6

Steamboats, Entertainment,
Journalism, and Culture

 

Kentuckians were garrulous and socially minded, and, on the street, outside the general store, and over the fence on the farm, they loved to talk with their neighbors about the news of the day. Newspapers were the great unifying institution, according to Richard Wade, and, since they were read by nearly everyone, nearly everyone could talk about the latest steamboat race or an unusually fast thoroughbred. Newspapers invited people to plays, concerts, and many other activities. Kentucky newspapers printed clippings from eastern journals and overflowed with world news and information about events on the Atlantic coast. They linked Kentuckians with their former lives in the East and with Europe and the world. John Bradford, an emigrant to Fayette County from Fauquier County, Virginia, was the first printer in Kentucky, publishing the first issue of the Kentucky Gazette on August 11, 1787; by 1840, the state had thirty-eight newspapers and thirty-four printing offices.¹

The most famous newspaper in Kentucky in the antebellum period was the Louisville Journal, edited by George D. Prentice, and one reason the paper attracted international attention was the eleven-year editorial war Prentice waged with his friend and political rival Shadrack Penn Jr., editor of the Louisville Public Advertiser. Many evenings after work they drank and talked politics at the same table at Walker's Saloon, but out-of-town readers of Prentice's attacks on Penn probably thought that they were bitter enemies. Penn began publishing his paper as a weekly on June 23, 1818, and, on April 4, 1826, he began publishing every day, making the Public Advertiser the first daily newspaper in Kentucky. He was an ardent Democrat, and he supported “Old Hickory” with enthusiasm. This made him a natural opponent of Prentice, who worshiped the ground on which Henry Clay walked.²

When Prentice came to Louisville and started his paper in 1830, he recognized Penn as a foil for his humor and intuitively comprehended the almost universal pleasure readers would enjoy in his attacks on Penn. Prentice referred to Penn, not as a Democrat, but as a Locofoco, the colorful name of the Democratic faction in New York that represented workers. He relentlessly and continuously twisted and turned almost every article and editorial that Penn wrote. The entertainment value rivaled that of the daily comic strips that would emerge in 1898, and people in Louisville said that they could not enjoy breakfast unless it was over that day's Louisville Journal. The quips became known as Prenticeana, and they were reprinted throughout the nation and in Europe. Prentice wrote that, when someone asked him what pen he preferred, he answered that he liked them all equally but that there was one he absolutely refused to use—the “Shadrack Penn.” He often ridiculed Penn for missing the latest scoops. “We are still without any papers from the East,” he wrote, “except such as are too old to be worth opening. We might as well look for news in the Louisville Advertiser or last year's Almanac.” He reported one day that the King of Holland and the Queen of Spain had resigned and that rumors were circulating that the Emperor of Austria and “Old Shadrack” were next.³

The most famous story arising from the editorial rivalry was the account of a practical joke that was reprinted in newspapers far and wide for years after both men were dead. According to the version in the San Francisco Bulletin, Prentice began setting his trap one day when a steamboat brought a New Orleans paper with a sensational story of a murder on the front page. He carefully stored it away in mint condition where no light would fade its ink or yellow its paper. Exactly one year later, he took it out, wrapped it in new wrapping paper and wrote on the package: “Compliments clerk of the steamer Waucousta, five days, seventy-eight hours out from New Orleans. Quickest trip on record. To Shadrach Penn, editor, Louisville Advertiser.” He gave it to a delivery boy with instructions that he was to race into Penn's office in a rush, throw the package down, and run out without a word. When Penn saw the inscription, he quickly opened the package and read the headline and first paragraph of the article on the murder. His printers had the paper ready to print, but he directed them to stop and include this story along with congratulations to the elegant and fast steamboat Waucousta for her record voyage. According to the story, when Prentice reported the deception the next day, he pointed out that the Waucousta was a small, extremely slow boat that could not have set any kind of record, and of course he howled in jubilation that the murder story was one year old. For years thereafter, according to the story, when Penn would scoop Prentice, Prentice would inquire, “Did that item come by the Waucousta?'”⁴

Prentice and his readers were sad to see the era close when Penn moved to St. Louis in 1841 in search of new opportunity. Prentice said good-bye to Penn in an editorial that declared that the only ill-will he ever had against Penn “passed out through [his] thumb and fore finger.” He wrote: “May all be well with him here and hereafter, for we should be sorry if a poor fellow whom we have been torturing eleven years in this world, were to be handed over to the tender mercies of the devil in the next. Shadrach farewell.” Penn returned for visits, and the first person he wanted to see was Prentice; he was a guest in Prentice's home whenever he was in town. When Penn died in 1846, Prentice wrote that he shed “tears, heart felt tears.”⁵

