RELIEF LEGISLATION AND THE ORIGIN OF 
THE COURT CONTROVERSY IN KENTUCKY^ 
I 
BANKING AND ECONOMIC PROBLEMS AFTER THE 
WAR OF 1812 
All that is Kentucky territorially was born contesting. 
Lying as she does with the great Ohio River on her entire 
northern border, with many of its tributaries — the Kentucky, 
Green, Cumberland, and Tennessee — well distributed thru her 
area, making navigation within the state and down the Mis- 
sissippi easy, and with gaps thru the mountains allowing con- 
nections with the East and lower South, Kentucky occupied a 
unique position among pioneer states. Situated between the 
lower South and the Ohio, this near-northern state truly 
served as a gateway. Emigration from the East and the 
South came rapidly during the last two decades of the eight- 
eenth and the first two decades of the nineteenth centuries, 
bringing habits, customs, and political ideas from both re- 
gions. Some of this emigration used Kentucky merely as a 
waiting-station and moved on across the Ohio farther north 
and west. Even the shifting population added to the state’s 
cares and responsibilities. From the early days when Boone 
and Kenton challenged the first Indian on the chase or in the 
canebrakes of Kentucky, for a century every decade produced 
not only the problems then common to all the states but excit- 
ing, perplexing ones peculiarly hers. 
No period in all Kentucky’s first hundred years, not even 
the decade when the dangers of the Civil War and its accom- 
panying readjustments afflicted her, was more exasperating 
or laden with greater peril than the decade from 1819 to 1829, 
especially in the decade is this true of the years from 1822 to 
^ Tliis article, dealing mainly with bank and other debtor-relief legislation, gives 
the background for and the origin of the very bitter and prolonged court contest in 
Kentucky. It consists of the opening chapters of an unpublished monograph entitled 
The Critical Court Struggle in Kentucky. 
( 51 ) 
