So, what would create that first scandal? In a few words: land laws and land grants. The first controversy involved whether Virginia even owned Kentucky. The first land companies argued that the king never granted Kentucky to Virginia; however, it was included in the 1609 Charter. The companies claimed that the land was granted to the entire nation and was under the jurisdiction of the Continental Congress. Of course, there was money involved. According to The Partisan Spirit, “most of the land companies were operated out of Philadelphia and could profit from the Virginia claim, but a congressional claim would mean they might cash in on their purchases of land from Indians. They evidently hoped to receive congressional land grants and then sell the land in small parcels at high prices.”²

The Virginia land laws of 1779 resolved the issue by giving land to settlers under their claims. Virginia then encouraged individuals, especially military veterans, to take up claims. First, a warrant was necessary, but that was of no use if it did not include an attachment of specific land. Thus, settlers went off to Kentucky to find prime land. From 1777 to 1779, settlers came to Kentucky in large numbers, and many were not of upstanding character. One group was land surveyors hoping to make good money after braving the harsh trip from Virginia, Pennsylvania or North Carolina. It stands to reason that Kentucky’s earliest scandal involved land surveyors.

Patricia Watlington called Thomas Hamilton “the oldest and best established of the surveyors.” He was fifty-two when he became surveyor of Fayette County in 1781, eleven years before statehood. He was a tall, slender man who had previously served in the Virginia legislature. He designated his nephew Humphrey Marshall as his deputy surveyor and began a political scandal. Humphrey was enthusiastic and wanted to tap into the riches of land speculation. He seemed “capable of any deceit that would increase his wealth.”³

As a public surveyor with a streak of dishonesty, Marshall was entangled in several schemes. One involved charging a double fee—when people could not pay it after twelve months, they lost their plats. As the first to know, Marshall would swoop in and put the plats in his name.

Marshall was involved in other complicated schemes to grab land. Surveyors often took advantage of poor individuals who knew no better, and almost all surveyors obtained great quantities of land. Marshall acquired 97,316 acres, and John May, another surveyor, amassed 831,294 acres of Kentucky.⁴ Virginia established Kentucky counties; perhaps Marshall was the first of many corrupt county officials in Kentucky history.

The development of Kentucky politics can be seen in many ways through its constitution. Kentucky statehood was all but assured by the Virginia Compact of 1789, but it took three more years and ten conventions (between 1784 and 1792) to achieve independence. According to Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau in The Kentucky Encyclopedia, “The principal obstacles to separation involved Virginia land grants and the shared responsibilities for Virginia’s debt from the Revolutionary War.” The terms of the compact were revised to the satisfaction of Kentucky, and it was admitted as the fifteenth state in 1792.

Kentucky’s first Constitutional Convention was held in 1792. Modeled on Virginia’s charter, that first constitution called for a lower house of legislators to serve one-year terms and appoint the state senate and governor for four-year terms. It also established a court of appeals, the state’s highest court. This constitution was not submitted to the voters but established a process for a new convention in a few years.

Controversies in the various branches of government resulted in a new convention in 1799. Two major controversies at the time included a decision by the Kentucky Court of Appeals in 1794, setting off Kentucky’s first major political fight. The decision held that the Virginia Land Commission exceeded its authority when it decided the rights of numerous land disputes in Kentucky during the years of 1779 and 1780. This undermined the land titles of thousands of Kentuckians and resulted in the legislature attempting to remove two justices who had voted in favor of the decision. The attempt failed, but the legislature later took the jurisdiction of the court of appeals over land cases.⁵

The second controversy involved the disputed governor’s race of 1796. James Garrard was a candidate, along with Ben Logan and Thomas Todd. Logan was the favorite because he was a military hero; Todd had served as secretary of all ten statehood conventions. The Kentucky Electoral College did not give any of four candidates for governor a majority vote, and instead of giving the candidate with the most votes (Logan) the office, “conducted a second ballot between the top two highest vote getters.”⁶ The second-place candidate was Garrard. On the second ballot, Garrard was victorious and declared the next governor. Logan protested but eventually gave up the effort. Garrard succeeded Isaac Shelby, the first governor of Kentucky.

While none of this was illegal, it was a huge political controversy and one of the first episodes in a long history of election-related strife and division in Kentucky. Garrard would go on to succeed himself and be the last governor to do so until a constitutional amendment allowed succession in 1992. Paul Patton was reelected in 1999 and was the first governor since Garrard to win consecutive terms.

The 1799 Constitutional Convention made some changes to Kentucky’s first constitution. The governor was able to keep his important patronage power, with the authority to appoint the judiciary, but slavery remained protected, as it had been in 1792. One of the most important differences of opinion concerned the requirement that only property owners were entitled to vote. This argument had gone on since the beginning of statehood. As Mathias says, “Those with no property wanted no property qualification for voting and wanted a bill of rights and suffrage for ‘free white males.’”⁷ He points out that there was much suspicion between landowners and those without land.

