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Indiana University 
of women for debt; also a peculiar law was enacted confining 
imprisonment for debt to the limits of each county town.^^® 
On December 17, 1821, a law forbidding any and all imprison- 
ment for debt was enacted. The federal government still al- 
lowed imprisonment, and the repeal law by the state was 
opposed by many of the creditor class.®'’ It is interesting to 
note that the United States Bank tried to imprison in Ken- 
tucky one of its debtors as late as 1822. The federal court, 
however, upheld the practice and procedure of the state’s 
courts and refused the bank’s request.'^® 
Owing to the pressure on debtors passed down from the two 
federal branch banks to the thirteen branches of the Bank 
of Kentucky and to the forty-six independent banks, failures 
among the state banks were inevitable. The “Forty Thieves”, 
as the independent banks were known, had been in bad repute 
from the time of their creation. They were now in hard 
straits and early began closing their doors. The press began 
to warn farmers against receiving their notes ; the United 
States Bank stopped accepting them; merchants, butchers, 
hotel men, even cab-drivers refused their paper in various 
parts of the state, and even counterfeiters ceased trying to 
imitate them.^^ Certainly half of all these banks were defunct 
or were winding up their affairs by the end of 1819.^- The 
feeling became general that the independent banks had not 
fulfilled the objects of their creation. The charge 
. . . that they have operated as a curse and not as a blessing on the 
state, is confessed and declared aloud by the whole country, who with one 
voice demand the repeal of their charters — and the revocation of the 
destructive powers with which they have been invested.’’® 
In January, 1820, the independent banks which had been 
only recently created to foster good times had their charters 
repealed by the legislature as a relief measure because they 
could not pay their demand notes in any sort of money the 
people would have. They were given time to wind up their 
affairs satisfactorily, but they never did.^^ The state still had 
Niles’ Register, XXIII, Supplement, 160, 161; see also Collins, History of Kentucky, 
I, 29. 
Kentucky Gazette, December 14, 1821. 
Niles’ Register, XXII, 291, 292. 
Kentucky Gazette, July 16 and August 19, 1819. 
Kerr (ed.). History of Kentucky, II, 602-606; McElroy, Kentucky in the Nation’s 
History, 382-384. 
Kentucky Gazette, editorial, January 3, 1820. 
Durrett, op. cit., 17 ; Collins, op. cit., I, 29, 
