Not only were Lexington and Louisville important towns, but Danville, the first capital of Kentucky, also possessed importance, and, indeed, had been the first of the Western towns to develop an active and distinctive social and political life.

It was in Danville that, in the years immediately preceding Kentucky's admission as a State, the Political Club met.

The membership of this club included many of the leaders Of Kentucky's intellectual life, and the record of its debates shows the keenness with which they watched the course of social and political development not only in Kentucky but in the United States.
They were men of good intelligence and trained minds, and their meetings and debates undoubtedly had a stimulating effect upon Kentucky life, though they were tainted, as were a very large number of the leading men of the same stamp elsewhere throughout the country, with the doctrinaire political notions common among those who followed the French political theorists of the day.

[Footnote: "The Political Club," by Thomas Speed, Filson Club Publications.] The Large Landowners.
Open-air Life.
Of the gentry many were lawyers, and the law led naturally to political life; but even among the gentry the typical man was still emphatically the big landowner.

The leaders of Kentucky were men who owned large estates, on which they lived in their great roomy houses.