Restrictions on suffrage of free white males were not part of the 1799 constitution, so property owners continued to want some checks on democracy, including indirect election of the governor and state senators and control of the judiciary. However, this second constitutional convention angered property owners by changing the anti-democracy 1792 constitution to provide for direct election of the governor and state senators, abolishing the Electoral College and prohibiting the governor from succeeding himself. More than anything else, this division led to the formation of political parties.

While the party movement was gaining traction across the nation, Kentucky was divided along property and then party lines. Kentucky would become known for citizens showing often blind loyalty to political parties and the leaders who ran them. This tradition started in the early 1800s and lasted until late in the twentieth century. As the parties matured, however, issues did become more important, and voters took sides between the likes of Henry Clay, a Whig, or Andrew Jackson, a Democrat. National politics had significant influence on Kentucky.

The governors during this time were heavily involved in patronage, and loyalty to party was vital for appointments. The governor was usually the face of the party, and it was important to his future success, including national aspirations, to have loyal appointments throughout the state. Extreme political patronage like this would be an issue in state and federal politics until the reform movement forty to sixty years down the road.

Kentucky did not recognize the legal existence of political parties until 1842.⁸ However, they in fact had existed since the 1820s, evolving over the years following the last constitutional convention. Just like today, one of the early problems for legislators in Kentucky was setting up voting areas and other aspects of election administration. With the advent of parties, elected officials often considered the impact of changes in legislation on their party. Any advantages the laws gave their opponents were troublesome. Mathias is correct when he says that the “evolution of election administration was slow and tortuous.”⁹ As a result, calls for honest elections administered in a nonpartisan manner were nonexistent. It would take almost a century to clean up the electoral mess, and dissent and fraud now had a system in place to flourish.

Thomas N. Lindsey, a representative and a delegate to the 1849 constitutional convention, said in a letter to Orlando Brown, “Kentucky elections are annual ‘scenes’ that last for three days.” Elections originally were held in the county seat but dispersed as population scattered, leading to the creation of many more polling places. Mathias said that voice voting was held and that one’s party affiliation and political leanings were known to all. Election Day drinking and fighting were commonplace, and “lengthy elections offered the opportunities and time for party workers to organize themselves toward the perpetration of frauds.” For example, in the 1836 presidential election, Gallatin County had 918 voters registered but a total of 1,008 voted, resulting in 109.8 percent turnout. In 1832, at least five counties exceeded 100 percent of their possible vote. Oldham County went so far as to have 163.1 percent of its possible votes.¹⁰ For the most part, the county sheriff was responsible for state and local elections. If voter fraud existed, the sheriff usually knew about it—and sometimes was in the middle of it.

In 1833, a major case of election fraud happened in a congressional district covering several rural counties. In the election, Thomas P. Moore and Robert P. Letcher contested their race, which was held in the Fifth Congressional District. The controversy happened when five county sheriffs met to compare votes. Each was a strong partisan, loyal to their candidate and party. Moore was a Democrat and Letcher a Whig. Four of the counties’ totals were in doubt. The fifth county went for Letcher, but the sheriff walked out, and the remaining counties certified the election for Moore, however, the U.S. House refused to seat either candidate and ordered a new election, which Letcher won by 258 votes. This was a good example of the need for nonpartisan election administration.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Kentucky’s political parties were defined by economic and cultural events. In their second edition of A New History of Kentucky, Klotter and Friend say that “economic, religious, personal and societal” events affected every Kentuckian, but “there was little agreement on how to improve society.…One side felt if left alone, in time[people] would do what was right. Others believed that people could be trusted only when their character had been transformed, whether by conversion, reform movements, or even government.” This was the fundamental difference between the Whigs and the Democrats in Kentucky. Such deeply held personal but opposite beliefs influenced the type of behavior fundamental to fraud.

With all this said, Kentucky’s geography may have affected its politics more than any other factor. Some, including Mathias, believe the natural geographic division was ignored when Kentucky was laid out and its borders established. He says, “Sectionalism thrives best when arbitrary borders frustrate nature’s design, and Kentucky’s subsequent history would seem to approve this statement.”

Wilkinson became an aide to Arnold and soon thereafter to General Horatio Gates. Gates gave Wilkinson the honor of going before Congress to deliver news of victory at Saratoga. According to Steve Preston, writing in NKyTribune, “Not only did Wilkinson keep Congress waiting while attending to personal matters, when he finally did appear, he inflated his own role in the victory.” As a result, he was given the brevet rank of brigadier general, and he was just twenty years old. His long history of deceit had begun. He was also appointed to the U.S. Board of War and Ordnance. Again, according to his Wikipe...