 22. Scholars first began to study the household as a conceptual unit in early debates over the transition to capitalism in the colonial and early national periods. See Michael Merrill, “Cash Is Good to Eat: Self-Sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of the United States,” Radical History Review 4 (Winter 1977) 42–71; James Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentalité in Preindustrial America,” WMQ 35 (January 1978) 3–32; Christopher Clark, “Household Economy, Market Exchange, and the Rise of Capitalism in the Connecticut Valley, 1800–1860,” Journal of American History 13 (Winter 1979) 19–89. The household has also been an important unit of focus among generations of southern historians. See Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transportation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978). In the European and global context, see Mary S. Hartman, The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004) Peter Laslett, Household and Family in Past Time (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975). Finally, the household has also proved to be an important and useful unit of analysis in labor history. See Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Joshua R. Greenberg, Advocating the Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in New York, 1800–1840 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009) 160–173. 23. On the political utility of both the patriarchal ideal and paternalist thinking during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Friend, Kentucke’s Frontiers, 184–202; François Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Penguin Books, 2007) 92–103; Mark E. Kann, A Republic of Men: The American Founders, Gendered Language, and Patriarchal Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Kenneth Lockridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage: The Commonplace Books of William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson and the Gendering of Power in the Eighteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1994); Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman

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Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Anthony Parent, Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660–1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) 197–235; Daniel Blake Smith, Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986). 24. The first recent work to argue that we re-center the narrative of imperial change was White, Middle Ground, and others have continued to pursue the argument about historical actors on the edges of empires. See Kathleen DuVal, Native Ground: Indians and Colonists at the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Jack Greene, “Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem,” WMQ 64 (2007) 235–250; Griffin, American Leviathan; Hinderaker, Elusive Empires. 25. This body of work is as old as the field of women’s history itself, beginning, in many ways, with one of the earliest studies of American women, Katherine Kish Sklar, Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976). On women in colonial and revolutionary America, see Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers; Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997) 36. As well, Jeanne Boydston has described how the household became “pastoralized”—made into women’s “natural” domain—as a remedy for the trials and dislocations of emergent capitalism; see Boydston, Home and Work; Jeanne Boydston, “The Woman Who Wasn’t There: Women’s Market Labor and the Transition to Capitalism,” Journal of the Early Republic 16 (1996) 183–206. For a sampling of works that address the advent of white heteronormativity and the celebration of households during times of social and political unrest in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, see Peter Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, revised ed., 2008); Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 26. Such issues are increasingly becoming part of new scholarly attention. See especially the April 2013 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly on “Centering Families in Atlantic Histories,” Special Issue, WMQ 70 (April 2013) 205–424.

Chapter 1. “Servant to Master” 1. Harry Toulmin, The Western Country in 1793, Reports on Kentucky and Virginia, Marion Tingling and Godfrey Davis, eds. (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1948) v–xx. 2. Harry Toulmin, A Description of Kentucky in North America: To Which Are Prefixed Miscellaneous Observations Respecting the United States (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1945). Quotations on 88 and 70, respectively.

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3. Toulmin, Description, 91. 4. “Some Particulars relative to Kentucky; Extracted from the Manuscript Journal of a Gentleman not long since returned from those parts,” National Gazette I (November 1791), reprinted Eugene L. Schwaab, ed., Travels in the Old South: Selections from Periodicals of the Times (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973) 58. 5. Schwaab, ed., Travels in the Old South, 58. 6. Toulmin, Description, 29. This particular line is one that Toulmin borrowed from Crèvecoeur. In fact, much of Toulmin’s Description includes heavily borrowed materials. In the opening chapter of his work, Toulmin explains that many of his observations are based on the work of others and gives credit, in particular, to Gilbert Imlay, Thomas Jefferson, Jedidiah Morse, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. This particular passage can be found excerpted from passages in J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) 57–59. 7. Alongside Toulmin’s works, the genre of frontier promotion produced a number of significant publications that included Filson, Discovery; Thomas Hutchins, A Topographical Description of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers Company, 1904); Gilbert Imlay, A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America; containing a succinct account of its soil, climate, natural history, population, agriculture, manners & customs (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1969); Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed., William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). For a fuller analysis of the frontier narrative genre in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Thomas Hallock, From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narrative, Environmental Politics, and the Roots of a National Pastoral, 1749–1826 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 8. Toulmin, Western Country, 132. 9. Many historians have documented the ways in which patriarchal power manifested in early American history along lines of both race and gender. After Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh identified a brief colonial window in which patriarchal power wavered, scholars have documented the ways in which the slaveholding planter class consolidated authority through a patriarchal ideal, placing control in the figure of a white, male father figure. See Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, “The Planter’s Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” WMQ 34 (1977); Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs; Jan Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness: Family Values in Jefferson’s Virginia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Parent, Foul Means, 197–235; Carole Shammas, A History of Household Government in America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Terri Snyder, Brabbling Women: Disorderly Speech and the Law in Early Virginia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 10. The most sweeping articulation of the way that the Anglo colonial project positioned visions of the white patriarchal household alongside the social and familial experience of both African and Indian people is Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs.

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11. On the imagining and marketing of the Americas in European consciousness, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983) 19–27; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Introduction: The Changing Definition of America,” in America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). On desire and European impressions of the Americas, see Jennifer Morgan, “ ‘Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1770,” WMQ 47 (January 1997) 167–192. 12. See Boydston, Home and Work, 30–55; Kerber, Women of the Republic, 35–67; Cynthia Kierner, Beyond the Household: Women’s Place in the Early South, 1700–1835 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) 11–45. 13. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 29–57; Friend, Kentucke’s Frontiers, 77–81. 14. On station life, see Eslinger, Citizens of Zion, 9–27; Nancy O’Malley, Stockading Up (Lexington: Kentucky Heritage Council, 1987). 15. Ellen Eslinger, “The Shape of Slavery on Virginia’s Kentucky Frontier: 1775–1800,” in Diversity and Accommodation: Essays on the Cultural Composition of the Virginia Frontier, ed., Michael Puglisi (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997) 182. 16. George W. Ranck, Boonesborough: Its Founding, Pioneer Struggles, Indian Experiences, Transylvania Days, and Revolutionary Annals (Louisville: John P. Morton and Co., 1901) 35. 17. Craig Friend argues that in the context of frontier war in Kentucky, “men exaggerated masculinity”; see Friend, Kentucke’s Frontiers, 113. In other colonial contexts, scholars have noted how the military escalation of contact between European and indigenous men rendered interaction so violent that only women could intervene to enact diplomacy. See Julianna Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007) 13. 18. Lyman C. Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone, Ted Franklin Belue, ed. (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998) 435. 19. The problem of widowhood during wartime was certainly not new but had increasingly become a persistent social problem since the mid-eighteenth century. On the problem of widows in the wake of the Seven Years’ War, see Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979) 154–160. 20. Faragher, Daniel Boone, 126–127. 21. Faragher, Daniel Boone, 126. 22. Ann Kennedy Wilson Poague Lindsey McGinty holds the status of a pioneer legend in Kentucky lore. In particular, see George Morgan Chinn, Kentucky: Settlement and Statehood, 1750– 1800 (Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 1975) 328–330, 337. William Poague is also mentioned in Ranck, Boonesborough, 41. Both “Lindsey” and “Lindsay” are used in the records. 23. On Ann McGinty’s contributions to Fort Harrod, see Honor Sachs, “The Myth of the Abandoned Wife: Married Women’s Agency and the Legal Narrative of Gender in Eighteenth-Century Kentucky,” Ohio Valley History 3 (Winter 2003) 3–20.

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24. James McGinty v. Ann McGinty and Robert Pogue, Case Numbers 334 and 335, Lincoln County Equity Court, KDLA. 25. Ann Lindsey registered her tavern in Mercer County on January 2, 1787, under the alternate spelling of “Lindsay.” Michael L. Cook, Mercer County, Kentucky Records (Evansville, IN: Cook Publications, 1987). 26. Alexander Scott Withers, Chronicles of Border Warfare, or a History of the Settlement by the Whites, of North-Western Virginia, and of the Indian Wars and Massacres in that Section of the State (Cincinnati: Stewart and Kidd, 1912) 200. 27. Hambleton Tapp, “Colonel John Floyd, Kentucky Pioneer,” Filson Club Historical Quarterly 15 (January 1941) 1–24. 28. John Floyd to Thomas Jefferson, April 16, 1781, William Palmer, ed., Calendar of Virginia State Papers (Richmond: Sherwin McRae, 1881) 2: 48. 29. Statistics on the number of people killed from Aron, How the West Was Lost, 48. 30. On James Harrod, see Draper, Life of Daniel Boone, 555–557. 31. On Ann Harrod’s dream, see White, Middle Ground, 396. On the fate of her son, see James C. Klotter, “James Harrod,” in The Kentucky Encyclopedia, ed. John E. Kleber (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992) 413. 32. Land records for Denton, Hartness, and McNeil appear, respectively, in Neal O. Hammon, Early Kentucky Land Records, 1773–1780 (Louisville: Filson Club Incorporated, 1992) 58, 62, 74. See also, among others, Elizabeth Allen, 49; Martha Black, 51; Sarah Bryan, 53; Mary Ears, 59; Mary Hendrick, 65; and Elizabeth Horn, 66. 33. Juliana Barr, “From Captives to Slaves: Commodifying Indian Women in the Borderlands,” Journal of American History 92 (June 2005) 19–46. 34. On Indian “mourning wars” to cover the dead, see Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 64–66. On targeting women and children in raids throughout the European colonial context, see James Axtell, “The White Indians of Colonial America,” WMQ 32 (January 1975) 55–58; Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman, 84–86, 252–254; Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012) 166–168, 195–198. On integrating women and children into native life, see John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). 35. On Jacob Hite’s western land ambitions, see Holton, Forced Founders, xiii–xvi. 36. The Virginia Gazette, printed by Alexander Purdie in Williamsburg, Virginia, August 30, 1776. On the ways that print culture shaped perceptions of backcountry violence in the late eighteenth-century more broadly, see Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008) 73–94. 37. On the value of women as objects of diplomacy and trade in both the Indian and European contexts, see Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman, 84–86, 175–176, 247–248, 267–268. 38. On the sacredness of the home in the context of seventeenth-century Indian wars, see Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, 84–85, Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Phillip’s War and the