Readers of the Louisville newspapers, the Lexington Observer and Reporter, and other newspapers followed advances in the speed of travel with interest and pride; new speed records represented progress and meaningful connection with people in distant cities. Most stagecoaches in Kentucky were “elegant Concord coaches” manufactured in Concord, New Hampshire, by the Abbott-Downing Company. They held six passengers inside and one on top beside the driver, with baggage stored on top and in a compartment behind. The Concord featured leather straps wrapped around the white-oak coach, and these acted as swinging shock absorbers, reducing the effect of bumps in the road and the jerks and lurches of starting and stopping. J. Winston Coleman in Stage-Coach Days in the Blue-grass quoted a travel account of a merchant traveling the sixty-five miles from Maysville to Lexington in 1839. He was impressed that the trip was organized for speed and efficiency and that it took only nine hours. As soon as the driver would stop at a tavern, the merchant reported, hostlers would change the four horses, “bringing on fresh high-stepping spirited ones, champing their bits, apparently very anxious for a galloping start toward the next post.” When the coach arrived at the stage office in Lexington, at Bren-nan's Hotel, later the Phoenix Hotel, the man was impressed with the large crowd standing around eager for the latest newspapers from Washington and the East Coast. Travel by stagecoach from Louisville to Nashville took three days or two sixteen-hour days, and, when the Louisville and Nashville Railroad opened October 31, 1859, two passenger trains traveled each way every weekday at what seemed like lightning speed to reach their respective destinations—nine hours and sixteen minutes.⁶

Railroads provided speed and a dependable schedule, and they represented the future, but the most dramatic and significant advances in travel and transportation of freight in antebellum Kentucky were with steamboats. With the northern border on the Ohio River, the western border on the Mississippi River, and the Tennessee and other rivers flowing through the interior, Kentucky had more miles of navigable water than any of its contiguous states. Steamboats were the most important factor in the economic expansion of the trans-Appalachian West; they delivered passengers, manufactured goods, farm products, and newspapers to distant locations. They transformed Kentucky's river system into a superhighway that steadily reduced the cost of transportation and contributed to the growth of Paducah, Newport, Covington, and other cities, especially Louisville.⁷

The Falls of the Ohio at Louisville was the only major navigational barrier on the Ohio River, and, for the first thirty years of steamboat traffic, the Falls made Louisville the center of steamboat operations in the western United States. The Falls consisted of two miles of rapids falling twenty-six feet as boats moved downriver—rapids that most of the year required boats headed in either direction to dock in Louisville or its downstream port below the Falls at Portland and portage passengers and freight. For a few weeks during the spring and fall rains, there was sufficient water depth to navigate the Falls without unloading, but most of the time boats had to unload and hire a pilot to guide the empty boat through the rapids. This natural barrier created two separate river systems with Louisville as the transshipment point: New Orleans to Louisville and Louisville to Pittsburgh. Before 1830, three-fourths of the steamboats arriving in Pittsburgh had departed from Louisville. When the Louisville and Portland Canal was completed in 1830, portage continued because large steamboats were too wide to pass through the narrow locks. During the 1840s, Cincinnati rose as an industrial and commercial center, and, by 1850, it had replaced Louisville as the Ohio River transshipment center. However, because of the Falls, Louisville still dominated the trade with New Orleans. The system was fully operational by 1820, when packets—boats operating on a regular schedule—transformed Louisville into a boomtown. New warehouses went up along the waterfront in Louisville and Portland, thousands of draymen moved people and freight around the Falls, and merchants opened new businesses. Louisville developed first with commerce, but entrepreneurs quickly invested in boatyards and gave the city its first heavy industry, steamboat construction.⁸

Kentuckians identified with the steamboat industry so thoroughly that they were fascinated with the most sensational stories in newspapers before the Civil War, articles reporting the worst disasters of the era—steamboat accidents. “Only a frontier massacre could match the sudden terror, the mass slaughter, the torture, and the lurid destruction [of many accidents on the western rivers],” wrote Louis C. Hunter. Comparable to passenger airline crashes today, the catastrophes killed or injured people of all ages, men, women, and children. Steamboats were of light construction for the least water draft, so, when they crashed or exploded, they splintered; when they ignited with a fire on board, they burned like kindling. Mrs. Catherine Hunt of Lexington traveled on a steamboat to St. Louis in 1831, and she wrote: “When I look around me and think that only a plank separates me from Eternity, Oh how I shudder.” Accidents dramatized the fact that steamboats were not built to last—the average life span was five years. Most accidents were caused by one of four problems: snags in the river, fires, collisions, or tremendous explosions of the high-pressure steam boilers. Explosions were the worst—with a sudden booming sound, an exploding boiler would cast a huge mushroom cloud into the sky hundreds of yards high. Flying through the air and landing in the river in a radius of 250 yards were firewood, crushed kegs and other pieces of freight, splinters of the boat, and human bodies and body parts. Explosions were so powerful that bodies flew through the air and crashed through the walls of houses on the shore and sometimes all the way through a house into the yard beyond. Survivors in the river clung to pieces of wreckage and waited to be rescued. Passengers were “scalded, crushed, torn, mangled and scattered in every possible direction,” a reporter wrote of one explosion.⁹

