@Book{ friend1999,
    editor = {Craig Thompson Friend},
    title = {The Buzzel about Kentuck: Settling the Promised Land},
    address = {Lexington, Ky.},
    publisher = {University Press of Kentucky},
    year = 1999,
}

Friend chapter

“‘Work & Be Rich’: Economy and Culture on the Bluegrass Farm,” 126-151

p. 127-8: immigrants in 1790s and early 1800s motivated by “hope of sustaining wife and children” and bequeathing property, which was harder to do in older states. Friend calls it “the crucial incentive for relocating into Kentucky and retarded quick out-migrations,” citing several works on kinship along the frontier

p. 128-129: unequal land distribution; by 1800, fewer than half household heads owned land

p. 130:

Familial and communal obligations required older residents to pass property on to the next generation. Land, therefore, held a premarket value, a communal significance integral to the stability of society. Yet, because land early became a commodity exchange by profiteering speculators, property also took on a monetary association that could not be ignored. In a society where less than half of the householders owned land, the need for capital to purchase land and create a farm compromised aspirations to live in self-sufficiency.

p. 132: “The pursuit of land forced all settlers into a quest for capital.”

p. 132: example of a landless family that bought two slaves to labor for them

p. 137: by 1800, 25.2 percent of households owned slaves

p. 138: market orientation of slaveholders

Aron chapter

Stephen Aron, “‘The Poor Men to Starve’: The Lives and Times of Workingmen in Early Lexington” (p. 175-193)

p. 178: notes early Lexington’s reputation as the “Philadelphia of the West”

p. 181-182: notes the decline of Lexington manufacturing after the depression of 1819, compounded by the rise of Louisville: “the proliferation of steamboats on western waters after the War of 1812 doomed inland Lexington’s reign as the entrepot of the Ohio Valley.”

p. 184-185: examines the final settlement of the slavery debates in 1792 and 1799, and offers “hiring out” as one explanation of why even opponents of slave labor ultimately capitulated: “These short-term arrangements permitted small farmers and even tenants to take advantage of otherwise unaffordable slave labor. By turning unfree labor from competitor to contributor, hiring out won slavery support from nonslaveholders and gained the system a more secure base” (185). In manufacturing jobs, hiring out also “offered opportunities to slaves, for whom the experience sometimes brought ‘a taste of freedom’” (185)—though very few, because repression and constraint of free blacks increased between 1800 and 1820.

Eslinger chapter

Ellen Eslinger, “The Beginnings of Afro-American Christianity Among Kentucky Baptists” (p. 198-215)

Discusses how western Baptist churches, like Virginia counterparts, often included black members and offered them institutional structures in which rights unavailable in the civil sphere (making complaints about mistreatment, settling intra-community disputes) might be made available, though she cautions against an overly rosy view of what membership in Baptist churches afforded to enslaved people.