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Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage, 1999) 75–76. On outrage in response to violations against the home more broadly, see Wayne Lee, Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina: The Culture of Violence in Riot and War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001) 200. 39. On the kidnapping and rescue of the Boone and Callaway daughters, see Faragher, Daniel Boone, 131–140. 40. On the symbolic impact of women’s and children’s captivity in Kentucky, see Perkins, Border Life, 68–70. 41. On the Gnadenhutten massacre, see Griffin, American Leviathan, 167–169; Rob Harper, “Looking the Other Way: The Gnadenhutten Massacre and the Contextual Interpretation of Violence,” WMQ 64 (July 2007) 621–644. 42. The story of the women of Bryan’s Station has appeared in many places, with significant variations. See, in particular, Reuben T. Durrett, Bryant’s Station and the Memorial Proceedings (Louisville: John P. Morton and Company, 1897); John A. McClung, Sketches of Western Adventure: Containing an Account of the Most Interesting Incidents Connected with the Settlement of the West, from 1755–1794 (Cincinnati: U. P. James, 1839); Virginia Howard Webb, Bryan’s Station Heroes and Heroines (Lexington: Press of the Commercial Printing Company, 1932). 43. On the Battle of Blue Licks, see Michael C. C. Adams, “An Appraisal of the Blue Licks Battle,” Filson Club Historical Quarterly 74 (2000) 127–131; Bennet K. Young, History of the Battle of Blue Licks (Louisville: J. P. Morton and Company, 1897). 44. On Boone’s hesitation about proceeding into battle, see Faragher, Daniel Boone, 217–218. 45. Darren Reid, ed., Daniel Boone and Others on the Kentucky Frontier: Autobiographies and Narratives, 1769–1795 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009) 43. 46. Reid, ed., Daniel Boone and Others, 89. 47. Fischer and Kelly, Bound Away; Hofstra, Planting of New Virginia; Holton, Forced Founders, 3–38. 48. In fact, many of the great proponents of national expansion preferred to imagine the West from a safe distance. See John Logan Allan, “Imagining the West: The View from Monticello,” in Thomas Jefferson and the Changing West, ed. James P. Rhonda (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997) 3–24. 49. On the capitalist aspirations of Virginia’s colonial elite, see Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975) 196–211; Parent, Foul Means, 9–54. On the envy and admiration with which eighteenth-century investors viewed the colonial patriarchs, see Holton, Forced Founders, 3–4. 50. On the consolidation of power among Virginia elite, see Parent, Foul Means, 197– 268. On soil exhaustion, see Alan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986) 47–49.

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51. On the Proclamation of 1763 and British imperial policy in the West, see Griffin, American Leviathan, 19–94. On the role of western investors in the coming of the American Revolution, see Holton, Forced Founders, 1–74; Anthony F. C. Wallace, “ ‘The Obtaining Lands’: Thomas Jefferson and the Native Americans,” in Thomas Jefferson and the Changing West, 25–41. 52. Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 6.0, April 17, 2011), October 1767, trial of Thomas Lloyd, Sarah his, James Murphy (t17671021–41). 53. On Fenton’s arrest, see Old Bailey Proceedings Online, September 1769, trial of Stephen Mackaway, Bartholomew Fenton (t17690906–81). For his sentencing, see Old Bailey Proceedings Online, September 6, 1769, punishment summary, William Taunton, Thomas Mellor, William Dunk, Robert Merry, Richard Belcher, Moses Alexander (s17690906–1). On criminal transportation, see Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Don Jordon and Michael Walsh, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, Eighteenth-Century Criminal Transportation (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004). Fenton is listed as a convict aboard the Justitia in Peter Wilson Coldham, The King’s Passengers to Maryland and Virginia (Berwyn Heights, MD: Family Line Publications, 2006) 211–212. The arrival of the Justitia and the sale of its passengers as servants in Virginia is noted in The Virginia Gazette, printed by William and Clementina Rind in Williamsburg, Virginia, March 1, 1770. 54. For complaints of settlers concerned that they were protecting the investments of the wealthy, see James Rood Robertson, Petitions of the Early Inhabitants of Kentucky (Louisville: John P. Morton and Company, 1914) 67. 55. The Virginia Gazette, Rind, January 14, 1773. On the political significance of western lands in the coming imperial crisis, see Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution; Holton, Forced Founders, 3–38. 56. On meanings of independence in the revolutionary backcountry, see Jack P. Greene, “Independence, Improvement, and Authority: Toward a Framework for Understanding the Histories of the Southern Backcountry during the Era of the American Revolution,” in An Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry during the American Revolution, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Thad Tate, and Peter Albert (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1985) 3–36. 57. Jackman v. Merewether (1790), in James Hughes, A Report of the Causes Determined by the Late Supreme Court for the District of Kentucky, and by the Court of Appeals, In Which Titles to Land Were in Dispute (Lexington: John Bradford, 1803) 17. 58. The best discussion of land speculation in Kentucky is Aron, How the West Was Lost, 58–81. 59. On Richard Henderson, see Aron, How the West Was Lost, 58–68. 60. Robertson, Petitions, 40. 61. On settler anxiety about interests being swallowed up by large land investors, see Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution, 221–222.

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62. On the connections linking property, citizenship, and revolutionary republicanism, see Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000) 5–25; McCoy, Elusive Republic, 48–75; Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) 70–86; Peter Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000) 53–79. 63. On the distinctions between settlers and speculators and their respective frustrations with British imperial policy, see Holton, Forced Founders, 7–8. 64. On the ambiguity of political sovereignty in the backcountry during the revolution, see Griffin, American Leviathan, 97–180. On the flexible claims to self-sovereignty in the early West after the revolution, see Kevin Barksdale, The Lost State of Franklin: America’s First Secession (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2010). 65. “An act for dividing the county of Fincastle into three distinct counties, and the parish of Botetourt into four distinct parishes.” William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large, Being A Collection of all the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature in 1619, 13 vols. (1809–1823; reprint Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1969) 9: 257–261. 66. For perspective on the eighteenth-century debates over those who support themselves by their labor and those who rely on inherited wealth, see William Manning, The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, Michael Merrill and Sean Wilentz, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 67. “An act for establishing a Land office, and ascertaining the terms and manner of granting waste and unappropriated lands.” Hening, ed., Statutes at Large, 10: 50. 68. The best overview of Kentucky’s early system of land distribution is found in Hammon, Early Kentucky Land Records. 69. Robertson, Petitions, 47. 70. Robertson, Petitions, 46. 71. Robertson, Petitions, 46–47. 72. Robertson, Petitions, 46. On settler anxiety about interests being swallowed up by large land investors, see Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution, 221–222. 73. “An act for establishing a Land office, and ascertaining the terms and manner of granting waste and unappropriated lands.” Hening, Statutes at Large, 10: 50. 74. On Jefferson’s role in selling off Kentucky, Thomas Perkins Abernethy notes that the celebration of small freeholders that became the cornerstone of Jeffersonian democracy was at odds with the provisions that the 1779 Land Law allowed. Abernethy observes that there “is an element of historical irony in the fact that Jefferson, the father of democracy, should have helped to draft the act by which democracy was defeated in Virginia at the moment when it might have had its birth.” Western Lands and the American Revolution, 228. A similar sentiment is echoed in Aron, How the West Was Lost. 75. Hammon, Early Kentucky Land Records, 47–48.

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76. “An Act for adjusting and settling the titles of claimers to unpatented lands under the present and former government, previous to the establishment of the commonwealth’s land office.” Hening, Statutes at Large, 10: 40. 77. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 71. 78. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 71. 79. Neal O. Hammon and James Russell Harris, eds., “ ‘In a Dangerous Situation’: Letters of Col. John Floyd, 1774–1783,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 83 (1985) 202–236, 212. 80. Robertson, Petitions, 47. 81. John May to Samuel Beall, August 30, 1779, Beall-Booth Family Papers 1778–1956, FHS. 82. Watlington, Partisan Spirit, 43. 83. Robertson, Petitions, 64. 84. On the escalation of violence on the post-revolutionary frontier, see Griffin, American Leviathan, 183–239; White, Middle Ground, 413–468.

Chapter 2. “To Live Independent” 1. Kentucky Gazette, May 31, 1794. 2. The theme of women “wearing the breeches” would be a familiar motif to early Americans, reflecting a trans-Atlantic exchange of literary and theatrical tropes that included breeches performance and cross-dressing. See Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Elizabeth Reitz Mullinex, Wearing the Breeches: Gender on the Antebellum Stage (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). The issue of cross-dressing women would continue to evolve in American western expansion well into nineteenth century; see Peter Boag, Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 3. Boydston, Home and Work, 44. 4. Though, as historians have shown, the bedrock of patriarchal authority was rarely stable or static. See Boyston, Home and Work, 30–42; Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, 319–366; Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009) 13–38; Isaac, Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom; Rockman, Scraping By, 160–173; Shammas, History of Household Government in America; Karin Wulf, Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000) 85–118; Serena Zabin, Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 5. As quoted in Eslinger, Citizens of Zion, 87. 6. Charles Brunk Heinemann, “First Census” of Kentucky, 1790 (Washington, DC: G. M. Brumbaugh, 1940) 3. 7. Census records for the Southwest Territory in 1790 report 31,913 white people. Cynthia Cumfer, Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the Tennessee Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007) 164.

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8. See Aron, How the West Was Lost, 58–81; Thomas Humphrey, “Conflicting Independence: Land Tenancy and the Coming of the American Revolution,” Journal of the Early Republic (2008) 159–182; Teute, “Land, Liberty, and Labor,” 281–286, 253–311. 9. Teute, “Land, Liberty, and Labor,” 404–411. 10. On income inequality and the concentration of wealth, see Lee Soltow, “Kentucky Wealth at the End of the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 43 (September 1983) 624. The phrase “the best poor man’s country” has a long history, the origins of which are discussed particularly well in the introduction to Billy G. Smith, ed., Down and Out in Early America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). See also James Lemon, The Best Poor Man’s Country: A Geographical Study of Southeastern Pennsylvania (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976). 11. Jean M. Yarbrough, American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998) 76. 12. For studies of tenancy in other areas of colonial and revolutionary America, see Willard F. Bliss, “The Rise of Tenancy in Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 108 (October 1950) 427–441; Edward Countryman, “ ‘Out of the Bounds of the Law’: Northern Land Rioters in the Eighteenth Century,” in The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred F. Young (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976) 39–69; Sing Bok Kim, Landlord and Tenant in Colonial New York: Manorial Society, 1664–1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978). 13. Stephen Aron, “ ‘The Poor Men to Starve’: The Lives and Times of Workingmen in Early Lexington,” in Buzzel about Kentuck, 175–193. 14. Thomas D. Clark, “Salt, A Factor in the Settlement of Kentucky,” FCHQ 12 (1938) 42–52; Robert E. McDowell, “Bullitt’s Lick: The Related Saltworks and Settlements,” FCHQ 30 (1956) 241–269. 15. McDowell, “Bullitt’s Lick.” 16. Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution, 80; “William Christian,” in Kleber, ed., Kentucky Encyclopedia, 184–185; Redmond Ira Roop, The Life Story of Colonel William Christian (Christianburg, VA: Montgomery News Messenger, 1939). 17. William Christian to Elizabeth Christian, September 25, 1784, Hugh Blair Grigsby Papers, VHS. On saltmaking in the region, see John Jakle, “Salt on the Ohio Valley Frontier, 1770–1829,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 59 (1969) 687–709; McDowell, “Bullitt’s Lick.” 18. Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution, 301. 19. Annie Christian to Elizabeth Christian, September 18, 1786, Hugh Blair Grigsby Papers, VHS. On Annie Christian, see Honor Sachs, “Reconstructing a Life: The Archival Challenges of Women’s History,” Library Trends 56 (Winter 2008) 650–666; Gail S. Terry, “Family Empires: A Frontier Elite in Virginia and Kentucky, 1740–1815,” Ph.D. diss. (College of William and Mary, 1992); Fredrika Teute, “Anne Henry Christian, A Frontier Woman,” Virginia Historical Society Occasional Bulletin 44 (June 1982) 9–12.