Steam-engine technology was new, and sometimes boilers exploded when no negligence was involved, but the first question after an explosion was whether the captain had recklessly endangered his boat by racing. Sometimes when another boat came alongside, the temptation to race was great, and the passengers would chant and cheer and challenge the captain to go to maximum speed. It was entertaining but also part of business in that the winner would arrive at the next landing first and collect the passengers and freight. The captain would order firemen to add pine knots and rosin to the wood in the furnace to produce greater pressure and speed. “We have become the most careless, reckless, headlong people on the face of the earth,” an observer wrote. “‘Go ahead’ is our maxim and pass-word, and we do go ahead with a vengeance, regardless of consequences and indifferent to the value of human life.” Congress refrained from regulating steamboats until a public outcry arose following two particularly devastating accidents. In 1837, the Ben Sherrod, a packet owned by a group in Louisville, was steaming north from New Orleans toward Louisville when, near Natchez, the captain began racing with another boat. He ordered rosin and pine knots, and in the excitement the firemen may have acted carelessly because sparks from one of the furnaces ignited a fire in a large stack of wood. The fire spread, and the two boilers exploded, killing over 150 passengers and crew.¹⁰

Safe operation required that engineers open the safety valves when the boat stopped to prevent an explosion from the buildup of excessive pressure in the boilers. However, late in the afternoon of April 25, 1838, when the Moselle left the landing in Cincinnati and went upstream a short distance for passengers, Captain Perrin directed his engineers not to open the valves during the stop. He wanted to entertain his 280 passengers and the people on the shore in Cincinnati, Newport, and Covington by racing away at great speed. As soon as he cast off and straightened in the river, three of the four boilers exploded; he and many others were thrown onto the shore and killed—over 150 people on board lost their lives.¹¹

Concerned citizens reacted by organizing investigating committees and public meetings that accused steamboat crews of carelessness. Congress broke with the tradition of laissez faire and enacted the Steamboat Act of 1828, the first federal law regulating steamboats. The act required that engineers open safety valves when stopped and authorized the appointment of federal inspectors to enforce the new requirement that steamboats have a federal license. The law set a precedent for regulation, but the death toll increased nevertheless; in the twelve months between July 1, 1850, and June 30, 1851, 628 persons lost their lives on steamboats in the western rivers and 67 on inland waterways in the East. Finally, the Steamboat Act of 1852 established the maximum pressure allowed, required tests of boilers, and required licenses for engineers and pilots. The authority of federal inspectors was increased in that they could refuse licenses, revoke licenses, and order repairs. When the act went into effect on January 1, 1853, the number of fatal accidents declined immediately, and the accident rate declined by nearly 75 percent between 1853 and 1859.¹²

Accidents rarely occurred when operators cooperated with federal inspectors, but, during the Civil War, the atmosphere of emergency led to negligence and an increase in accidents. Indeed, at the end of the war, on April 27, 1865, the Sultana had the worst steamboat accident in history. The vessel was certified for 376 passengers and left New Orleans with about 100. Then at Vicksburg a large crowd of discharged Union soldiers anxious to return home gathered at the wharf. The captain accepted 2,100, some of whom had been imprisoned in Andersonville, along with about 200 civilians, bringing the number on board to about 2,300, over six times the legal limit. Seven miles south of Memphis at 2:00 A.M., a strained boiler exploded, and about 1,700 passengers lost their lives.¹³

Increased safety was a sign of progress, and, meanwhile, the public celebrated the dramatic increases in speed. Designers increased the size and number of engines and boilers, and people lauded the decrease in time for the upriver voyage of fourteen hundred miles from New Orleans to Louisville. The travel time decreased from thirty days in 1820 to six in 1850; the average speed for upstream travel increased from four miles per hour to ten. When a new, faster boat appeared, sometimes the captain would schedule a trip with limited stops to set a new record. These trips were called trial trips, fast runs, or brag runs, but these were euphemisms for races against time or another boat. Under the Steamboat Act of 1852, a captain could have his license revoked if an inspector had evidence that he had raced to the point of recklessness, but, when captains raced, they claimed that they were staying within the limits of safety under the federal law. The greatest race from New Orleans to Louisville—the one that set the record that still stands today—was between the Eclipse and the A. L. Shotwell, two of the most beautiful and powerful steamboats ever built. The race created tremendous excitement in Louisville and Kentucky because the Louisville and New Albany, Indiana, community identified with both boats as their own. Residents in the area owned both. The A. L. Shotwell was built in New Albany, a steamboat manufacturing center across the river from Louisville, and the Eclipse was also constructed in New Albany and decorated and outfitted in Portland. Both captains were native Kentuckians. The finish line of the race was the wharf at Portland. Headlines called it “The Greatest Race on Record.” In May and June 1853, it was one of the most popular newspaper stories in the nation and, along the western rivers, a favorite topic of conversation.¹⁴

