necked BY N. S. SHALER с ORK BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY MON York Public Library, 135th Street Crunch. 103 West 1350 сор CIRC 1854 THE NEW YORK 650143 ASTOR, LENOX AND R 1913 L Copyright, 1884, All rights reserved. MEM AOBK The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company. 578 976 S PREFACE. THE following account of the Commonwealth of Kentucky is designed to give the general reader a short story of the development of that State. The reader will kindly observe that it is not entitled a history; the writer desires to disclaim the intention of writing anything that could be fairly termed a history of his native State. Such a work would, when properly done, require the space of several such volumes and a large amount of special research, which it has not been in the power of the present writer to give to his task; it is the main aim of this little book to set forth the history of the motives that have led the people in the shaping of their Common wealth, using only so much of the incidents of their life as seemed necessary to make these motives clear. Fortunately for this work, previous writers have made extensive and generally careful compilations, which give fuller annals of the Commonwealth than have been secured for any other State, except, perhaps, for Massachusetts. Chief among these is Collins's Historical Sketches of Kentucky, entitled "His |