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20. Alongside the political significance of personal independence and its relationship to citizenship, such status had important cultural resonance and associations with economic security as well. It pointed to what historian Daniel Vickers termed a “competency,” or a comfortable personal wealth that would allow families to remain on farms and provide for themselves and future generations. See Vickers, “Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early America,” WMQ 47 (1990) 3–29; see also Greene, “Independence, Improvement, and Authority.” 21. Seth Rockman has argued persuasively that these two conflicting narratives—one that celebrated economic prosperity as an extension of revolutionary democracy and another that underscored the expansion of poverty and privation in the early republic— were “flip sides of the same coin” and “contingent on one another.” Rockman, Scraping By, 2. In the historiography, these two trajectories are often depicted as separate stories. Some historians describe early nationhood as a dynamic period of possibility and personal prosperity rooted in democratization and egalitarianism. See Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution. Others document the experiences of those who did not benefit from the liberal promises of the American Revolution, though for the most part, such studies focus on urban centers rather than rural areas. See Ruth Wallis Herndon, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Simon P. Newman, Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Billy G. Smith, The “Lower Sort”: Philadelphia’s Laboring People, 1750–1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Smith, ed., Down and Out in Early America; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986). 22. Jakle, “Salt on the Ohio Valley Frontier.” One of the best resources on the region’s geology is the “Rocks and Earth” chapter in Harriette Simpson Arnow, Seedtime on the Cumberland: Life in the Cumberland River Region of Kentucky and Tennessee, 1780–1803 (New York: Macmillan, 1960) 19–39. 23. “Letter from Thomas Perkins, February 27, 1785,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 12 (1873) 38. 24. “Letter from Thomas Perkins,” 38–39. 25. André Michaux, “Journal of André Michaux,” in Reuben G. Thwaites, ed., Early Western Travels (Cleveland: A. H. Clark and Co., 1904) 3: 37. 26. Robertson, Petitions, 43. 27. William Fleming, “Colonel William Fleming’s Journal of Travels in Kentucky, 1779–1780,” in Newton D. Mereness, ed., Travels in the American Colonies (New York: Macmillan, 1916) 620. 28. See McDowell, “Bullitt’s Lick.” A vivid description of salt making is also found in Toulmin, Western Country, 105–106. Perhaps nobody has written or studied more extensively on the Kentucky saltworks than Robert Emmett McDowell. A fascinating

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writer, McDowell started his career writing pulp science fiction, though his true interest was Kentucky history. His rich collection of transcribed documents at the Filson Historical Society formed the foundation of a fictional book loosely based on Bullitt’s Lick. The novel sets a story of romance against a thoroughly researched backdrop of the Kentucky saltworks. McDowell, Tidewater Sprig (New York: Crown Publishers, 1961). 29. “Letter from Thomas Perkins,” 38. 30. John Robert Shaw, John Robert Shaw, An Autobiography of Thirty Years, 1777–1807, Oressa M. Teagarder and Jeanne L. Crabtree, eds. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992) 127. 31. William Christian to Benjamin Harrison, September 28, 1782, BFP. 32. Robert Daniel to William Christian, October 27, 1784, BFP. 33. Annie Christian to Anne Fleming, March 26, 1786, BFP. 34. Some studies that investigate the diverse nature of early American labor include Jacqueline Jones, American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000); David Montgomery, “The Working Classes of the Pre-Industrial American City, 1780–1830,” Labor History 9 (Winter 1968) 3–22. 35. Toulmin, Description, 90. 36. Kentucky Gazette, April 26, 1790. 37. Kentucky Gazette, April 25, 1798. 38. Estimates placing wages at twelve shillings per day in 1784 are found in Hazel Dicken Garcia, “ ‘A Great Deal of Money . . .’: Notes on Kentucky Costs, 1786–1792,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 3 (Summer 1979) 186–200. The estimates for 1797 are from a notice in the Kentucky Gazette stating that a common laborer could earn around ten dollars, or sixty shillings, per month, an amount historian Elizabeth Perkins equates to two shillings and six pence per day. See Kentucky Gazette, September 13, 1797; Perkins, “The Consumer Frontier: Household Consumption in Early Kentucky” Journal of American History 78 (1991) 486–510. On wage-working men in Lexington, see also Aron, “ ‘The Poor Men To Starve.’ ” 39. “Some particulars relative to the Soil, Situation, Productions, &c. of Kentucky,” in Eugene L. Schwaab, ed., Travels in the Old South: Selected from Periodicals of the Times, 2 vols. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973) 1: 60. 40. Estimates of wages to prices found in Perkins, “Consumer Frontier,” 503–505. 41. Kentucky Gazette, August 18, 1792. 42. Richard Woolfolk to Hannah Hinch, September 5, 1786, BFP. 43. Meriwether’s tavern license appears in Ludie Kincaid, “Minute Book No. 1 Jefferson County Kentucky, April 6, 1784 to December 7, 1785,” FCHQ 6 (1932) 142. 44. Nicholas Meriwether expenses, not dated, BFP. 45. Kentucky Gazette, August 30, 1788. 46. Also spelled “Critchlow” in some records. Andrew Hynes and Company vs. John Crutchlow (1798) in Bullitt Circuit Court Records, REMC.

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47. Andrew Hynes and Company vs. John Crutchlow (1798) in Bullitt Circuit Court Records, REMC. 48. Andrew Hynes and Company vs. John Crutchlow (1798) in Bullitt Circuit Court Records, REMC. 49. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire, 162. 50. Aron, “ ‘The Poor Men to Starve.’ ” 51. Quotation from McCoy, Elusive Republic, 66. 52. On the connections between economic dependence and political manipulation, see Jack P. Greene, Imperatives, Behaviors, and Identities: Essays in Early American Cultural History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992) 148–150; Keyssar, Right to Vote, 5. 53. Thomas Holt v. Thomas Theobald (1800) in Bullitt Circuit Court Records, REMC. 54. Thomas Holt v. Thomas Theobald (1800) in Bullitt Circuit Court Records, REMC. 55. Deposition of Nathan Bass. Thomas Holt v. Thomas Theobald (1800) in Bullitt Circuit Court Records, REMC. 56. Deposition of Nathan Bass. Thomas Holt v. Thomas Theobald (1800) in Bullitt Circuit Court Records, REMC. 57. On the nature of race- and gender-mixed job opportunities and worksites, see Rockman, Scraping By, 45–56; David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1999). 58. Nicholas Meriwether expenses, not dated, BFP. 59. The best overview of this argument is Boydston, “Woman Who Wasn’t There.” In a variety of settings, other scholars have made similar arguments about women’s essential labor to the expansion of capitalism. See Boydston, Home and Work; Hartigan-O’Connor, Ties That Buy; Cynthia Kierner, Beyond the Household: Women’s Place in the Early South, 1700– 1835 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Rockman, Scraping By; Stansell, City of Women; Wulf, Not All Wives; Zabin, Dangerous Economies. 60. See Boydston, Home and Work, 45; Kerber, Women of the Republic, 47; Lewis, Pursuit of Happiness; Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash. 61. Historians have long known that women’s work was not confined to domestic labor. Rather, women from the colonial period onward engaged in labor and exchange in their husbands’ absence, functioning as “deputy husbands,” a term coined in Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (New York: Vintage, 1991). 62. Quotation from Terry, “Family Empires,” 195. 63. Terry, “Family Empires,” 195–196. 64. Frank Edwards to William Christian, May 7, 1785, BFP. 65. William Christian to Elizabeth Christian, September 25, 1784, Hugh Blair Grigsby Papers, VHS. 66. Mary Daniel to William Christian, December 25, 1783, REMC. 67. Mary Daniel to William Christian, November 21, 1783, REMC.

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68. Author and recipient unclear, Caleb Wallace Collection, December 27, 1783, Hugh Blair Grigsby Papers, VHS. 69. Mary Daniel to William Christian, November 21, 1783, BFP. 70. John Hinch drowned in a salt well in the summer of 1786. Documentation of his death appears on August 1, 1786, Jefferson County, Kentucky, Court Order Book no. 2, 21. 71. Annie Christian to Hannah Hinch, October 11, 1786, BFP. 72. Annie Christian to Hannah Hinch, August 14, 1786, BFP. 73. On the ephemeral nature of economic transactions in early America, see HartiganO’Connor, Ties That Buy, 1–2. 74. Kentucky Gazette, April 25, 1789. 75. On the myth of the male breadwinner and the specter of failure, see Rockman, Scraping By, 161–162. 76. On the celebration of the yeoman ideal and the shortcomings of eighteenthcentury farms in early Kentucky, see Craig Thompson Friend, “ ‘Work and Be Rich’: Economy and Culture on the Bluegrass Farm,” in Buzzel about Kentuck, 125–152. 77. Deposition of Rebecca Johnson, Agnes Irons v. Robert Wickliffe (1821) in Bullitt Circuit Court, REMC. 78. Kentucky Gazette, October 5, 1793, November 23, 1793. 79. Kentucky Gazette, May 24, 1788. 80. Kentucky Gazette, August 11, 1792. 81. Barbara Bibbs v. Frederick Baker (1798) in Lincoln County Ordinary Court Case Files, KDLA. 82. Mary Daniel to William Christian, November 21, 1783, BFP. 83. Kentucky Gazette, February 2, 1793, May 2, 1798. 84. Heinemann, “First Census” of Kentucky, 3. 85. On the planting habits of western slaveholders, see Todd H. Barnett, “Virginians Moving West: The Early Evolution of Slavery in the Bluegrass,” FCHQ 73 (1999) 221–248; J. Winston Coleman, Slavery Times in Kentucky (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940); Eslinger, Citizens of Zion, 31–42; Eslinger, “Shape of Slavery on the Kentucky Frontier”; J. Blaine Hudson, “Slavery in Early Louisville and Jefferson County, Kentucky, 1780–1812,” FCHQ 73 (1999) 249–283; Marion B. Lucas, A History of Blacks in Kentucky: From Slavery to Segregation, 1760–1861 (Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 1992) xi–xx. 86. On the diplomatic problems with Spain and national anxieties about markets for western produce, see McCoy, Elusive Republic, 123–124. 87. Kentucky Gazette, December 20, 1788. 88. Kentucky Gazette, November 21, 1789. 89. See Sarah S. Hughes, “Slaves for Hire: The Allocation of Black Labor in Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1782–1810,” WMQ 35 (April, 1978) 260–286; Jonathan Martin, Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); John Zaborney, Slaves for Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012).