The Eclipse was designed to be the largest, most luxurious, and fastest boat on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers—she was meant to eclipse all others. When she steamed out of the boatyard in January 1852, she appeared, indeed, to eclipse all others. She had “probably the largest engines on the western rivers” before the Civil War, and few later boats equaled her size and power. Her hull was 360 feet long, when most boats were less than 250 feet in length; her two paddle wheels were huge at forty-one feet in diameter; she had eight large boilers, and she cost more than any steamboat up to that time—$150,000. Luxurious steamboats were called floating palaces, and the Eclipse was as beautiful as an expensive hotel. The main cabin featured Oriental tapestries and paintings; the men's lounge on one end had a gilt statue of Andrew Jackson; the women's area on the other end had a statue of Henry Clay. The forty-eight bridal chambers were elaborately outfitted, and a reporter wrote that the only way to appreciate the boat was to “go through her gorgeous cabins, visit her nursery, her servants' rooms, her play ground for children, her pantries, her bath rooms, barber shop, and other departments.” The New Orleans Picayune recommended the Eclipse as one of the best, fastest, and safest boats on the rivers. A passenger on one of her trips from New Orleans to Louisville declared that the passengers were royally entertained with music and dancing and other activities. “To appreciate such a trip,” he wrote, “you must take a turn in person on this floating palace. There is no luxury or accommodation of a first-class hotel but what she can furnish, and the servants are attentive, tidy and respectful.” Captain E. T. Sturgeon, one of the principal owners, was widely known for being careful—he had been navigating for fourteen years and had never lost a life.¹⁵

The A. L. Shotwell was outstanding as well; she was smaller than the Eclipse but larger than most boats; she was also luxurious and built for speed. Her hull was 310 feet long, and she had two large engines and two thirty-seven-foot-diameter paddle wheels. Her engines and boilers were smaller than those on the Eclipse, but, since she was smaller, she had the potential to move as fast as the Eclipse. She floated out of the boatyard in New Albany in December 1852, and the Louisville Journal declared that she towered “above all the rest, like Diana among her nymphs.” She had a roomy, elegant cabin with decorative columns and velvet carpet on the floor; her staterooms had spring mattresses, linen sheets, and satin drapes. “Mr. Shotwell has shown his usual liberality in presenting to the boat a beautiful service of silver and a splendid piano,” wrote a journalist. A traveler quoted in the New Orleans Picayune wrote: “If any man wants to be well treated, let him travel on the A. L. Shotwell. She is a palace in every sense of the word.” During the boat's fourth month of operation, the Louisville Journal proclaimed her “one of the finest, largest, swiftest, and most profitable boats in the New Orleans trade.” Captain Burt L. Elliott was widely known as a “beloved” gentleman with a lengthy and successful career commanding steamboats.¹⁶

The Eclipse and the Shotwell were both so outstanding that it was no surprise when their representatives announced the race. They agreed not to move side by side but to make a fast run starting three days apart—this would deflect criticism that they were racing recklessly. Sturgeon was to start first, and he had the newspapers in New Orleans and Louisville announce that this would be a fast trip. He notified passengers who had booked passage earlier that they could cancel their reservations, but apparently none did. Nevertheless, an anonymous letter to the editor of the New Orleans Picayune condemned the race as mad and reckless. It would, the writer charged, jeopardize hundreds of lives “to gratify the paltry ambition of making a few hours quicker time.” Interests for both boats agreed to fill the berths with passengers but take no freight, and they agreed to limit the number of stops and make advance arrangements for wooding with “the least possible delay” by bringing alongside barges and boats loaded with wood without stopping.¹⁷

The Eclipse started first, and a large crowd gathered at the levee in New Orleans early Saturday morning, May 14, 1853. The announced departure time was 9:30 A.M., and the excitement was intense when Captain Sturgeon finally ordered her cables cast loose. The crowd gave a deafening cheer, cannon boomed, and people waved flags, hats, and handkerchiefs and shouted hurrah. Straightening the boat in the river, Sturgeon ordered her cannon to fire, and the large paddle wheels turned; the great race was under way. Betting had begun months before when the race was first announced, and southern gentlemen who loved gambling on elections, horses, and card games were eager to bet on this famous steamboat race. Wagering was heavy in Louisville and all along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers; the New Orleans Bulletin estimated that forty thousand dollars was risked in New Orleans and fifteen thousand in Cincinnati. When the Eclipse reached Natchez and Vicksburg, timekeepers on the wharfboats told telegraph operators that she was running very fast, and newspapers reported that her times thus far were the fastest on record.¹⁸

