34 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SHALER 



smaller holders into the possession of two families of common 

 blood who migrated together from Virginia in the colonization 

 period. These families, bearing the names of Southgate and 

 Taylor, were from the first considerable slaveholders; they both 

 aspired to form landed families. Unto them, as soon as they 

 were established, there came, as usual, numbers of their poor 

 kindred, those swarms of the unsuccessful the landless of the 

 Virginia families, who were ever fighting to save themselves 

 from falling to the level of the "poor white trash," whom the 

 slaves of the rich accounted as beneath their own station. These 

 tenant whites came not to any extent in the first movement into 

 Kentucky ; that was made up of men of a higher social grade, 

 and of the frontier class, generally shiftless people who had the 

 habits of the frontier, living by hunting and trapping. They 

 drifted out in search of new land to rent, or were imported by 

 the large proprietors, so that their farms might be rented. In 

 my boyhood, I knew this group of small farmers well. There 

 were perhaps a hundred families of the class on the lands of 

 my kindred. They were then mostly of the second generation, 

 though many of the elder were born in Virginia or North Caro- 

 lina an excellent folk, curiously resembling the English cotter 

 of the better class, as I came to know him in my walks in cen- 

 tral England in the years 1867 to 1873. Vigorous, honest, 

 kindly, with good farming instincts, sexually wholesome, with 

 no other vice than drunkenness, which was rarely continuous, 

 but took the form of sprees on the quarterly pay-days or other 

 festive occasions. They were, it is true, addicted to fighting, 

 and were nursers of feuds, but they never murdered for money. 

 Their feuds then, as now in the less advanced eastern section 

 of the state, seem to have been due to the large share of the 

 class motive among them. In this regard they did not differ 

 from the higher-placed group of great landowners. 



The most conspicuous feature of the cotter class, as I knew it, 

 was its shif tlessness ; it was not mere indolence, though the peo- 

 ple were characteristically lazy ; but rather an entire lack of all 