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90. Kentucky Gazette, October 31, 1795. 91. Aron, “ ‘The Poor Men to Starve,” 183–185. 92. On the economic advantages of hiring slaves over white workers see Zaborney, Slaves for Hire, 120–122. Hiring slaves might also prove to be ultimately cheaper than purchasing a slave for life, Rockman, Scraping By, 112–113. 93. Mary Daniel to William Christian, November 21, 1783, REMC. 94. Daniel Drake, Pioneer Life in Kentucky, 1785–1800 (New York: Henry Schuman Inc., 1948) 93. 95. On the “living wage” in early America, see Rockman, Scraping By, 132–157. 96. Annie Christian to Alexander Scott Bullitt, April 24, 1788, BFP. 97. Annie Christian’s letters betray tensions between herself and Alexander Scott Bullitt. See Annie Christian to Anne Fleming, September 22, 1787, Hugh Blair Grigsby Papers, VHS. As well, she often lamented in her correspondence about her power struggles with Bullitt. See Annie Christian to Elizabeth Christian, January 2, 1788, BFP. Further discussion of the rift between Christian and Bullitt is found in Terry, “Family Empires,” 199–203. 98. Annie Christian to Alexander Scott Bullitt, March 24, 1788, BFP. 99. On the potential for hired slaves to use their divided interests between their owners and their employers to their own advantage, see Martin, Divided Mastery. The classic example of a slave negotiating the terms of his hire for the purposes of gaining some level of physical autonomy is Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, David Blight, ed., 2nd edition (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002) 108–110. 100. For evidence of slaves holding their own store accounts and trading with cash, see Perkins, “Consumer Frontier,” 496. On slave ambitions for self-purchase, see Juliet E. K. Walker, Free Frank: A Black Pioneer on the Kentucky Frontier (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1983). 101. Kentucky Gazaette, February 28, 1798. 102. Quotation from Teute, “Land, Liberty, and Labor,” 340. 103. Increasingly throughout the late eighteenth century, and particularly in early national urban centers, white workingmen would begin to see themselves as united by race in opposition to competition to black labor. See Roediger, Wages of Whiteness. 104. Moses Moore v. William Martin (1798) in Bullitt Circuit Court Records, REMC.

Chapter 3. “Ruin Poor Families” 1. As quoted in Eslinger, Citizens of Zion, 97. 2. Estimates of population increase in 1784 from Harrison, Kentucky’s Road to Statehood, 7–8. 3. William Christian to William Fleming, September 25, 1785, Hugh Blair Grigsby Papers, VHS. On the financial struggles of post-revolutionary migrants, see Harrison, Kentucky’s Road to Statehood, 7. 4. Virginia had long paid soldiers and officers in military warrants to western lands. Many of the earliest Kentucky settlers and speculators were those who had earned title to

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western land for through their service in the Seven Years’ War. Hammon, Early Kentucky Land Records, xv. After the American Revolution, Virginia leaders set aside a huge portion of land south of the Green River to serve as payment for soldiers. According to Stephen Aron, although the area contained close to 1.5 million acres of land, few moved there to settle, and the region became home to squatters until speculators took an interest in the region after 1795. See Aron, How the West Was Lost, 150–153; Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution, 336. 5. Heinemann, “First Census” of Kentucky, 3. Discussion of the feminization and youthful demography of Kentucky’s early population first appeared in Honor Sachs, “Not the Best Poor Man’s Country: The Social World of the Eighteenth-Century West,” Ph.D. diss. (University of Wisconsin Madison, 2006) 17–18. 6. The best analysis of economic inequality and wealth distribution in Kentucky is Lee Soltow, “Kentucky Wealth at the End of the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 43 (September 1983) 617–633. Soltow analyzed tax lists in 1800 to account for standard markers of wealth such as land and slaves but also took into consideration location and quality of land as well as other forms of property and wealth, including number of horses owned and number of retail licenses, taverns, and town lots registered. His results show a staggered level of inequality. Using the Gini coefficient (a statistical measure of income distribution) Soltow found that the concentration of wealth was as high as. 80 for adult free males. To give this some kind of perspective, the Gini coefficient is measured on a scale of zero (representing total income equality) to one (representing absolute inequality). In their study of wealth in America on the eve of the American Revolution, Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson found that in 1774, the Gini coefficient for all thirteen colonies was. 456. New England had the lowest level of economic inequality, at. 348, while the South (which included slave populations) had the highest level, at. 466. With this as a comparison, Soltow’s analysis that showed a. 80 level of inequality in Kentucky at 1800 suggests an extremely unbalanced (and quite possibly inaccurate, given such high levels) distribution of wealth. Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson, “American Incomes Before and After the Revolution,” Working Paper 17211 (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2011), www.nber.org/papers/w17211 (accessed April 26, 2014) 39. 7. G. Glenn Clift, “Second Census” of Kentucky, 1800 (1954, reprint Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1970) iv. 8. Robertson, Petitions, 76. 9. Nobles, American Frontiers, 107. 10. The belief that the new national government would secure equality for western settlers was an idea being articulated in policy but less so in practice. Indeed, throughout the 1780s, Congress had labored to craft policy that would ensure the fair and equal distribution of western lands. The Land Ordinance of 1785, however, secured such visions for the Northwest Territory and did little to remedy existing problems in Kentucky. In fact, as Peter Onuf argues, the land policies developed in the 1780s were deliberate efforts “to

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preempt the usual course of lawless landgrabbing” that characterized Kentucky’s settlement. Onuf, Statehood and Union, 37. 11. On this transition from private patriarchal control to public intervention during the revolutionary era, see Shammas, History of Household Government in America, 53–82. 12. See Herndon, Unwelcome Americans; Nash, The Urban Crucible; Rockman, Scraping By; Smith, “Lower Sort”; Smith, ed., Down and Out in Early America. 13. Toulmin, Description, 91. 14. Filson, Discovery, 81. 15. Michael Katz, In the Shadow of the Poor House: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Nash, Urban Crucible; Rockman, Scraping By; Smith, ed., Down and Out in Early America. 16. See McCoy, Elusive Republic, 107–113. 17. Quotation from McCoy, Elusive Republic, 194. 18. Specifically, Jefferson said, the “mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.” Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 165. 19. On Jefferson’s problematic understanding of western lands and the people who lived on them, see Rhonda, ed., Thomas Jefferson and the Changing West; Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). 20. Teute, “Land, Liberty, and Labor,” 404–411. 21. Robert Daniel to William Christian, October 27, 1784, BFP. 22. Robert Breckenridge to Samuel Beall, April 21, 1791, Beall-Booth Papers, FHS. 23. Gary Nash, “Poverty and Politics in Early American History,” in Down and Out in Early America, 6. 24. Filson, Discovery, 29. 25. Robert Breckenridge to Samuel Beall, April 18, 1792, FHS. 26. Quotation from Aron, How the West Was Lost, 57. 27. Francis Ransdell Slaughter to [illegible] Ransdell, June 6, 1792, FHS. 28. Violence in the West would persist through the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, which severely compromised Indian resistance in the Ohio Valley. See Griffin, American Leviathan, 245–252. 29. Roland Madison to Isaac Shelby, February 15, 1795, Isaac Shelby Papers, FHS. 30. “An Act concerning Coroners, and for other purposes,” in William Littell, The Statute Law of Kentucky (Frankfort: William Hunter, 1800) 1: 167–168. 31. Newman, Embodied History, 16–39. 32. On the creation of such institutions, see Gary Nash, “Poverty and Poor Relief in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia,” WMQ 33 (1976) 3–30. 33. Nash, Urban Crucible, 11. 34. On the gendered nature of poor relief and the particular experiences of poor women in early American cities, see Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the

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Antebellum City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006) 50–89; Herndon, Unwelcome Americans; Wulf, Not All Wives. As well, in 2012, The Journal of the Early Republic devoted a special issue to the subject of women and poverty in early America. The scholarship in volume 32 (Fall 2012) addresses the question of women, gender, and poor relief in the early republic. 35. December 5, 1797, Michael L. Cook and Bettie Cummings Cook, Jefferson County, Kentucky Records (Evansville, IN: Cook Publications, 1987) 2: 136. 36. November 7, 1797, Cook and Cummings Cook, Jefferson County, Kentucky Records, 2: 129. 37. On the problem of cash in poor relief, see Hartigan-O’Connor, Ties That Buy, 121. 38. November 25, 1795, Cook, Mercer County, Kentucky Records, 1: 433. 39. July 11, 1797, Michael L. Cook, Lincoln County, Kentucky Records (Evansville, IN: Cook Publications, 1987–) 3: 157. 40. Littell, The Statute Law of Kentucky, 1: 192–193. 41. March 25, 1794, Cook, Mercer County, Kentucky Records, 1: 383. 42. On traditions of gender and poor relief, see Karin Wulf, “Gender and the Political Economy of Poor Relief in Colonial Philadelphia,” in Down and Out in Early America, 163–188. 43. Robertson, Petitions, 68. 44. This intervention was based on a number of gendered presumptions about women’s economic vulnerability and worthiness as objects of charity, as well as a growing fetishization of a paternalist view of the nation-state. See Wulf, Not All Wives, 153–179; Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father, 102–103. In many ways, this approach was markedly different, though no less shaped by gender, from nineteenth-century models of charity, when the work of poor relief became increasingly associated with women’s benevolence, or from twentieth-century forms of welfare that were initially shaped by a maternalist impulse. See Lori Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). 45. For more on orphans in early America see John E. Murray, The Charleston Orphan House: Children’s Lives in the First Public Orphanage in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Sharon Braslaw Sundue, Industrious in Their Stations: Young People at Work in Early America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). 46. February 18, 1785, Cook, Lincoln County, Kentucky Records, 2: 140. 47. July 15, 1790, Cook, Lincoln County, Kentucky Records, 2: 396. 48. April 27, 1791, Cook, Mercer County, Kentucky Records, 1: 245. 49. November 15, 1785, October 16, 1787, Cook, Lincoln County, Kentucky Records, 2: 197, 288. 50. “Act concerning the Poor,” Littell, Statute Law of Kentucky, 1: 193. 51. See John E. Murray and Ruth Wallace Herndon, eds., Children Bound to Labor: Pauper Apprenticeship in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); John E. Murray,