Meanwhile, on the streets of New Orleans and Louisville, the race was the favorite topic of conversation. When a man asked his friend about his wife, the reply was, “The Eclipse is making glorious time!” When someone asked about the health of an acquaintance, he received the answer, “I'll bet the Shotwell beats her time.” Business discussions ended with, “I'll bet you the Eclipse beats the Shotwell,” or vice versa. “At breakfast table, dinner table, and tea table, [the race] was the absorbing subject of discourse, and boilers, machinery, hull, keeps, steam and fuel were discussed to the exclusion of everything else,” one man wrote. An excited young man began a letter to his sweetheart: “My Dear Eclipse.” People talked about how the Eclipse had a piston break down south of Natchez and stopped forty minutes for repairs and how, when the boat arrived in Natchez, the shore was lined with a large crowd of people waving hats and yelling “Huzza!” The news circulated that among the dense crowd on the wharf at Memphis was a newly married young couple going north on their honeymoon. The young man came on board to arrange passage, but after a quick stop of only six minutes the boat departed, leaving the bride on the shore. The young man begged Captain Sturgeon to turn back, but Sturgeon told him he could disembark at Paducah and return to his wife on the next boat headed south.¹⁹

Newspapers in Louisville announced that the Eclipse would arrive at about sunset on the fourth day, Wednesday, May 18, and by 7:00 P.M. nearly everyone was gathering along the waterfront at Portland and across the river on the Indiana shore. At about 7:30 P.M., there was still enough daylight to see black smoke rising above the trees down the river, and then one could see the glow of sparks trailing behind the two tall stacks of the magnificent boat. She came into full view, and the crowd saw the lights in her cabins reflected on the river and the power of her movement as she cut through the water. Sturgeon ordered the cannon to fire, signaling the end of the run, and announcing that the Eclipse had come home. The people on both sides of the river cheered at the top of their voices.

The Shotwell had started from New Orleans the day before, and attention turned to her. Reports came from Shotwell timekeepers on the lower Mississippi River that she was making a very fast run as well. At Natchez, she was winning by twenty-seven minutes, and, at Vicksburg, Captain Burt L. Elliott did not stop. He saluted the crowd on the shore with a blast from the boat's cannon and steamed on up the river. At Memphis, he continued at full steam and had the clerk throw a bottle overboard with two New Orleans newspapers and the note: “Time out: two days, ten hours—had a strong head wind last night and to-day—also the day we started.” Word passed on the streets of Memphis: “Shotwell ahead one minute!” When Captain Elliott was reported ahead by twenty-one minutes at Paducah, betting increased to a frenzy. Friends of the Eclipse remained in the wagering and were cheered by the report that the Shotwell ran into a fog bank near Henderson, ran aground, and lost one hour and thirty-five minutes.²⁰

On Saturday evening, May 21, a greater crowd than before gathered in Portland and on the Indiana side of the river to witness the finish of the race. Portland was “literally crammed with eager faces, on the qui vive.” Clearly, the Eclipse had made the fastest run from New Orleans in history, and now the Shotwell might arrive home even faster. The Shotwell came into view, her cannon fired, the crowd cheered, and it became obvious that in racing second—and in the absence of official timekeepers and judges—the Shot-well gained an advantage. The timekeepers on the wharf at Portland were Shotwell timekeepers, and they declared that their boat had won by one, two, or five minutes. A correspondent for the Arkansas Whig summarized the essence of the problem for bettors: “Shotwell just arrived. She claims to have beat the Eclipse five minutes. Undecided.” Captain Sturgeon and the owners of the Eclipse refused to concede defeat and claimed to have won by nineteen to twenty-three minutes. A few days later, both captains published lengthy reports in the newspapers, each with over twenty signed affidavits certifying departure and arrival times and times when the boat arrived at points on the rivers and claiming to prove that his boat won. They disagreed by several minutes on departure and arrival times, each giving the advantage to his boat. The editors of the New Orleans Picayune declared the race essentially a tie: “We have two first rate steamers; the difference between which is reduced down to minutes in a run of 1,400 miles.” Apparently few of the wagers were paid, and it seems impossible today to determine the winner.²¹

However, as far as a group of steamboat men in St. Louis was concerned, the Shotwell had run the fastest to the one-thousand-mile point at Cairo, Illinois. They were interested in this part of the race because they had invested in and celebrated the previous record to that point established in 1844 by the J. M. White, based in St. Louis. They declared that the Shotwell reached Cairo about three hours faster than the White and a few minutes faster than the Eclipse, setting a new record. Captain Sturgeon and his timekeepers disagreed, but the group in St. Louis invited Captain Elliott to a victory celebration and presented him a magnificent pair of elk antlers with a silver plate engraved, “Take me if you can.” Their spokesman said that this was an “emblem of speed,” declaring the Shotwell the successor to the J. M. White. Elliott said that he was honored to receive the horns worn so long by the White with no rival. “The motto they bear,” he said, “warns us that they are ours only so long as we can honorably sustain our present reputation for unrivalled speed.” He said that, when another boat beat his time to Cairo, he would transfer the horns without a murmur. The race to Louisville was never run again, but in July 1870, when the Robert E. Lee raced the Natchez from New Orleans to St. Louis, the Robert E. Lee received replicas of the elk antlers for setting a new record to Cairo.²²

