User:Randolph.hollingsworth/CCC-origins

Origins – Role of Christ Church in the New Republic and the new Commonwealth of Kentucky 

It is impossible to separate the history of Christ Church Cathedral from the origins of the United States or of the creation of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. The origins of CCC are born within the international context of a New Republic and the two Great Awakenings; of Kentucky’s separatist tendencies to join the international cosmopolitanism of Spain and France; of Republican Motherhood, Empress-waist gowns, liberty hats and concert music; of the American Jockey Club’s blood-horse and the economic and political power of the Fayette County’s Court Days; we can find CCC’s powerful contributions to the Lexington Democratic Society, slavery and Kentucky’s first 2 constitutions with strong statements of Democratic-Republican ideals and Maryland/Virginia’s freedom of religion; in the systematic emphasis on building up a strong, sophisticated infrastructure that would draw in an educated, wealthy immigrant and good for internationally-oriented businesses. The origins of CCC can be separated into 4 phases:
 * 1) Formation of the “Episcopal Society” and the Transylvania Seminary - 1770s-99
 * 2) The “American Episcopal Society” – 1800-War of 1812
 * 3) The change to weekly church services under Rev. Ward – 1813-1820
 * 4) The creation of the Diocese by Rev. Chapman – 1820-30s (watershed for Lexington)

The establishment of churches in Kentucky progressed with European settlement in Kentucky – which took place more rapidly in the last quarter of the 18th century. During this period Catholic, Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian groups became firmly established. In spite of the Proclamation signed by the English King George III forbidding colonists to move beyond the Appalachian highlands, scouts continued to go west into this former contested area with rich trading with Native Americans, French and Spanish. Long-hunters coming from the backcountry of the Carolinas, Pennsylvania and Virginia came back with tales of the rich bounty of the Ohio Valley area. Surveyors came into what is now Kentucky sent by entrepreneurial land companies, and the Transylvania Land Co., organized in 1773 by Judge Richard Henderson of North Carolina, signed a treaty with the Cherokee Indians on March 17, 1775. Meanwhile the Virginian colonial power refused to recognize this treaty. James Harrod organized a fort on the Wilderness Road (near Harrodsburg) in June 1774, and by 1776 Harrodstown became the seat for Virginia’s new county. But Kentucky’s early historians most love the story of the Quaker Rebecca Boone’s husband Daniel Boone, his work for the Transylvania Land Company and his founding of Boonesborough. With Boone came a Virginia Anglican, William Russell, brother-in-law to Patrick Henry, Governor of Virginia. He was a justice of Fincastle County, Virginia. Russell aided in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, and later became a US Continental Army Brigadier General. Judge Richard Henderson, also Anglican and head of the Transylvania Company, called together delegates from the then 4 Kentucky settlements to meet together at Boone’s fort near the Kentucky River. After the political sessions were completed, on Sunday May 28, 1775, the 1st public service of worship by whites in KY is led by John Lyth, a Church of England clergyman using the Book of Common Prayer beneath a great elm tree, come to be known as the “Church Tree” and to shelter 100 people or more - for 1st Sunday after Ascension Day (his sister is Letitia, wife of Col. Robert Breckinridge – Lyth left his entire estate in Virginia to Letitia’s daughter, Betty who later came as a reluctant migrant to Kentucky).

The Church of England, however, during the American Revolution was unpopular and linked to Toryism. Similarly, the Virginia and Carolina Methodists suffered from John Wesley’s Toryism and anti-slavery sentiments. By the mid 1780s, however, Methodism had found its footing in Kentucky and Bishop Francis Asbury ordered a Kentucky Circuit be added to the structure of “local preachers” and Methodist societies already in place. The first Methodist church of Lexington was organized in 1789 and constructed a log cabin at the southwest corner of Short and Dewees streets. Old and recent memories of persecution by the established Church of England were fresh in the new American consciousness – Baptists, in particular. Public financial support of churches withered because of the New Republic’s principles emphasizing separation of church and state. After the American version of Anglicanism is created, the political leaders of Kentucky who once were Anglican, became determined to re-establish their church formally. The Diocese of Maryland tried to send out Rev. William Duke to Kentucky in 1789 to form a church, but he fell ill somewhere near Harper’s Ferry in Virginia and turned back.