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“Bound by Charity: The Abandoned Children of Late Eighteenth-Century Charleston,” in Down and Out in Early America, 213–232. 52. Cook and Cumming Cook, Jefferson County, Kentucky Records, 5: 64. 53. Cook and Cumming Cook, Jefferson County, Kentucky Records, 5: 64. 54. Recent scholarship on the seventeenth century suggests that someone like Morrow would not seem entirely unusual in the early colonial settlements. See in particular, Paul Finkelman, “Crimes of Love, Misdemeanors of Passion: The Regulation of Race and Sex in the Colonial South” in The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South, ed. Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) 124–135; Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002). 55. July 3, 1792, Cook and Cummings Cook, Jefferson County, Kentucky Records, 1: 443. 56. August 19, 1793, Cook, Lincoln County, Kentucky Records, 3: 101. 57. Robert H. Bremmer, ed., Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970) 1: 263–270. 58. “Act concerning the Poor,” Littell, Statute Law of Kentucky, 1: 192. 59. March 20, 1792, Cook, Lincoln County, Kentucky Records, 3: 40. 60. October 16, 1792, Cook, Lincoln County, Kentucky Records, 3: 62. 61. “Act concerning the Poor,” Littell, Statute Law of Kentucky, 1: 193. 62. September 15, 1789, Cook, Lincoln County, Kentucky Records, 2: 369. 63. August 7, 1798, Cook and Cummings Cook, Jefferson County, Kentucky Records, 2: 157. 64. May 27, 1794; August 26, 1794, Cook, Mercer County, Kentucky Records, 1: 387, 395. 65. May 21, 1793, Cook, Lincoln County, Kentucky Records, 3: 73; March 25, 1794, Cook, Mercer County, Kentucky Records, 1: 383. On options for workingmen in early Kentucky, see Aron, “ ‘The Poor Men To Starve.’ ” 66. On the deepening problem of economic inequality by 1800, see Soltow, “Kentucky Wealth.” 67. October 28, 1794, Cook, Mercer County, Kentucky Records, 1: 400. 68. January 26, 1796, Cook, Mercer County, Kentucky Records, 1: 436. 69. On poor mothers’ and families’ use of institutions and almshouses to manage poverty or provide children with new opportunities, see Rockman, Scraping By, 206–208. 70. July 5, 1796, Cook and Cummings Cook, Jefferson County, Kentucky Records, 2: 89. 71. October 27, 1789, Cook, Mercer County, Kentucky Records, 1: 148. 72. March 23, 1790, Cook, Mercer County, Kentucky Records, 1: 172. 73. On the potential for abuse of power and sexual exploitation of servants, see Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) 63–74; Clare Lyons, Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) 232–234; Terri Snyder, “ ‘As If There Was Not Master or Woman in the Land’: Gender, Dependency, and Household Violence in Virginia, 1646–1720,” in Over the

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Threshold: Intimate Violence in Early America, ed. Christine Daniels and Michael Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 1999) 219–236. 74. Littell, Statute Law of Kentucky, 1: 375. 75. “An Act concerning Guardians, Infants, Masters, and Apprentices,” in Littell, Statute Law of Kentucky, 1: 673–678, quotation on 1: 674. 76. Littell, Statute Law of Kentucky, 1: 674. 77. July 16, 1793, Cook, Lincoln County, Kentucky Records, 3: 77. 78. October 20, 1789, Cook, Lincoln County, Kentucky Records, 2: 372. 79. On the narrative of female dependence in Kentucky, see Sachs, “Myth of the Abandoned Wife.” 80. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith articulated the idea that the “labouring poor” were inadequate candidates for citizenship, equating the monotony of their work with the capacity to become “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” See Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Bantam Classic, reprint edition, 2003) 429. See also McCoy, Elusive Republic, 35–40. 81. “An Act to prevent the increase of Vagrant and other idle and disorderly Persons within this state,” in Littell, Statute Law of Kentucky, 1: 288. 82. Littell, Statute Law of Kentucky, 1: 288. 83. Littell, Statute Law of Kentucky, 1: 290. 84. “An Act to amend an act entitled ‘an act concerning the Poor,’ ” in William Littell and Jacob Swigert, The Statute Law of Kentucky (Frankfort: Kendall and Russell, 1822) 2: 87. 85. On national leaders’ anxiety about western discontent, see Furstenberg, “Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier,” 663–664; Onuf, Origins of the Federal Republic, 181–185. 86. For discussions of backcountry unrest and agrarian uprising, see Michael Bellesiles, Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for Independence on the Early American Frontier (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993); Richard Maxwell Brown, The South Carolina Regulators (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963); Brendan McConville, These Daring Disturbers of the Peace: The Struggle for Property and Power in Early New Jersey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Leonard Richards, Shays’ Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); David P. Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980); Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); James P. Whittenburg, “Planters, Merchants, and Lawyers: Social Change and the Origins of the North Carolina Regulation,” WMQ 34 (April, 1977) 215–238. The idea of “wildfire” as a metaphor for western unrest is discussed in Onuf, Origins of the Federal Republic, 178. 87. George Washington to Henry Knox, December 26, 1786, www.founders.archives.gov.

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88. Quotation from McCoy, Elusive Republic, 129. 89. Quotation from Cayton, Frontier Republic, 7.

Chapter 4. “A Stroke of Manly Courage” 1. Gilbert Imlay, The Emigrants (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998); Imlay, Topographical Description; Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer. 2. For background on Imlay, see the introduction by W. M. Verhoeven and Amanda Gilroy in Imlay, Emigrants, ix–lv. See also W. M. Verhoeven, Gilbert Imlay: Citizen of the World (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008). 3. Imlay, Emigrants, 236. 4. Imlay, Emigrants, 92. 5. Imlay, Emigrants, 237. 6. For perspectives on the connection between manhood and militias, see Gregory Knouff, The Soldiers’ Revolution: Pennsylvanians in Arms and the Forging of Early American Identity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012); Harry S. Laver, “Refuge of Manhood: Masculinity and the Militia Experience in Kentucky,” in Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South, ed. Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004) 1–21; Lee, Crowds and Soldiers, 202–204. For broader overviews on the subject of manhood and masculinity in early America, see Toby Ditz, “Shipwrecked; or Masculinity Imperiled: Mercantile Representations of Failure and the Gendered Self in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” Journal of American History 81 (1994) 50–80; Lorri Glover, Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Dana Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity From the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1994). 7. On the vulnerability of the early frontier in a broad Atlantic context, see Furstenberg, “Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier.” 8. On the fragility of sovereignty and loyalty in the early West, see Griffin, American Leviathan, 212–239. 9. On the perception of neglect in the early West, see Andrew R. L. Cayton, “ ‘Separate Interests’ and the Nation-State: The Washington Administration and the Origins of Regionalism in the Trans-Appalachian West,” Journal of American History 79 (June 1992) 39–67. 10. White, Middle Ground, 315–365. 11. Griffin, American Leviathan, 142–149; Jack Sosin, Revolutionary Frontier, 1763–1783 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974) 117–118; Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2001) 62–64. 12. Griffin, American Leviathan, 124–151; White, Middle Ground, 413–468.

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13. George Rogers Clark to Colonel Archibald Lochry, August 9, 1781, in James Alton James, ed., George Rogers Clark Papers, 1771–1781 (Springfield: Trustees of the Illinois State Historical Library, 1912) 8: 583. 14. George Rogers Clark to George Mason, November 19, 1779, in James, ed., George Rogers Clark Papers, 8: 118. On the problem of desertion among Clark’s troops, see Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 215; Sosin, Revolutionary Frontier, 117–118; White, Middle Ground, 369. 15. George Rogers Clark to George Mason, November 19, 1779, in James, ed., George Rogers Clark Papers, 8: 117. 16. George Rogers Clark to the Western Commissioners, February 25, 1783, in James, ed., George Rogers Clark Papers, 19: 204. 17. George Rogers Clark to George Mason, November 19, 1779, in James, ed., George Rogers Clark Papers, 8: 118. 18. On the conflicts and struggles over expectations of deference in the eighteenth century, see Richard Beeman, “Deference, Republicanism, and the Emergence of Popular Politics in Eighteenth-Century America,” WMQ 49 (1992) 401–430; Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); John Smolenski, “From Men of Property to Just Men: Deference, Masculinity, and the Evolution of Political Discourse in Early America,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3 (2005) 37–81; Michael Zuckerman, “Tocqueville, Turner, and Turds: Four Stories of Manners in Early America,” Journal of American History 85 (1998) 13–42. 19. On the problem of insubordination and apathy in backcountry militias, see Lee, Crowds and Soldiers, 129–136. 20. William Christian to Benjamin Harrison, September 28, 1782, BFP. 21. John Floyd to John May, April 8, 1782, William P. Palmer and S. McRae, eds., Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts: Preserved in the Capitol at Richmond (Richmond: R. F. Walker, 1875–1893) 3: 121–122. 22. Kentucky Gazette, April 7, 1792. 23. Kentucky Gazette, March 17, 1792. 24. Kentucky Gazette, May 25, 1793. 25. Kentucky Gazette, May 25, 1793. 26. Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, 83–84. 27. Throughout Anglo-America, this narrative of household atrocity evoked particular outrage. Lee, Crowds and Soldiers, 200; Lepore, Name of War, 75–76. 28. Filson, Discovery, 79. 29. On Indians’ disinclination against rape in war, see Gregory Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991) 9–10; Lee, Crowds and Soldiers, 121. On the particular outrage of Indians at European rapes on Indian women, see Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman, 64–67. 30. On captivity narratives and the Anglo-American belief that Indians were not interested in sexual conquest of English women, see Block, Rape and Sexual Power, 221–230.