Kentucky had attracted national attention with its floating palaces, and the Kentucky frontier came into the limelight for historians in 1895 when Frederick Jackson Turner, a young history professor at the University of Wisconsin, presented, in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” his frontier thesis, asserting that the frontier experience made Americans unique. Describing Kentucky as the first western frontier, he wrote: “Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file—the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer—and the frontier has passed by.” Turner theorized that the area of free land in the West and its settlement allowed people to start over with greater opportunity and that, therefore, Americans became individualistic, practical, optimistic, and freedom loving. Today, historians consider the frontier thesis simplistic, but Michael A. Flannery has argued that Turner still influences the interpretation of early Kentucky history and contributes to the myth that antebellum Kentuckians were provincial, narrow-minded backcountry folk without much appreciation for culture or education.²³

Flannery pointed out that, when Turner and his students emphasized the egalitarian characteristic of frontier life—when they assumed that nearly everyone approached the starting line in new communities with equality—they overlooked the stratification of frontier towns. Class structures developed very quickly, and, while class lines were not as hardened as they were on the Atlantic coast and one could move up more easily, there still were classes, and the upper class on the frontier had leisure time to read, attend concerts and plays, and attend university. Flannery and others have demonstrated that Kentucky settlers were far from provincial; they identified with Philadelphia and London and attempted very quickly to bring European culture alive in Lexington and Frankfort and in small towns and county seats throughout the state. Kentucky is a land along the river and between the rivers, and Kentuckians thought globally in terms of the world market—the waters of every one of Kentucky's rivers flowed eventually into the Mississippi River, which flowed to New Orleans, the entrepôt to the world.²⁴

Even though there was a class structure, it was amicable, and several social activities brought people from different classes together and encouraged unity. For example, shopping at the general store on the Kentucky frontier and in antebellum Kentucky was an entertainment that brought together slaves and day laborers, men and women, and persons of all ages—they mingled and talked with each other as they made selections and paid for their purchases. Nevertheless, distinctions remained in what different customers could afford. Upper-class women purchased ceramic tableware, silk textiles, pewter, glass, and cutlery, while slaves and laborers could afford only cheap cotton cloth and tea. Elizabeth A. Perkins researched the 1796 daybook of the Lexington store of John Wesley and Abijah Hunt in Lexington, other retail-store ledgers, probate inventories, and other documents and wrote a valuable analysis of consumerism on the Kentucky frontier. She concluded that, in the earliest days on the Kentucky frontier, consumers identified with global culture and with the culture they left behind in the eastern United States. Some brought bowls and cups and other items with them, and on the frontier they purchased printed calico from India, coffee from the Caribbean, and imported items from Great Britain. “Shopping offered settlers on the frontier an exciting glimpse of the outside world,” Perkins wrote. “Circling the customer on plank shelves, consumer goods from around the world titillated the senses and fired the imagination.”²⁵

Richard C. Wade studied the class structure on the frontier and concluded that there were two frontiers, urban and rural, with the urban frontier identifying more with European culture, setting the tone of society, and experiencing more culture than rural areas. Flannery suggested that frontier cities were more powerful in transferring culture to the hinterlands than has been generally recognized. Between 1792 and 1859, the Kentucky General Assembly chartered sixty-four libraries, lyceums, or literary societies all over the state, from Paducah to Prestonsburg, from Covington to Glasgow. Tiny Rabbit Hash, with only sixty-seven residents, opened a public library. Wade wrote that, on the urban frontier, merchants mostly composed the upper class, and the only people with true leisure were the wives and daughters of wealthy merchants. Next were the professionals—physicians, lawyers, professors, teachers, ministers, and journalists. Wage earners were next, then transients, and, last, free African Americans and slaves. Urban society was not egalitarian, but there was much friendly contact, much fraternization.²⁶

Theater came early to the Kentucky frontier, two years before statehood, and its story confirms the reality of a class structure. In April 1790, Transylvania University students in Lexington presented a tragedy and a comedy as part of their annual examination, and several students made speeches. In 1799, on a stage in the Fayette County Courthouse, Transylvania students presented The Busy Body, followed by the afterpiece, Love a la Mode. Regular performances began on October 12, 1808, when umbrella maker and brewer Luke Usher opened the New Theater on the second floor of his new brick brewery on High Street. This construction of the first playhouse in Kentucky testified to the stratification of society, but all classes were invited to purchase tickets and share the experience, in different sections and at different prices. The theater seated five to six hundred people, and box tickets for the upper class sold for seventy-five cents. The pit was on the floor in front of the stage; for fifty cents, critics, journalists, and laborers could sit near the actors and shout at them and lead the audience in hurrahs. Later, in 1833, rules of conduct were published for a theater in Louisville, and they applied to the men in the pit. They were to take off their hats, refrain from smoking “segars” in the house, not knock sticks together for noise, and avoid loud talking. In the Lexington theater, servants were required to sit in the gallery, and their tickets were thirty-seven and a half cents. The first performance was Lovers' Vows in five acts and the brief drama As It Should Be.²⁷