In 1792 Kentucky was the first state in the new country to be organized west of the Allegheny Mounties and the first state in the new nation to expressly protect the institution of slavery. David Rice was educated at the College of New Jersey at Princeton before undertaking further studies under John Todd, who had spent a great deal of time working among slaves. Rice would eventually follow in Todd’s footsteps, working among slaves as an ordained Presbyterian minister in Virginia for over twenty years. After being forced out of Virginia in 1783, Rice came to Kentucky – over 300 Kentuckians had signed a subscription list to show their readiness for creating a formal Presbyterian infrastructure recognized by the Hanover Presbytery in Virginia. Rice is credited with organizing three of the first Presbyterian congregations in Kentucky and was involved in the organizing of the Transylvania Presbytery by 1786, the Synod of Kentucky, and the Transylvania Seminary (first starting as a grammar school in his home in 1787). This Princeton graduate was elected as chairman of the board to handle the endowment coming from the 12,000 acres that Virginia’s legislature had deeded to Kentucky. A strong opponent of slavery, joined n the efforts of the Kentucky Abolition Society, writing under the pseudonym “Philanthropos.” In 1792 published his pamphlet “Slavery Inconsistent with Justice and Good Policy” – failing soon thereafter as a delegate to the Kentucky constitutional convention, to insert an article leading to the emancipation of slaves included in the state's first constitution. The first church in Lexington was the Mt. Zion Presbyterian Church in 1784 in a log cabin located at the southeastern corner of Walnut and Short streets. In 1792 they split over a difference in the translation of the Psalms of David, and the First Presbyterian church on the southeastern corner of Mill and Short was built (the other congregation disbanded in 1830). Meanwhile the Market Street Presbyterian church was dedicated July 30, 1815, with the young Rev. James McChord (later to become the Second Presbyterian church on East Main Street).

The first separate church for Blacks in Kentucky was organized in the early 1780s by Peter Duerett, a slave who migrated to Kentucky with the Rev. Joseph Craig, brother of Rev. Lewis Craig who brought “The Traveling Church” of Separate Baptists from Spotsylvania through the Cumberland Gap in the winter of 1781. By the fall of 1782 Craig established the South Elkhorn Baptist Church, and Duerett (“Old Captain”) and his wife created a Baptist church for Black converts at the “Head of Boone’s Creek” (off Todd’s Road near Clark County). They subsequently hired out the time of himself and wife from his owner and moved to Lexington, bought a cabin from John Maxwell and started what was then called the First African Church. The congregation, led by free blacks and slaves, bought its first property in 1815 (a cotton factory on High Street, next to the present Asbury Methodist Church) under the names of freedmen Rolla Blue, Wm. Gist, Solomon Walker and James Pullock. The next year started a church school. By the time of Duerett’s death in 1823 at the age of 90, the church had an estimated membership of 300. By 1789 Lexington’s white Baptists built their first church on West Main street, on the ground now occupied by the First Baptist church. The second Baptist church to be erected in Lexington was completed in October, 1819, and stood on Mill Street opposite Gratz Park.

Meanwhile the Catholics in this area were seen as possible spies for the Spanish, French or their Native American allies. Father Stephen T. Badin, a refugee of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, came to Lexington in January 1794 - using a log cabin built in 1794 at the northeast corner of Patterson street extended (Baptist Alley) and Main street - and served the few Catholic families until he returned to France in 1821. A German Lutheran church and school was erected in 1795, and destroyed by fire in 1815. Some of the Lutheran graveyard remains in the rear of the First Methodist Church, 214 West High Street.

The Episcopal Society and the Transylvania Seminary
The Protestant Episcopal Church organized in 1789 as part of New Republic’s autonomy from Britain, but Baptists, Presbyterians and Methodists already firmly ensconced in the Upper South and along the eastern coast. Most notable Lexingtonians identified themselves as Episcopalians and Democratic-Republicans. A few Anglican ministers were in Bardstown and Lexington but did not establish a parish formally. Fayette County “Episcopal Society” met together in early 1790s and held services on the farm of Captain David Shely, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, probably in a small log building out Russell Cave Pike about 4 miles out from the center of Lexington. John Bradford started the state’s first newspaper, the Kentucky Gazette, in 1787- serving as the official site for all political matters in the state - and helped organize Lexington’s first library in 1798. Bradford was elected as the Transylvania University’s first chairman and helped transform it into Kentucky’s first state university. These were Lexington’s “established order” that formed the core of Transylvania’s early board as well as the establishment of the Episcopal Church in Lexington. Lawyers and doctors, extraordinarily wealthy men such as Robert Wickliffe, William Morton, George Nicholas and William Russell formed the core of Transylvania, the Freemasons and the Democratic Society as well as the Episcopal church while their wives and daughters attended lectures at the school and organized social assemblies downtown, church gatherings and musical extravaganzas.