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31. Kentucky Gazette, April 6, 1793. 32. On the significance of violent imagery in frontier mythology, see Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000). 33. John Breckenridge to Isaac Shelby, March 6, 1795, Isaac Shelby Papers, FHS. 34. David Wood Meriwether letter, September 14, 1785, FHS; Anonymous letter from Harrodsburg, January 30, 1780, FHS. 35. The best discussion of masculinity in the Paxton Crisis is Eustace, Passion is the Gale, 335–384. 36. Griffin, American Leviathan, 168–173; Harper, “Looking the Other Way.” 37. On the evolution of “Indian hating” in the wake of the American Revolution, see White, Middle Ground, 366–412. See also Griffin, American Leviathan, 25–27, 176–180, 262– 267; Silver, Our Savage Neighbors. 38. On the larger problem of military desertion within the Continental Army, see Knouff, Soldier’s Revolution, 99–100. 39. Cayton, Frontier Republic, 39. See also Francis Paul Prucha, The Sword of the Republic: The United States Army on the Frontier, 1783–1846 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986) 20–40. 40. Kentucky Gazette, May 26, 1792. 41. Kentucky Gazette, June 23, 1792. 42. On the critical and degrading language of runaway slave advertisements, see Eustace, Passion is the Gale, 70–75; David Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways: SelfFashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century MidAtlantic,” WMQ 56 (1999) 243–272. 43. Kentucky Gazette, May 26, 1792, December 15, 1792. 44. Kentucky Gazette, June 23, 1792. 45. Arthur Campbell to John Steele, March 28, 1792, Arthur Campbell Letters, FHS. 46. For similar tensions between militiamen and their officers in backcountry North Carolina, see Lee, Crowds and Soldiers, 182–184. 47. Kentucky Gazette, December 3, 1791. 48. Kentucky Gazette, June 23, 1792. 49. Kentucky Gazette, July 13, 1793. 50. Kentucky Gazette, October 18, 1794. For more on runaway wives in Kentucky, see Sachs, “Myth of the Abandoned Wife.” On runaway wives elsewhere, see Mary Beth Sievens, Stray Wives: Marital Conflict in Early National New England (New York: New York University Press, 2005). 51. Faragher, Daniel Boone, 58–62, quotation on 60. On the problem of marital infidelity and informal divorce in eighteenth-century Kentucky, see Sachs, “Myth of the Abandoned Wife.” 52. On soldiers’ motivations and expectations of service, see Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill: University of

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NOTES TO PAGES 107–111

North Carolina Press, 1996); Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990). 53. Shaw, John Robert Shaw, 11. 54. The issue of payment for service was actually quite fraught during the revolutionary era. Wayne Lee describes how tensions existed between militias and Continental soldiers over the issue of pay. Those in the militias saw themselves as propertied men who sacrificed their interests for the greater good. They looked down on Continental soldiers, whom they saw as poor men who were fighting only for a paycheck. Lee, Crowds and Soldiers, 150–151. 55. Robertson, Petitions, 67. 56. Robert George to John Todd, July 15, 1782, Draper Manuscript Collection, 52J25, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin. 57. Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin Books, 2007) 14. 58. Rediker, The Slave Ship, 227. 59. Robert George to John Todd, July 19, 1782, Draper Collection, 52J25. 60. Garret Van Meter to Thomas Jefferson, April 14, 1781, James, ed., George Rogers Clark Papers, 8: 525. 61. For similar patterns of support for protest, see Jeffrey Crow, “Liberty Men and Loyalists: Disorder and Disaffection in the North Carolina Backcountry,” in An Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry during the American Revolution, ed. Peter Albert, Ronald Hoffman, and Thad Tate (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1985) 125–178; Lee, Crowds and Soldiers, 168–173. 62. Benjamin Harrison to George Rogers Clark, December 20, 1781, Draper Collection, 51J101. 63. April 3, 1787, Annie Christian salt receipts, BFP. 64. Samuel McDowell Jr. to Andrew Reid, undated letter, 1792, Samuel McDowell Papers, KHS. 65. Figure from Cayton, Frontier Republic, 38. 66. Quotation from Harrison, Kentucky’s Road to Statehood, 2. 67. Kentucky Gazette, December 15, 1792. 68. Kentucky Gazette, December 3, 1791. 69. Kentucky became a particular haven for Loyalists and tax evaders alongside political radicals. See Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau, “A New Look at the Whiskey Rebellion,” in The Whiskey Rebellion: Past and Present Perspectives, ed. Stephen Boyd (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985) 97–118; Patricia Watlington, “Discontent in Frontier Kentucky,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 65 (April 1967) 77–93. 70. S. Clark to Governor Harrison, November 30, 1782, in Palmer and McRae, eds., The Calendar of Virginia State Papers, 3: 384.

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71. James Speed to Governor Harrison, May 22, 1784, in Palmer and McRae, eds., The Calendar of Virginia State Papers, 3: 588. 72. Walker Daniel to Governor Harrison, May 21, 1784, in Palmer and McRae, eds., The Calendar of Virginia State Papers, 3: 584. 73. Eric Foner, ed., Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (New York: Library of America, 1995). 74. Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations (New York: Penguin Books, 2006) 148. 75. Thomas Paine, Public Good: Being an Examination into the Claim of Virginia to the vacant Western Territory, and the Right of the United States to the same (Albany: Charles R. & George Webster, 1780; reprint Berea, KY: Kentucke Imprints, 1976) 35. 76. Robertson, Petitions, 64. 77. On Vermont, see Bellisiles, Revolutionary Outlaws, 207–215; on the state of Franklin, see Barksdale, Lost State of Franklin; on Pennsylvania, see Griffin, American Leviathan, 232. 78. Washington to Benjamin Harrison, October 10, 1784, www.founders.archives.gov. 79. Cayton, Frontier Republic, 23. 80. Cayton, Frontier Republic, 23. 81. See Cayton, “Separate Interests”; Onuf, Statehood and Union. 82. Watlington, “Discontent in Frontier Kentucky,” 77–93. 83. Cayton, Frontier Republic, 4. 84. Aurther Campbell to William Davies, October 3, 1782, in Palmer and McRae, eds., The Calendar of Virginia State Papers, 3: 337. 85. Committee in the Virginia House of Delegates, December 11, 1781, Draper Manuscripts, 51J100. 86. McCoy, Elusive Republic, 123–124. 87. Samuel Flagg Bemis, Jay’s Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962). 88. Thomas Marshall Green, The Spanish Conspiracy: A Review of the Early Spanish Movements in the South-West (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke and Co., 1891). 89. See James Wilkinson’s “Memorial” in the introduction to Temple Bodley, ed., Reprints of Littell’s Political Transactions in and Concerning Kentucky and Letter of George Nicholas to His Friend in Virginia (Louisville: J. P. Morton, 1926) cxxxix. 90. Bodley, ed., Reprints, lxvii. 91. On the rhetoric of love in eighteenth-century alliance and diplomacy, see Eustace, Passion is the Gale, 107–150. On the role of male expressions of love in early national political culture, see Godbeer, Overflowing of Friendship. 92. For a discussion on the Tennessee Valley “Spanish Intrigue,” see Barksdale, Lost State of Franklin, 145–161, quotation on 159. 93. Aron, American Confluence, 82–83. 94. Faragher, Daniel Boone, 174. 95. Littell, Statute Law of Kentucky, 1: 359.

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NOTES TO PAGES 117–127

96. Littell, Statute Law of Kentucky, 1: 359. 97. On the narrative of female dependence in Kentucky specifically, see Sachs, “Myth of the Abandoned Wife.” 98. Littell, Statute Law of Kentucky, 1: 359.

Chapter 5. “A New Race of Men” 1. Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, 43–44. 2. Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, 45. 3. Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, 51–52. 4. Furstenberg, “Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier,” 663–665. 5. Harrison, Kentucky’s Road to Statehood, 19–32. 6. Gregory Nobles, “Straight Lines and Stability: Mapping the Political Order of the Anglo-American Frontier,” Journal of American History 80 (1993) 9–35. 7. On the confusion over admission of new states, see Onuf, Origins of the Federal Republic, 161–163. On the Land Ordinance of 1784, see Onuf, Statehood and Union, 25. 8. Bennett Henderson Young, History and Texts of the Three Constitutions of Kentucky (Louisville: Courier-Journal Job Printing Company, 1890) 37. 9. The process by which elites consolidated power in Kentucky during the early republic echoes processes unfolding in other frontier areas. See Thomas Perkins Abernethy, From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee: A Study in Frontier Democracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1932); Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible; Rachel N. Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). 10. Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, 34. 11. Quotation from Eslinger, Citizens of Zion, 115. 12. Coward, Kentucky in the New Republic; Watlington, Partisan Spirit. 13. Francis Ransdell Slaughter to Ransdell, June 6, 1972, FHS. 14. Harrison, Kentucky’s Road to Statehood, 97. 15. Kentucky Gazette, March 3, 1792. 16. Kentucky Gazette, October 15, 1791. 17. Kentucky Gazette, October 15, 1791. 18. Coward, Kentucky in the New Republic, 16–17; Harrison, Kentucky’s Road to Statehood, 98–99. 19. Kentucky Gazette, December 17, 1791. 20. Kentucky Gazette, October 15, 1791. 21. Kentucky Gazette, October 15, 1791. 22. Kentucky Gazette, September 24, 1791. 23. Kentucky Gazette, November 19, 1791. 24. Kentucky Gazette, November 19, 1791. 25. Kentucky Gazette, November 19, 1791.

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26. “medlar, n.” OED Online. March 2014. Oxford University Press. http://0-www. oed.com.wncln.wncln.org/view/Entry/115783?redirectedFrom—edlar& (accessed April 29, 2014). 27. Kentucky Gazette, November 19, 1791. 28. Kentucky Gazette, November 19, 1791. 29. Kentucky Gazette, December 10, 1792. Hudibras was a satirical heroic poem about a knight-errant who is the subject of such over-the-top praise he is made to seem ridiculous, Samuel Butler, Hudibras (London: H. G. Bohn, 1859). 30. On the verbal dueling and emasculation, see Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) 173. On manhood, honor, and insult, see Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) 3–23. 31. Kentucky Gazette, December 31, 1791. 32. Coward, Kentucky in the New Republic, 14–15. 33. Alexander Scott Bullitt to William Fleming, March 8, 1792, BFP. 34. Marshall, History of Kentucky, 1: 395. 35. Watlington, Partisan Spirit, 43. 36. Thomas Speed, The Political Club, Danville Kentucky 1786–1790, Being an Account of an Early Kentucky Society From the Original Papers Recently Found (Louisville: J. P. Morton and Company, 1894). 37. Speed, Political Club, 125. 38. Keyssar, Right to Vote, 3–28. 39. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979) 1: 165. 40. Hugh Blair Grigsby, A History of the Virginia Federal Convention of 1788 (Richmond: Wm. Ellis Jones, 1890) 79. 41. Coward, Kentucky in the New Republic, 11. 42. Quotation from Teute, “Land, Liberty, and Labor,” 125. 43. Bellesiles, Revolutionary Outlaws; Richards, Shays’ Rebellion; Taylor, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors; Lee, Crowds and Soldiers, 46–96; Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion. 44. Quotation from Teute, “Land, Liberty, and Labor,” 130. 45. McCoy, Elusive Republic, 130. 46. Quotation form Coward, Kentucky in the New Republic, 32. 47. George Nicholas to James Madison, May 2, 1792, www.founders.archives.gov. 48. Young, History and Texts of the Three Constitutions of Kentucky, 23. 49. George Nicholas to James Madison, May 2, 1792, www.founders.archives.gov. 50. Harrison, Kentucky’s Road to Statehood, 126. 51. Kentucky Gazette, March 1, 1794. 52. Eslinger, Citizens of Zion, 132.