The New Theater was quite successful, and in 1810 Usher divided some of the boxes to sell more tickets; he installed a new stage curtain with a painted scene of the American navy in action in the Tripolitan War. That same year Shakespeare came to Kentucky when Usher presented Macbeth. The audience approved, and Shakespeare became one of the most popular playwrights in Lexington during the next decade. Usher's actors were amateurs and members of the Lexington Thespian Society; their acting was inferior to that of the stage stars in the East and in Europe. One famous actor back East, when invited to come to Kentucky, replied: “No, I've no desire to be devoured by savages.” Was he thinking of wild animals, perhaps, or the men in the pit?²⁸

West T. Hill revealed that, between 1790 and 1820, there were nearly six hundred productions in Kentucky and that most were by professional actors who first arrived in Lexington in 1815. By then, Luke Usher had opened theaters in Louisville and Frankfort and made the key decision to employ Samuel Drake, an actor-manager in Albany, New York, to come to Lexington with his troupe of professionals and tour the Kentucky circuit. Usher wanted Drake to perform in Lexington in the fall, in Frankfort in the winter for the legislature, and in Louisville each spring. Drake was an outstanding actor, and his troupe included his three sons and two daughters; they were accomplished as well—not as much as the stars in Philadelphia—but well above the amateur level. Other troupes came, including Sol Smith's, and Smith and others went on the road in Kentucky, taking drama to small towns and villages for single performances. Smith packed his scenery and wardrobe in trunks, loaded the trunks in two wagons, and entertained in Paris, Richmond, London, Georgetown, Nicholasville, Maysville, Harrods-burg, Versailles, Shelbyville, and other Kentucky towns.²⁹

Amateur thespians opened Louisville's first theater on Jefferson Street in 1808; in 1815, Drake brought professional actors for their first appearance. In 1818, he purchased the theater, renovated it, and opened it as the City Theatre. A visitor to Louisville attended a performance of Wives as They Were and Maids as They Are by Drake's troupe in the City Theatre in 1819 and reported that Samuel Drake gave a fine performance in the featured play, a tragedy. However, some of the other cast members seemed to be “made of wood and more like a gate-post than an animated being.” This turned out all positive because, when these actors said their lines, it turned the tragedy into a comedy and gave the audience many laughs. When Drake was in town, the theater was all the talk: “Have you seen Cinderella?” people asked. Theater patrons memorized the show's tunes and sang them walking along the streets. Shadrach Penn wrote his own reviews, and, after attending The Hunchback in May 1838, he asked: “Did you see Ellen Tree last Thursday night? If you did not, you have lost a pleasure that cannot be expressed. Her acting is beyond all praise—it is nature itself.”³⁰

Comedic actor Thomas D. Rice performed at Drake's theater, and one day he saw an elderly African American man working at a livery stable and singing a song that included the words “Jump Jim Crow.” It had a lively beat, and, when Rice expanded the lyrics and worked it into his closing number as a song and dance, the audience shouted for encore after encore. Soon Jump Jim Crow became a national hit, and audiences demanded that he sing it every time he performed. He would, sometimes with words adapted to the occasion. At the Adelphi Theater in Louisville in August 1834, he was in the cast of a benefit for his fellow thespian Charles Muzzy, and he sang:

I've staid for Muzzy's Benefit,
I want you all to know,
And the way I wheel about tonight,
I tell you won't be slow,
So wheel about, turn about and jump Jim Crow.³¹

The song had nothing to do with segregation, but later southern segregation laws were called Jim Crow laws. Few women attended the theater in the early years, but in 1833 in Louisville several upper-class women attended.³²

Interest in music developed about the same time as interest in drama, and local amateur musicians sang and played instruments between acts in the theater and sometimes in feature plays. Given the traditional image of frontier society as wild and crude, it seems incongruous that on November 12, 1817, Beethoven's First Symphony, Simfonia con minuetto, was performed in Lexington, apparently the third time it was performed in America. The concert was at half past six on Wednesday evening in the assembly room of Sanford Keen's tavern. The orchestra and singers also presented numbers by Mozart, Haydn, Viotti, and Kreuzer. Anton Philip Heinrich directed the concert and performed on the piano for at least one selection. He was a native of Bohemia recently arrived in the city and had brought the Beethoven music with him. Tickets were one dollar, and they were available at bookstores and Wenzel's Music Store as well as at the tavern. The concert was very well received; Heinrich soon left for Bardstown, where he composed; he later moved to Louisville.³³