The overwhelming majority of settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee were Germans and Scotch-Irish from Pennsylvania and North Carolina backcountries coming in with strong democratic political ideas, radicalized by the evangelical revivalism of the Great Awakening. The Democratic committees of correspondence kept up a running debate in the Gazette about the type of constitution that Kentucky should have - and the Bourbon county democrats were the most radical, reinforced by the activism in the antislavery campaigns of the county and the religious ferment culminating in the Cane Ridge revival of 1800. After the Ohio country was opened up with the battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, many antislavery farmers from Kentucky fled north for better chances of owning their own land. By 1795, over 85% of the families in the Green river valley were landless. Nearly every owner of the famed Bluegrass territory had political connections either in Virginia or in Congress. The political and legal education of men like John Brown, George Nicholas and John Breckinridge coming out of the College of William and Mary into Kentucky in the 1790s created a perfect combination of religious and political fervor. Their civic boosterism, elite landowning and pro-slavery sentiments earned these families political influence and assured them an elevated place in Lexington’s social hierarchy.

This elitism inherent within the Jeffersonian Republicanism and its love affair with France seemed to be in direct contradiction to the promise of egalitarianism of frontier Presbyterianism and what later comes to be the rise of the Democratic Party by the early 19th century. But Kentucky was built on a kind of hybrid politics – wealthy proprietors who wheel and deal at a national level and code-shift to a local culture demanding a public forum of interaction in a folksy, Everyman style. It formed the core of what Southern historians now call Jeffersonian Nationalism.

With the waning Presbyterian influence at the seminary, Reverend David Rice and others broke with Transylvania and established Kentucky Academy in 1794. The academy was located in Pisgah, Woodford County where it remained until 1799. $4,000 was subscribed in Kentucky, and $10,000 subscribed in the East, towards its endowment, of which President George Washington and Vice-President John Adams contributed $100 each, and Aaron Burr $50. Dr. George Gordon, of London, England, secured a small valuable library and ‘philosophical apparatus', or laboratory equipment, for the new school.

With Rice’s second defeat in the Kentucky Constitutional conventions, the more egalitarian-leaning Presbyterians returned to join with the “liberal” thinking Transylvania Seminary to form Transylvania University. Schools of medicine and law were immediately established at the new university. Transylvania experienced rapid growth and earned a national reputation during the presidency of Horace Holley (1818-1925) – the envy of the Virginians. Governor Jefferson began exploring how to build their state’s university to as to stop the brain drain from Virginia. Mary Austin Holley’s poetry entertained General Lafayette and their daughter attended a prestigious school with a liberal arts curriculum and music. By that time the Lexington Democratic Society and its Scott county branch were disbanded and the new federalist-leaning “American System” of Henry Clay had begun.

Christ Church Cathedral in Lexington was the first organized Episcopal church in Kentucky with a clergyman to minister to them. Reverend James Moore had come to Kentucky in 1791 as a Washington College graduate and the new husband of the Presbyterian Margaret Todd – the daughter of the Rev. John Todd who donated his library to Lexington. His aspirations to be a Presbyterian minister were short-lived. He was invited to become president of Kentucky Academy with the high visibility from elite Virginians seeking to keep Kentucky as an ally. But when he broke with the Presbyterians, he then became the director of Transylvania Seminary. Eventually, he and Margaret built - about 3 miles from Lexington on Georgetown Pike - the beautiful home “Vaucluse” (later known as Malvern Hill) with its square, high ceilinged parlor for his flute concerts. The room was covered with special material to enhance the acoustics and was flanked by two chambers, opening onto a recessed portico ideal for evening soirees. A member of the new Kentucky elite, they held at least 12 slaves (several of whom had probably come with him as part of his wife’s dower out of Virginia), and James fathered at least six white children. Following up on conversations with the prestigious families of the Episcopal Society, Moore was ordained as an Episcopal priest by Bishop Madison in 1794 in Virginia.