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53. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 90; Coward, Kentucky in the New Republic, 12–47; Watlington, Partisan Spirit, 220–222. 54. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 91. 55. Quotation from Aron, How the West Was Lost, 92. 56. Quotation from Aron, How the West Was Lost, 92. 57. Quotation from Aron, How the West Was Lost, 92. 58. Eslinger, Citizens of Zion, 84–86; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia. 59. William Pope arrest warrant, August 18, 1786, FHS. 60. John May to Samuel Beall, December 9, 1780, Beall-Booth Family Papers, FHS. 61. For examples of runaway slaves escaping to Indian country, see notice for Billy, Kentucky Gazette, February 23, 1793; notice for John Dick, Kentucky Gazette, April 18, 1798; notice for Will and Abram, Kentucky Gazette, February 23, 1793; notice for Isaiah Kerby, Kentucky Gazette, April 18, 1798. 62. Kentucky Gazette, March 9, 1799. 63. This idea is also reflected in the work of Stephen Aron, who argues that the opportunities for true equitable land distribution in Kentucky were “lost” when ordinary settlers began to adopt many of the very same practices for which they had earlier distrusted speculators and investors. Aron finds that, in many ways, ordinary settlers were not at odds with land investors but simply hoped to share in the bounty. Aron, How the West Was Lost. 64. This was part of a larger national trend emerging and expanding throughout the early republic. See Rockman, Scraping By; Roediger, Wages of Whiteness. 65. Kentucky Gazette, April 4, 1799. 66. “An Act to Reduce into One, the Several Acts Concerning Slaves, Free Negroes, Mulattoes, and Indians,” Littell, Statute Law of Kentucky, 2: 113–123. 67. “An Act to Reduce into One,” 2: 113–123. 68. Ellen Eslinger, “Shape of Slavery on Virginia’s Kentucky Frontier.” 69. Coward, Kentucky in the New Republic, 123–161. 70. Keyssar, Right to Vote, 349–351. 71. Heinemann, First Census of Kentucky, 3. 72. Clift, “Second Census” of Kentucky, 1800, iv. 73. Historians generally contend that the lawmakers of 1792 never intended to give free people of color the vote, they merely left out racial specifications by accident due to their general inexperience. Historian Lowell Harrison, for example, explains that although Kentucky’s first state constitution “did not list ‘white’ as a requirement . . . blacks were not considered to be citizens, and the use of that term disqualified them from voting.” In Joan Wells Coward’s exhaustive analysis of Kentucky’s 1792 constitution, it is unclear whether nonwhite populations entered the franchise “by intent or accident.” The delegates to the second constitutional convention in 1799, in contrast, had far better training in law and politics. As such, scholars contend that they simply fixed oversights of the first and added a racial restriction that was presumably always intended. Coward, Kentucky in the New Republic, 138; Harrison, Kentucky’s Road To Statehood, 122.

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74. Journal of the Convention, Begun and Held at the Capitol in the Town of Frankfort, on Monday the Twenty-Second Day of July in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand, Seven Hundred and NinetyNine (Frankfort, KY: Hunter and Beaumont, 1799) 12. 75. July 30, 1799, Resolutions and Proceedings in the Committee of the Whole (Frankfort, KY: Hunter and Beaumont, 1799). 76. Kentucky Gazette, August 8, 1799; Stewart’s Kentucky Herald, August 13, 1799. 77. Journal of the Convention, 22. 78. On Green Clay “perversely” outraging the convention with unpopular practices, see Coward, Kentucky in the New Republic, 130–131. 79. Journal of the Convention, 36.

Conclusion 1. George Henry Preble, Origin and History of the American Flag (Philadelphia: Nicholas L. Brown, 1917) 2: 639. 2. Keyssar, Right To Vote, 54–59. 3. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom. 4. Smith, Civic Ideals, 6. 5. See Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, 17–18. 6. Such ideas are developed in terms of antebellum expansion into the American West and Latin America in Greenberg, Manifest Manhood. On the idea of white womanhood as a justification for racial violence during the early twentieth century, see Nancy McLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 7. See John Craig Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007). 8. On Jefferson’s anxiety over Missouri and nineteenth-century western expansion, see Peter Onuf, “Thomas Jefferson, Missouri, and the ‘Empire for Liberty,’ ” in Thomas Jefferson and the Changing West, 111–154. 9. David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995) 20–23.

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I NDEX

Blackstone, William, 131, 133 Boone, Daniel, 1–2, 14, 24–25, 27, 101–2, 107 Boone, Jemima, 24–25 Boone, Rebecca, 20, 107 Boonesborough, 18–19, 20, 24 Boston, Delphy, 84–85 Bourbon County, 125, 126 Bourbon Iron Furnace, 52 Boydston, Jeanne, 42 Braxdale, Sarah, 83 Breckenridge, John, 69, 103, 136, 137, 138 Breckenridge, Robert, 77, 78 British, 5, 144; empire, 2, 6, 28; and Indian allies, 38, 39, 98, 99; Loyalists, 93, 113; policies of, 29, 32; in the West, 12, 16, 18, 46, 97, 113–14 Brown, John, 130, 145 Brown, Richard Maxwell, 7 Bryan’s Station, 25–27

Abernethy, Thomas Perkins, 4–5 abolition, 135–36 Act Concerning the Poor (1793), 80–81, 85 Act to Prevent the Increase of Vagrant and other Idle and Disorderly Persons (1795), 90–91 Adams, John, 3–4 Articles of Confederation, 122 Asturgus, James, 61 backcountry rebellion, 91–92 Baker, Frederick, 63–64 Baptists, 71; and antislavery, 136 Bass, Nathan, 56–57 Battle of Blue Licks, 20, 27 Beall, Samuel, 38, 77, 78 Becker, Carl, 6 Bell, John, 106 Bibbs, Barbara, 63–64

187

INDEX

Bullitt, Alexander Scott, 67, 130 Bullitt, Thomas, 47 Bullitt’s Lick, 11, 45, 46–48, 149; dangerous conditions of, 51–52; and male labor, 42–43, 54–56; natural history of, 49–50; and salt making, 49–51; and slave labor, 65–68, 70; and tenancy, 52, 66, 77; wages at, 53–55; and women’s labor, 57–64 Burks, Mary, 88

Constitutional Convention (1792), 12, 123, 125–34, 135, 138 Constitutional Convention (1799), 12, 135–36, 137–38, 140–42 Continental Army, 99, 106, 107, 149 Craig, Elijah, 53 Craig, Lewis, 71 Crèvecoeur, Hector St. John de, 94, 120–21, 124 Crutchlow, John, 54–55

Callaway, Elizabeth, 24–25 Callaway, Frances, 24–25 Callaway, Richard, 21, 24 Campbell, Arthur, 105–6, 113 Campbell, Lucy, 89 Cannon, Nancy, 86 Cherokee Indians, 18, 23, 24, 31, 97. See also Indians children: “binding out,” 87, 88; born out of wedlock, 84, 85; as laborers, 48, 58; and poverty, 81–88; violence against, 101–3. See also orphans Christian, “Annie” Henry, 46–48, 51, 56, 58, 60–62, 63, 65, 67–68, 71, 110, 130, 149 Christian, William, 21, 46–48, 51, 59, 71, 77, 100, 149 citizenship, 118, 146, 150; and military service, 107; and personal independence, 62; and white manhood, 97–98, 109, 143, 145, 148. See also independence; voting rights Clark, George Rogers, 20, 98–100, 109, 111, 148 Clark, William, 148 Clay, Green, 141–42 Clay, Henry, 141 Claypole, John, 109 Congress, 109, 113, 114, 115, 122, 125

Daniel, Mary, 59–60, 64, 66 Daniel, Robert, 51, 59, 77 Daniel, Walker, 111 Danville Political Club, 130–31, 132 David, Jane, 85 Davis, Jefferson, 149 debt, 54–55, 74, 77, 92 Delaware, 141 Delaware Indians, 25, 97, 98, 99, 105 dependence: and children, 78, 83–85, 88; and economic inequality, 35, 40, 52; and gender, 44; and household relationships, 7, 15, 42, 48, 62, 64, 78, 79, 82, 96; and male labor, 9, 11, 45, 48, 55–57, 69, 70, 93, 97; and marriage, 118; and political manipulation, 93, 131, 133; and poverty, 79; and slave labor, 68; and state assistance, 90; and tenancy, 35. See also citizenship; independence; patriarchy desertion: militia, 96, 99–100, 104–6, 109, 111; of wives, 106–7 divorce: informal, 21, 63, 64; petitions for, 116–18 Drake, Abraham, 66 Elliot, Robert, 106 The Emigrants, 94–96

188

INDEX

Hanna, Alexander, 86 Harrington, Sophia, 80 Harrison, Benjamin, 110 Harrod, Ann, 22 Harrod, James, 22 Henderson, Richard, 31, 32, 33 “Henry Hudibras,” 128–29 Henry, Patrick, 29, 46, 98 Hinch, Hannah, 60–61, 63, 110 Hinch, John, 60 hiring out. See slavery Hite, Jacob, 23–24, 31, 33 Holt, Thomas, 56 households: idealized, 10, 147; during the American Revolution, 16; divisions of labor within, 62; and empire, 147; historiography of, 7, 10; inequality within, 146–47; and men as heads of, 12, 82; as models of government, 127–28; public management of, 74, 80, 82, 88, 89; self-sufficiency, 5, 7; vulnerability of, 24, 101–2. See also dependence; family; independence; patriarchy Hynes, Andrew, 55

Falls of the Ohio, 22, 47, 51, 101 family, 10, 146–47; and American expansion, 2, 4, 7, 15–16, 17, 76; and the American Revolution, 16, 62; and boosterism, 15, 16; and the British Empire, 2–4; gender relations within, 42, 56; historiography of, 5, 7, 10; and labor, 52; and poverty, 74, 79–80; protection of, 7, 9, 17, 35, 73, 100; regulation of, 81–82; violence against, 23–24, 27, 101–3; western pressures on, 8, 70, 73–74. See also children; gender; households; orphans; patriarchy; poverty; violence; women Faragher, John Mack, 107 “A Farmer,” 135 Fenton, Bartholomew, 29–30 Filson, John, 1–2, 15, 75, 78, 94, 101 Fincastle County, Va., 46 Fleming, William, 50 Floyd, John, 21, 38, 100 Fort Harrod, 20, 22 Frankfort, Ky., 132 Franklin, state of, 112, 116 free blacks, 72, 139, 140–41 frontier: concepts of, 2; as remedy to poverty, 75, 76

Illinois, 98, 116 Imlay, Gilbert, 15, 94–96 independence: defined by land, 17, 30, 31, 35, 39, 131; failure to achieve, 39–40, 42, 44–45, 48, 64, 69–70; and household authority, 31, 42; and labor, 44; male expectations of, 8; and manhood, 48, 100, 109, 118; personal, 9, 11, 14, 18, 45; and race, 68; and republican citizenship, 32, 62, 93, 123; and voting rights, 131. See also citizenship; dependence; manhood; patriarchy Indiana, 47, 98