The fact that a first-rate classical musician from Europe such as Heinrich directed an orchestra of amateur Kentucky musicians in this beautiful classical music demonstrates that high culture lived in frontier Kentucky. Serious Lexington amateurs had been associating and giving concerts since 1805, three years before Luke Usher opened his theater. The first concert, sponsored by the state's first musical society, the Kentucky Music Society, was in the two-hundred-seat ballroom of Robert Bradley's tavern on Short Street. Interest in meeting and presenting concerts ebbed and flowed through 1840, and every few years a new music society would form and then disband. After the Kentucky Music Society discontinued, there was the Handel and Haydn Society, then the Harmonic Society, then a group called the Musical Amateurs. Meanwhile, as Joy Carden discovered in her pathbreaking research, the musical renaissance remained steady in Lexington and spread throughout Kentucky. She found that Lexington had fifty-six concerts between 1805 and 1840 and that residents supported music teachers, music stores, and piano manufacturers, who sold pianos made in Kentucky and London, England, in every part of the state. German immigrant Wilhem Iucho, church organist for Christ Church Episcopal, taught, sold music and instruments, and composed. He wrote The Kentucky Central March and Quick Step for a Whig barbecue in Boyle County and The Ashland Quick Step for a rally by the Clay Club of Lexington. In Louisville, in 1850, there were thirty-six piano makers, three music publishers, nine music stores, and thirty music teachers, and Peters, Webb and Company, one of the piano makers, also manufactured organs.³⁴

Newspapers published advertisements in the 1790s of such books for sale by merchants as Paradise Lost, Tom Jones, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and David Hume's History of England. In 1802, Joseph Charless opened the first bookstore, and others followed, stimulating the Lexington merchant William Leavy to recall: “Perhaps nothing illustrates more the rise and progress of Lexington and its vicinity in its society and wealth than the rise of the Book Business here.” Further evidence that Lexington had a reading population was that residents collected five hundred dollars to open the first public library in 1796, a library that by 1815 had two thousand books. By 1850, Kentucky had fifty-one public libraries and forty-five special libraries at universities and other institutions, including the Kentucky Historical Society, organized in 1836.³⁵

Kentucky's public school system began in 1838 and became adequate ten years later, but by 1840 the state had 116 private academies and grammar schools, 43 more than Ohio. The teenaged Ulysses S. Grant left his Ohio home to attend Maysville Seminary during the 1836-1837 academic season. Harriette Holly, daughter of Horace and Mary Austin Holley, studied history, rhetoric, drawing, dancing, and piano at the outstanding Lexington Female Academy. John Wesley Hunt and his wife, Catherine, enrolled two of their daughters in Mary Beck's Academy for Young Ladies in Lexington, a school that included music and “an English classical education.” Churches usually had members from several classes, which helped soften class lines. Some upper-class individuals regarded Baptists and Methodists with disdain after Cane Ridge, but this did not prevent them from seeking converts among the wage-earning class. And sometimes it worked the other way, as when Pastor William M. Pratt baptized John Hunt Morgan's young brother Thomas in the First Baptist Church of Lexington. Pratt wrote in his diary: “No more members of his family Christian. Quite a proud aristocratic family & I hope his example may be a blessing to them all.”³⁶

“The freemen of this Commonwealth shall be armed and disciplined for its defense,” proclaimed the first state constitution. Only ministers were excluded, but state laws added a list of others, including professors, jailors, printers, and the speaker of the House of Representatives. Members of a militia company elected their own officers, and they nearly always chose someone from the upper class, if possible. The militia expressed civic values, represented states' rights, and enabled the militiaman to identify with the glory of the military renown of Kentucky. “Populist in nature,” wrote Mary Ellen Rowe, “yet supporting the existing social hierarchy by its structure, the militia embodied the republicanism of the new nation.” In his novel Lonz Powers; or, The Regulators (1850), James Weir of Owensboro described a militia muster when the men came together for a day of training. Many men brought their wives and children, and it was a merry holiday with horse racing, wrestling, boxing, and target shooting. At the entrance to the field, merchants sold cider from barrels and cakes from baskets, and candidates mingled and shook everyone's hand until the fife-and-drum corps called the men to form ranks in the field. There, colonels, majors, captains, and privates “mingled together in a confused mass,” shouting, talking, and laughing. Finally, the officers organized the men into companies for review; later in the day, the training climaxed with a mock battle. “Every man,” Rowe concluded, “from the gentleman officer who commanded the unit to the servant who tended his horse, had a place in the militia unit as he had a place in his community. Each reinforced the other, and militia service remained an essential test of a man's status in his town and county.”³⁷

Today, with all the argument over and revision of the frontier thesis, it is easy to see why Turner considered Kentucky an ideal model. Today, after a tremendous quantity of solid historical research and brilliant writing, it is clear that the frontier contributed to democracy in politics, opportunity in economic life, and a large measure of unifying socialization. Lacy K. Ford wrote: “Informal stump meetings, door-to-door canvassing, barbecues, and the politicization of the militia musters, all brought de facto democracy to the politics of the early republic.” However, the most glaring omission of the frontier thesis was that it ignored the identification of Kentucky pioneers with their life back in the East and with England and the world. They came to Kentucky for a better life, and that included participation in European and global culture and identification with the society left behind on the Atlantic coast.³⁸