Reverend Moore recruited more members to the Episcopal Society and by 1796 held bi-weekly services in frame house on corner of Market and Middle (now Church) Streets – the present site of Christ Church. On 22 December 1798 the rift between the more Virginia- and federal-oriented Episcopalians and the more strictly Calvinist Presbyterians ended when a large group of men gathered together to vote for a union of Transylvania Seminary and the Kentucky Academy. They agreed that the new combined institution would take effect from after the 1st day of June 1799 - creating Transylvania University. Meanwhile, slaveowners fearing the influence of abolitionist preachers like the Presbyterian David Rice or the Kentucky Academy’s strict Presbyterian seminarians and made sure that in the Second Constitutional Convention in 1799 that the new Kentucky Constitution prohibited a minister from becoming a legislator. Ebenezer Brooks, writing in the Gazette under the pseudonym of “Corn Planter” (July 17, 1788) had many years earlier already explained the position of many of Lexington’s residents: “The faithful preacher will have neither leisure nor inclination to concern in politicks (sic), and he who is of an opposite character is not to be trusted.” It’s important to remember that of the state’s 221,000 residents in 1800 only about 10,000 belonged to an established denomination.

American Episcopal Church
By 1803 a brick church replaced the clapboard frame house at Church and Market. This happened only after a lawsuit between the builder Maddox Fisher and the “American Episcopal Church” (represented in name by Walter Warfield, David Sheley, Robert Todd, William Morton, James Bullock and Rev James Moore). Fisher complained that the church leaders had originally made the deal for bricks to be laid at a Main Street site (owned by Robert Todd), close to his brickyard. However, the church leaders had become convinced that their congregation feared the regular overflowing of the Town Branch would threaten the new building and its planned interior, so they chose instead to build on the corner already occupied by the frame house. Moore was greatly respected as “learned, liberal, amiable and pious” (romanticized later in the century by James Lane Allen who described Moore in his novel Flute and Violin as: “humanly speaking, almost a perfect man”). Moore resigned as president of Transylvania in 1804 to focus on building up his church by recruiting more Episcopalians – and he (and his wife in the magnificent Valcuse parlor) was very successful. By August 25, 1808, 26 men agreed to subscribe to pews, pay for their erection and to rent them annually. The prices were determined by a committee that was to serve as stewards for the funds necessary for paying the salary of the minister. Not all the subscribers were baptized in the church nor did they necessarily attend services. In July the first vestry chosen: John Wyatt, John Johnson, William Macbean, John Jordan, William Morton, David Shely, Walter Warfield. A lottery was started with a drawing at the elegant and popular William Satterwhite’s tavern to finish the church and pay for an organ. The first organist was John C. Wenzel, a music store owner, member of the Kentucky Music Society and concert pianist. Some of the most wonderful musicians came to Christ Church, including Wilhelm Iucho, Abby Hammond, all of whom served as organist for them. By 1810 Lexington has several millionaires: Episcopalians and Presbyterians (one of whom was a woman who helps to found the McChord Presbyterian Church and underwrite the transportation and education of Alfred Russell, a Lexington slave who became an Episcopalian missionary in Africa and Liberia’s 10th president.

2nd Phase – organized church with weekly meetings
Lexington’s contribution to the Second War in American Independence was extraordinary – Clay rode a wave of patriotism in his boast that Kentuckians alone could conquer Canada. Both Virginian presidents, Madison and Monroe, supported Kentucky prices for their exports (hemp, slaves, horses) with federal marshals and restrictive international tariffs. Kentucky’s first city is a hub for banks, law courts, stage coach lines, post roads and railroads. It was the first urban center in Kentucky to have street lights, police, hog regulations, paved sewers and sidewalks.

