THE FEUDAL SYSTEM IN KENTUCKY 33 



of proprietorship where the land was held by relatively few men, 

 who let it to tenants. Even when the poorer class of original 

 settlers acquired land, it was likely to pass to the richer holders 

 by purchase or through law-suits based upon the claims of older 

 patents. Boone became landless and emigrated to Missouri, 

 complaining that at the end of his adventures he had no place 

 in which to be buried. Kentucky inherited from Virginia the 

 mediaeval theory of a landed aristocracy resting upon a tenantry. 

 North of the river, though there were here and there landowners, 

 the conception of the relation of the people to the land was that 

 of the free man working acres which he owned. 



Another influence which tended to establish the Virginia 

 method of proprietorship in Kentucky, and thus to fasten the 

 feudal system, was the peculiar division in the quality of the 

 settlers. These colonists were from the three very distinct 

 classes into which the people of Virginia had from the beginning 

 of its history been divided, viz. : the upper class of proprietors, 

 their slaves, and the group of poor whites who were well accus- 

 tomed to the station of tenants. They accepted the lot of the 

 landless and were content to get what they could out of their 

 station without striving for a higher. So it came about that in 

 the first half of the nineteenth century relatively few of the land- 

 owners labored with their hands ; they either let their holdings 

 to their tenants, or, where they were themselves engaged in the 

 business of farming, the labor was done by the slaves. If the 

 holding was large, these slaves were generally controlled by an 

 overseer; if so small that only a few negroes were employed, the 

 owner would do the overseeing himself. Thus, while manual 

 labor was not considered as in itself degrading, for, so far as I 

 have seen, any landowner of that time would, without thought 

 of his station, take hold with his slaves in any farming work, 

 there grew up, or rather was perpetuated, the tradition of the 

 three distinct estates, the proprietor, the tenant, and the slave. 



In the county of Campbell, where I was born, by far the 

 greater part of the land came by patents or by purchases from 



