The convention assembled accordingly, Logan being one of the members, while it was presided over by Col.  Samuel McDowell, who, like Fleming, was a veteran Indian fighter and hero of the Great Kanawha.  Up to this point the phases through which the movement for statehood in Kentucky had passed were almost exactly the same as the phases of the similar movement in Franklin.  But the two now entered upon diverging lines of progression.  In each case the home government was willing to grant the request for separation, but wished to affix a definite date to their consent, and to make the fulfilment of certain conditions a prerequisite.  In each case there were two parties in the district desiring separation, one of them favoring immediate and revolutionary action, while the other, with much greater wisdom and propriety, wished to act through the forms of law and with the consent of the parent State.  In Kentucky the latter party triumphed.  Moreover, while up to the time of this meeting of the May convention the leaders in the movement had been the old Indian fighters, after this date the lead was taken by men who had come to Kentucky only after the great rush of immigrants began.  The new men were not backwoods hunter-warriors, like Clark and Logan, Sevier, Robertson, and Tipton.  They were politicians of the Virginia stamp.  They founded political clubs, one of which, the Danville club, became prominent, and in them they discussed with fervid eagerness the public questions of the day, the members showing a decided tendency towards the Jeffersonian school of political thought.

    Convention Urges Independence.

The convention, which met at Danville, in May, 1785, decided unanimously that it was desirable to separate, by constitutional methods, from Virginia, and to secure admission as a separate state into the Federal Union.  Accordingly, it directed the preparation of a petition to this effect, to be sent to the Virginia Legislature, and prepared an address to the people in favor of the proposed course of action.  Then, in a queer spirit of hesitancy, instead of acting on its own responsibility, as it had both the right and power to do, the convention decided that the issuing of the address, and the ratification of its own actions generally, should be submitted to another convention, which was summoned to meet at the same place in August of the same year.  The people of the district were as yet by no means a unit in favor of separation, and this made the convention hesitate to take any irrevocable step.

One of the members of this convention was Judge Caleb Wallace, a recent arrival in Kentucky, and a representative of the new school of Kentucky politicians.  He was a friend and ally of Brown and Innes.  He was also a friend of Madison, and to him he wrote a full account of the reasons which actuated the Kentuckians in the step they had taken. [Footnote:  State Department MSS.  Madison Papers, Caleb Wallace to Madison, July 12, 1785.] He explained that he and