On November 5, 1813, Lexington Episcopal Church formally invited Rev. John Ward as rector (after meeting him in the fall before) from Connecticut (ministered in RI, NJ,PA) – services now every 11 AM and 3 PM on Sundays. Ward lived in a house belonging to John D. Clifford and a study in one of the four garden houses. Officially aligned itself with the national organization in April 29 1814 when the parish agreed to the Constitution of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA and elected John D. Clifford a delegate to the general convention in Philadelphia in May though he was not seated as a regular member since Kentucky had no bishop or regular state convention. Rev. Ward increased the size of the vestry from 7 to 12, adding Thomas Bodley, John Bradford, William West, James Prentiss and Robert Wickliffe – Bernard Gaines, senior warden and John D. Clifford, junior warden. He razed the original brick building, held services at the Transylvania auditorium next door until the new building was up. The new brick church, stuccoed to imitate stone and was built to accommodate 800 people, was finished within Ward’s first year in Lexington. That winter of the 82 pews offered to the public on December 26th, 51 sold -- “far better than anticipated.” Pews on the ground floor brought in $50-$100, and the vestry hoped to raise $8K to cover part of the contract cost of the building as well as an additional $2K to remunerate the overruns by the builders, Shryock and Gaugh. By February 1815 the roof was fixed – before that many would not “venture to enter the doors”. In fact, said Ward in a letter to a friend back east, there were two Sundays when he could not conduct services due to the poor condition of the church. The grand new church bell had arrived by then and the organ was soon to be set up. The original deed of sale in 1804 by Wm. Morton and R. Warfield from Mrs. Barton now handed over to trustees of Lexington church. Ward wrote in April 3, 1815, to his friend Kemper in Pennsylvania: “My being here keeps my people from having itching ears. I am in no danger from any of those popular preachers who can talk from head to foot… I go on in my own way, setting forth plain truths in a plain manner and I am certainly willing to depend for success upon the great Head of the Church.”

Ward started a Bible society with the new deacon Rev. Jacob Morgan Douglas appointed by the Missionary Society of Pennsylvania from Pittsburgh. However, there was some office politics starting up: Ward feared Douglas was too close to the Presbyterians and Baptists, making him unpopular with his own Episcopalians as he made trips to Georgetown, Paris, Frankfort, Cincinnati and Nashville. Ward wrote on Oct. 25, 1816, to his senior warden Clifford visiting in Philadelphia asking him to show the letter to Kemper: “Our church would be destroyed by what Mr. Douglas calls his close preaching, but what we call a system of pretended inspired Calvinism, the sectarian doctrine of regeneration and grace, with a full admixture of endless perdition.” Douglass writes also to Kemper but never mentions breach with Ward. However, he notes that some in the congregation were at odds with Ward himself. Douglass opines that they “have been so spoilt by the licentiousness of the old Maryland and Virginia clergymen that I have to apply the wormwood and the gall. As for understanding the articles, the rubrics, or the liturgy, this is out of the question.” This may simply have been a personality clash but it also shows the early emphasis on keeping the ecstatic practices of frontier evangelism out of the Episcopal Church. Ward also employed several other traveling ministers on commission of the Episcopal Missionary Society, including John Churchill Rudd of New Jersey and Joseph Jackson of Maryland. Jackson wrote to Kemp on Dec. 2, 1817, that he heard “a considerable part of Handel’s Messiah, performed by a society of persons belonging to the [Lexington] church, several of whom were, previous to Mr. Ward’s settling in Lexington, profane and heedless of religion in all respects.”

3rd Phase – Organizing the Diocese of Kentucky, 1820 (depression) -1830s
The Panic of 1819 and Kentucky’s wildcat banks led to a terrible depression in 1820 and Lexington’s elite was embroiled in a social and political debate over the New and Old Courts. Parades, fairs and new architectural trends blossom along with experiments in new stock (Wickliffe’s cattalo and Warfield’s Lexington). During the rise of Tennessee’s “Long Knife” Andrew Jackson and the fall of Lexington’s beloved Aaron Burr, Lexington’s streets were torn up like those in Revolutionary France in a “Brick-Bat War” over the new political parties forming. Meanwhile the Rev. George Thomas Chapman of Massachusetts became the rector of “Christ Church”- its official name as of 1827. Rev. Chapman oversaw the organizing convention for a new diocese, held in Christ Church on July 8, 1829, with delegates from three parishes (the number required by rules of General Convention): Christ Church, Lexington; Christ Church, Louisville (organized in 1822); and, Trinity Church, Danville (founded by Chapman just two months before the convention). A constitution was adopted and the committee named to report a set of canons at the next convention. On July 25, 1829, Rt. Rev. John Stark Ravenscroft of North Carolina, the first Episcopalian bishop to come to Kentucky, arrived in Lexington and preached at Christ Church on Sunday, July 25, confirming 71 people that day. On Tuesday he confirmed 20 more. In August 1829 Christ Church sent its first deputy to a national General Convention in Philadelphia: Dr. John Esten Cooke (a professor at Transylvania Medical School). The Rt. Rev. Thomas Church Brownell of Connecticut was sent to inspect southern and western states, arrived in Lexington on December 3rd of that year and consecrated Christ Church.

