REVOLUTIONARY SOLDIERS IN KENTUCKY.

Lewis Collins

KENTUCKY owed most of her remarkable intellectual development, at an early day in her history, to the fact that at the close of the Revolutionary war in 1781 many of the most intellectual and cultivated of the officers and soldiers in that war from the states of Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, being unsettled in their homes and business by its great duration, privations, and calamities, sought new homes in the then richest land in the known world. Thus, the times and the country itself, the very life of hardship, self-denial, and self-dependence, combined to make a race seldom equalled in the world for strength of intellect and will, physical and moral courage, personal prowess and personal endurance. Never did a population so small in numbers embrace so many who were giants in intellect, giants in daring, and all but giants in physical proportions.

The following list of Revolutionary soldiers, many of them officers, who were still living in Kentucky in 1840, nearly sixty years after that soldierlife had closed, will show how the remarkable healthfulness of the climate and the simple and steady habits of those men and their widows conduced to long life. And what is still more remarkable than the great age attained by them, is that, even at that great age, over two-thirds (nearly three-fourths) of them were still the heads of families, and themselves housekeepers, not content to live with, much less be dependent upon, their children or others; so strangely and strongly and sternly was the spirit of personal independence implanted in their natures by their very mode of life.

But this list, remarkable as it is for showing how many Revolutionary soldiers emigrated to Kentucky and were still living and citizens thereof in 1840, contains the names of probably less than one-third of those who removed to Kentucky. Until about 1830, the pension laws embraced only the permanently wounded and invalid soldiers. Many refused a pension altogether, declaring they could support themselves, and would not seem dependent for even a portion of their bread upon a country whose liberties they had fought to obtain, and were willing to fight again to preserve. And many died, or fell victims to Indian vengeance, in the long interval from 1780 to 1814, and from 1814 to 1840. A few whose names are in the list, it is evident from their age, were too young to be in the Revolutionary war, except as drummers or wagonboys; while a few others were probably in the Indian wars soon after the Revolution. The figures indicate their age, in 1840.

Collins, History of Kentucky (1874), Vol. I, p. 5.

Revolutionary War Soldiers in Boone County

Boone County Kentucky History