existence of large plantations.
The only reason Kentucky had such large estates was because of the
method by which the land was given out by the mother State.
Economically Kentucky was not adapted to plantation life. The greater
part of the State required then, as it still does, the personal care
and supervision of the owner or tenant. The original distribution of
land made this impossible and there grew up a large class of
landholders who seldom labored with their hands, because of the
traditional system. A large number of inhabitants as early as 1805,
Michaux found, were cultivating their lands themselves, but those who
could do so had all the work done by Negro slaves.[241]

With passing years, while Kentucky maintained slavery, it came to
have a social system not like that in the South but one more like the
typical structure of the middle nineteenth century West. There were
several reasons for this. In the first place, the absence of the
policy of primogeniture in time came to distribute the lands over a
much larger population. In the second place, while all the land in
Kentucky had been granted by the year 1790, the patrician land-holding
element was completely submerged by the flood of so-called plebeians
who came in soon after Kentucky became a State. In 1790 there were
only 61,133 white people in Kentucky, and although all the land had
been granted, the white population in the next decade nearly tripled,
reaching 179,871 in 1800, and this increase, at a slightly smaller
rate, continued down to about 1820. Still further the nature of the
soil made it more profitable for the wealthier landed class to let out
their holdings to the incoming whites who did their own work and in
time came to own the property. "Each year increased this element of
the state at the expense of the larger properties."[242]

POPULATION FROM 1790 TO 1860 WITH RATES OF INCREASE
+=======================================================================+
| | |Per | |Per | |Per | |Per |
| | White |Cent |Free |Cent |Slave |Cent | Total |Cent |
| | |Incr. |Colored|Incr. | |Incr. | |Incr. |
+----+-------+------+-------+------+-------+------+--------------+------+
|1790| 61,133| | 114| | 11,830| | 73,077 | |
|1800|179,871|194.22| 741|550.00| 40,343|241.02| 220,955 |202.36|
|1810|324,237| 80.26| 1,713|131.17| 80,561| 99.69| 40