4th Phase: Organizing the Diocese
This important, official beginning of the Church concludes what could be seen as the 4th phase of the Origins of Christ Church. The next decade, the 1830s is a watershed in Lexington history – the legislature finally incorporates it as a city in 1831 and its first mayor, Charlton Hunt, is committed to internal improvements in the style of Henry Clay. The failure of the Maysville Road in a political feud between Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay together with the 1833 cholera epidemic stunted the city’s growth as a center of business and industry. The 1833 Kentucky law prohibiting the open buying/selling of slaves shifted Kentucky’s elite slaveowning families into a shadow market while the East coast began to blossom under a new market economy demanding freedom from tariffs and federal intervention. Lexington’s millionaires and elite order including the Episcopalians must adapt – and they do. Kentucky is the first to build a lunatic asylum in the West (an act of institutional benevolence of the time, the second in the nation), the Orphanage and Female Benevolent Society builds a new role for white women and the state begins to invest in public education with moral implications for building a better informed citizenry. By 1838 Kentucky was the first in the new nation to offer school suffrage for female heads of household. Christ Church is situated physically in an important spot in Lexington and ready for the next historical era: Antebellum Kentucky.

4 PHASES IN ORIGINS OF CHRIST CHURCH:
 * 1) Book of Common Prayer at “church tree” in 1775 to KY’s first city, 1796 Christ Church founded; Rev. James Moore presides at “frame house” on corner of Market & Church Street;
 * 2) 1803 brick church constructed; first vestry (July 2, 1809);
 * 3) 1814 new building stuccoed to look like stone and in 1815 the first bell hung in belfry; Rev Ward leaves to start a school;
 * 4) Rev. Chapman organizes diocese; consecration Dec 3, 1829; 3rd Street cemetery purchased 1832; Theological Seminary 1834-40s

Selected References
 * Aron, Stephen. How the West was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
 * Bluegrass Renaissance: The History and Culture of Central Kentucky, 1792-1852 . Edited by James C. Klotter and Daniel Rowland. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2012.
 * The Buzzel about Kentuck: Settling the Promised Land . Edited by Craig Thompson Friend. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1999.
 * Boles, John B. Religion in Antebellum Kentucky . Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1976.
 * Carden, Joy. Music in Lexington Before 1840 . Lexington, KY: Lexington-Fayette County Historic Commission, 1980.
 * “Christ Church Cathedral, Diocese of Lexington: A Brief History of the First Episcopal Church West of the Allegheny Mountains.” Compiled and edited by June M. Kinkead, Richard DeCamp, and Kay Collier Slone. [Lexington, KY: Christ Church], 1996.
 * Dunnigan, Alice Allison. The Fascinating Story of Black Kentuckians: Their Heritage and Traditions . Washington D.C.: Associated Publishers, Inc., 1982.
 * Harrison, Lowell H. and James Klotter. A New History of Kentucky . Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.
 * Hollingsworth, Randolph. Lexington: Queen of the Bluegrass . Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2004.
 * Sanders, Rev. Robert Stuart, D. D. Presbyterianism in Paris and Bourbon County, Kentucky, 1786-1961 . Louisville, Kentucky: The Dunne Press, 1961.
 * Schwarz, Michael. “The Origins of Jeffersonian Nationalism: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the Sovereignty Question in the Anglo-American Commercial Dispute of the 1780s,” Journal of Southern History LXXIX, 3 (August 2013): 569-592.
 * Sonne, Niels Henry. Liberal Kentucky, 1780-1828 . Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1968.
 * Swinford, Frances Keller, and Rebecca Smith Lee. The Great Elm Tree: Heritage of the Episcopal Diocese of Lexington . Lexington, KY: Faith House Press, 1969.
 * “The Story of Christ Church Lexington, Kentucky: 1796-1976.” Compiled by Frances Keller Swinford. [Lexington, KY: Christ Church, 1976].
 * “Transylvania University Early Documents, 1783-1851,” TUA1, Special Collections, Transylvania University, Lexington.
 * The Voice of the Frontier: John Bradford’s ‘Notes on Kentucky’ . Edited by Thomas D. Clark. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1993.
 * Wooley, Carolyn Murray. The Founding of Lexington, 1775-76, Including a Map of the Original Land Grants of the Region . Lexington, KY: Lexington-Fayette County Historic Commission, 1975.