Louisiana and Aaron Burr 263 



club included many of the leaders of Kentucky's 

 intellectual life, and the record of its debates shows 

 the keenness with which they watched the course 

 of social and political development not only in Ken- 

 tucky but in the United States. They were men 

 of good intelligence and trained minds, and their 

 meetings and debates undoubtedly had a stimulating 

 effect upon Kentucky life, though they were tainted, 

 as were a very large number of the leading men of 

 the same stamp elsewhere throughout the country, 

 with the doctrinaire political notions common 

 among those who followed the French political theo- 

 rists of the day. 22 



Of the gentry many were lawyers, and the law 

 led naturally to political life; but even among the 

 gentry the typical man was still emphatically the 

 big landowner. The leaders of Kentucky life were 

 men who owned large estates, on which they lived in 

 their great roomy houses. Even when they prac- 

 ticed law they also supervised their estates; and if 

 they were not lawyers, in addition to tilling the land 

 they were always ready to try their hand at some 

 kind of manufacture. They were willing to turn 

 their attention to any new business in which there 

 was a chance to make money, whether it was to put 

 up a mill, to build a forge, to undertake a contract 

 for the delivery of wheat to some big flour mer- 

 chant, or to build a flotilla of flatboats, and take the 

 produce of a given neighborhood down to New Or- 



"The Political Club," by Thomas Speed, Filson Club 

 Publications. 



