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Indiana University 
1826, inclusive. It was during this decade that panics, too 
many state banks, excess of paper money, creditor-defrauding, 
judge-breaking, determination of state and federal government 
relationship, one or all of them present at the same time, 
harassing this pioneer community, produced a memorable 
epoch. For nearly five years there raged in Kentucky the 
bitterest state-court controversy known in America. The 
primary purpose here is to set forth the most important 
facts of only the origin of the court episode and to throw into 
relief the contributory influences which brought about this 
critical contest.^ 
The general chaos which the Napoleonic wars had spread 
over Europe, coupled with the disrupting conditions result- 
ing from the War of 1812, had greatly hurt American trade. 
Europe slowly resumed both trade and specie payments. But 
bad harvests in England and on the Continent retarded pros- 
perity. In America, also, the return to stable business was 
slow. Droughts, hot spring weather, insects, and cold sum- 
mers, in the years from 1816 to 1819, kept farmers from 
buying new goods or paying for what they had purchased.^ 
When the eastern states were having an unstable, inflated 
period in business from 1812 to 1816, the states west of the 
Alleghenies had some silver and were fairly free from finan- 
cial troubles.^ Altho Kentucky’s only real bank had suspended 
specie payments during the war period, yet, due to good river 
trade, a rich annual catch of furs, and two good money crops 
of hemp and tobacco, she prospered better for a time than 
some of the western states. Between 1812 and 1819 more 
than forty steamboats were plying between Louisville and 
New Orleans. Trade with the East was more difiicult, but 
flatboats operated on the upper Ohio, and barter with Vir- 
ginia and East Tennessee was extensive.'^ About 1820 most 
of the steamboats in the West were owned in Kentucky, and 
the trade spirit was as high as the war spirit had been a few 
years before.® By 1812 Kentucky was sending over the moun- 
tains to the East 800,000 hogs annually, the cost of transpor- 
tation on western waters had been cut by steamboats to two- 
2 William Graham Sumner, Andrew Jackson (Boston, 1899), 151, 152. 
® Edward Channing, History of the United States of America (New York, 1921), V, 
314. 
^ Sumner, op. cit., 154. 
® General Basil W. Duke, History of the Bank of K&ntucky (Louisville, 1895), 5. 
® Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, Kentucky a Pioneer Commomvealth (Boston and New 
York, 1884), 174, 175. 
