"Along with other social forces peculiar to the age, it produced in Kentucky a kind of farmer the like of which will never appear again. He had the aristocratic virtues: highest notions of personal liberty and personal honor, a fine especial scorn of anything that was little, mean, cowardly. As an agriculturist he was not driving or merciless or grasping; the rapid amassing of wealth was not among his passions, the contention of splendid living not among his thorns. To a certain carelessness of riches he added a certain profuseness of expenditure; and indulgent towards his own pleasures, towards others, his equals or dependents, he bore himself with a spirit of kindness and magnanimity. Intolerant of tyranny, he was no tyrant. To say of such a man, as Jefferson said of every slave-holder, that he lived in the perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions and unremitting despotism, and in the exaction of the most degrading submission, was to pronounce judgment hasty and unfair. "Rather did Mrs. Stowe, while not blind to his faults, discern his virtues when she made him, embarrassed by death, exclaim: "If anybody had said to me that I should sell Tom down south to one of those rascally traders, I should have said, 'Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?'"[396] FOOTNOTES: [356] _Lexington Gazette_, August 23, 1803. [357] _Louisville Public Advertiser_, July 10, 1824. [358] _Louisville Weekly Journal_, October 15, 1845. [359] _Ibid._, October 22, 1845. [360] _Ibid._, September 27, 1848. [361] _Ibid._, May 16, 1849. [362] _Ibid._, December 10, 1851. [363] _Ibid._, December 22, 1852. [364] _Lexington Gazette_, April 12, 1806. [365] The best contemporary treatment of this subject in general is by Dr. R. J. Spurr--the sole printed text being in Perrin's _History of Bourbon County_, pp. 59-60. [366] Buckingham, _Eastern and Western States_, Vol. 3: 41. [367] _Louisville Public Advertiser_, August 11, 1824. [368] _Lexington Gazette_, June 14, 1803. [369] _Lexington Intelligencer_, July 7, 1838. [370] Perrin (Bourbon County), p. 60. [371] _Harper's Magazine_, October, 1884, pp. 730-738. [372] Clarke, _Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke_, p. 104. Rothert, _History of Muhlenburg County_, p. 104. Perrin (Bourbon County), p. 60. [373] _Address to the People of Kentucky_, p. 8. [374] _Presbyterian Herald_, April 16, 1846. See especially the editorial and articles in the issue of October 4, 1849. [375] Rothert, _History of Muhlenburg County_, p. 340. [376] Henson, _Life of Josiah Henson_, pp. 26-27. [377] _Louisville Weekly Journal_, March 27, 1850. [378] Little, L. P., _Ben Hardin, his Times and Contemporaries_, pp. 544-545. [379] Allen, James Lane, _Blue Grass Region of Kentucky_, pp. 77-78. [380] Robertson's _Autobiography_, pp. 124-125. [381] Shaler's _Autobiography_, pp. 57-58.