took any position of leadership or influence in the community until they
had assimilated themselves in speech and customs to their American
neighbors. The Scotch were frugal and industrious; for good or for bad
they speedily became indistinguishable from the native-born. The greater
proportion of failures among the Irish, brave and vigorous though they
were, was due to their quarrelsomeness, and their fondness for drink and
litigation; besides, remarks this Kentucky critic, "they soon take to
the gun, which is the ruin of everything." None of these foreign-born
elements were of any very great importance in the development of
Kentucky; its destiny was shaped and controlled by its men of native
stock.

Character of the Frontier Population.

In such a population there was of course much loosening of the bands,
social, political, moral, and religious, which knit a society together.
A great many of the restraints of their old life were thrown off, and
there was much social adjustment and readjustment before their relations
to one another under the new conditions became definitely settled. But
there came early into the land many men of high purpose and pure life
whose influence upon their fellows, though quiet, was very great.
Moreover, the clergyman and the school-teacher, the two beings who had
done so much for colonial civilization on the seaboard, were already
becoming important factors in the life of the frontier communities.
Austere Presbyterian ministers were people of mark in many of the towns.
The Baptist preachers lived and worked exactly as did their flocks;
their dwellings were little cabins with dirt floors and, instead of
bedsteads, skin-covered pole-bunks; they cleared the ground, split
rails, planted corn, and raised hogs on equal terms with their
parishioners. [Footnote: "History of Kentucky Baptists," by J. H.