Gardoqui, Don Diego de, 116 Garton, Sarah, 63 gender: and citizenship, 123–24, 142–43, 148; and frontier war, 23, 26; and the household, 10, 11, 45, 89, 102, 116, 118, 150; and labor, 42, 44, 52, 56–57, 63, 68–69, 86; and poor relief, 79–80. See also citizenship; manhood; women Gnadenhutten, Ohio, 25, 103 Green, Massie, 80 Greenup, Christopher, 130

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INDEX

Indians, 77; alliance with British, 98; attack on Bryan’s Station, 25–27; land negotiations with, 32–33; and narratives of violence, 24, 35, 101–4; and political exclusion, 123, 141–42, 148; slaves escaping to, 137; taking captives, 23, 24–25; violence against, 25, 92, 103–4; and western war, 8, 17, 21, 97, 104–5, 110. See also Cherokee Indians; Delaware Indians; Miami Indians; Shawnee Indians; violence Innes, Harry, 78, 130 Irons, Jonathan, 62–63

69, 93, 108, 129, 131; and servants, 88–89; unemployment, 90–91; unskilled, 53, 57; and virtue, 127; and wages, 53–54, 55. See also Bullitt’s Lick; children; servants; slavery; women Land Ordinances, 122, 147–48 landlessness, 8, 43–44, 52, 75, 77, 132. See also tenancy land speculation, 17, 27–28, 31–32, 37–38 Lawless, John, 106 lawyers, 126, 140 Lewis, Meriwether, 148 Lincoln, Abraham, 149–50 Lincoln County, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 89, 111 Lincoln, Thomas, 149 Lindsey, Joseph, 20 Logan’s Station, 78 Lord Dunmore’s War, 46 Louisiana Territory, 148 Louisville, 46, 47, 48, 61, 104, 149 Loyalists, 93, 113

Jackman, John, 30 Jackson, Andrew, 148 Jay, John, 114 Jefferson County, 80, 86, 87, 100, 101, 136 Jefferson, Thomas, 4, 13, 15, 21, 29, 36, 55, 76–77, 109, 113, 122, 130, 132, 147–48, 149 Johnson, Rebecca, 62–63

Madison, James, 13, 92, 130, 132, 133–34 Madison, Roland, 78 Maine, 133 Malthus, Thomas, 76 manhood: and citizenship, 62, 123–24; “the common man,” 125–27, 128–29, 131, 133, 136, 138, 140, 148; and family protection, 9, 25, 95, 96, 100, 102, 103–4, 115–16, 147; and labor, 15, 48, 56–57, 69–70; and land ownership, 29, 31–32, 33–34, 35, 73; and militarism, 19; and military service, 100, 107–8, 109; and personal independence, 32, 48, 100, 109, 118; and western discontent, 96, 97–98, 107–8, 118; and whiteness, 12, 69, 123, 142, 146, 149. See also gender; independence; patriarchy; race; whiteness

Kentucky: and the American Revolution, 29, 39, 98; demographics of, 20, 21, 42–43, 71–73; early industries in, 45, 52–53; economic inequality in, 43–44, 76–77; and imperial conflict, 5, 16–18, 96–97, 104–5; land speculation in, 31–32, 37–38; legislative acts of, 81, 85, 88–89, 90, 91; mythologized, 2, 14–15, 25, 71, 75–76; and rumors of disunion, 12, 96–97, 111, 112, 121; statehood of, 6, 122, 124–25, 148; state seal of, 145 Kentucky River, 24, 108 labor: and children 83, 85, 86; hired slaves, 65–68; itinerant, 52; meanings of male labor, 44, 55–56; meanings of women’s labor, 16, 58, 62, 63–64; and race, 64, 66, 67, 70, 138; slavery, 57,

190

INDEX

migration to, 74; violence in, 18, 25, 27, 39, 98 orphans, 11, 75, 78, 81, 82–85; and apprenticeships, 83, 84, 85–86. See also children Overseers of the Poor, 9, 11, 79, 80, 82, 85, 87, 88, 89

Marshall, Humphrey, 130 masculinity. See manhood Mason, George, 99 May, John, 38, 137 McDowell, Jr., Samuel, 110 McElwee, William, 137 McGinty, Ann, 20–21 McGinty, James, 21 McKinney, Betsey, 89 “The Medlar,” 127–29 Mercer County, 80, 81, 86, 87, 88 Meriwether, Nicholas, 54, 57–58 Miami Indians, 98, 105 Michaux, André, 49–50 militia, 99–100, 105–6, 108. See also desertion, militia Miró, Esteban, 115 misogyny, 127 Mississippi River, 65, 97, 113, 116; and navigation rights, 114, 119, 121, 125 Missouri, 149 Moore, Moses, 55, 70 Morgan, Edmund, 146 Morgan, George, 116 Morrow, Elizabeth, 83–84, 85 Morrow, Robert, 84 Muskingum River, 25

Paine, Thomas, 111–12 patriarchy: erosion of, 17, 27, 40, 44, 56, 72, 75, 81, 87, 97; and household order, 8, 15–16, 42, 73; and the state, 75, 82, 96, 115, 118, 127–28, 148; and status, 31, 142; and violence, 104. See also households; independence; manhood Patterson, Robert, 108 Paxton Boys, 91–92, 103 Perkins, Elizabeth, 53 Perkins, Thomas, 49, 51 Poage, William, 20 Pope, William, 136 poverty, 72–73, 87, 92, 123, 124, 148; and children, 81–88; denial of, 14, 75–76; and gender, 11, 81, 82, 89–90; institutional responses to, 76, 79; and men, 89–91, 93; and the state, 79–81, 87; and women, 8, 74, 78. See also children; orphans; women Proclamation Act (1763), 5, 29, 30, 32

Nash, Gary, 77 Neighbors, Elizabeth, 81 New Orleans, 65, 97, 114 Nicholas, George, 132–35, 136, 145, 146 Nicholas, Robert Carter, 144–45 North Carolina, 31, 43, 112, 113, 115, 133, 140 Northwest Territory, 98, 104, 111, 113, 147

race: and American expansion, 118–19, 124, 148; and Indian hating, 104; and labor, 52, 56, 64, 68–69, 138; and political privilege, 12, 123, 140–43; and sexual violence, 102; and slave regulation, 139–40; and whiteness, 45, 123, 138, 140–41; and violence, 70, 147. See also citizenship; slavery; whiteness, voting rights

Ohio River, 25, 65, 98, 110, 111, 114, 137 Ohio River Valley, 18, 25, 49, 111; imperial competition in, 5; 12, 16, and land speculation, 27–28, 32, 46;

191

INDEX

rape, 102 Rediker, Marcus, 108 Regulators, 92 Richeson, James, 117–18 Richeson, Margaret, 117–18 Rogers, Polly 116–17 Rogers, Robert, 116–17 Rylye, John, 105

137–38; and violence, 70. See also labor; race Smith, John, 105 Smith, Rogers, 146 South Carolina, 91, 92, 141 Spain, 65, 114–16, 121 Spalding, Nancy, 86 “Spectator,” 138 Stearns, William, 106 “Susan the Breeches Maker,” 41–42

St. Clair, Arthur, 104–5 “Salamander,” 126 salt, 46, 110; salt making, 47, 50–51 Salt River, 46, 50 Saltsburg, 47, 59–60, 61, 66 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 76 Sconce, Sarah, 87 separatism, 96–97, 111, 112–16, 122 servants, 29, 83–84, 85, 88–89 Seven Years’ War, 5, 21, 27, 36, 46, 91, 98 Sevier, John, 116 Shaw, John Robert, 107 Shawnee Indians, 18, 21, 24, 25–26, 97, 98, 99, 105 Shays’ Rebellion, 92, 133 Shelby, Isaac, 78, 103 Shenandoah Valley, 28 Silver, Peter, 101 Skinner, Polly, 87 Slaughter, Francis, 78, 125 “A Slave Holder,” 137 slavery: 18, 41, 48, 58, 60, 65, 142, 146, 148; and abolition, 135–36; and abolitionists, 136–37; demographics of, 43, 71–73, 136, 141; and dependent labor, 57, 69, 93, 108, 129, 131; and escape to Indian country, 137; and frontier autonomy, 68, 139–40; and hiring out, 52, 64, 65–68; and race, 56, 69, 70, 138, 140; slave codes, 123, 139; and slaveholders, 66, 68, 136,

Taylor, Mary, 85 tenancy, 11, 40, 51–52, 66, 72, 77, 78, 91, 97, 100, 123, 127, 132. See also landlessness Tennessee, 43, 116, 140 Teute, Fredrika, 43 Theobald, Thomas, 56–57 Thomas, Oswald, 86 Toulmin, Harry 13–15, 52 Turner, Frederick Jackson 2, 4, 6 vagrancy, 73, 90–91 Vermont, 6, 112, 133 veterans, 72, 96 violence: and association with Indians, 24; and domestic space, 18; in the Ohio River Valley, 18, 25, 27, 39, 98; psychological impact of, 22; between white and black workers, 70; against women, 101–3 Virginia, 20, 130, 132, 136, 141, 144; and frontier war, 98–99, 110–11, 113–14; and land speculation, 5, 23, 27–29, 31, 32–33, 37–38; legislative acts of, 33, 34; petitions to, 31, 34–36, 38–39, 50, 73, 81, 108; separation from, 92, 111, 112, 122, 124–25 Virginia Land Commissioners, 22 Virginia Land Law of 1779, 34, 36, 37

192

INDEX

Wilson, Isabell, 83 Wilson, John, 20 women: and the American Revolution, 58; demographics of, 43, 72–73; and divorce, 116–18; and frontier war, 18, 23, 25–27; Indian, 25, 103–4; and infidelity, 106–7; meanings of labor, 16, 58–59, 62, 63–64; as objects of male protection, 24, 95–96, 102–4; and poor relief, 80–83, 88; and poverty, 11, 75, 78; as single mothers, 82, 85, 87, 88; violence against, 7, 101–4; as widows, 19–20, 22, 27, 58, 78. See also family; gender; household; labor; poverty; widows Wyandot Indians, 99

voting rights: and property 131, 133; and race, 140–42; universal male suffrage, 132–34, 136. See also citizenship; whiteness Washington, George, 29, 92, 104, 113 Waters, Jane, 80 Weatherford, William, 80 Westfall, Elizabeth, 87 Westfall, Hezekiah, 87 White, James, 115 whiteness: and political privilege, 12, 123–24, 140–42; and labor, 64, 66, 67, 70, 138. See also citizenship; manhood; race widows, 19–20, 22, 27, 58, 78 Wilkinson, James, 95, 114–15

193