Mann Butler, the first Kentucky historian who worked with
comparatively modern methods, eliminating personal prejudices and
imagination, was born at Baltimore, July, 1784. At the age of three
years he was taken to the home of his grandfather in Chelsea, England.
Mann Butler returned to the United States, in 1798, and entered St.
Mary's College, Georgetown, D. C., from which institution he was
afterwards graduated in the arts, medicine, and law. His tastes were
decidedly literary, and he preferred law to medicine as being,
perhaps, more in line with literature. He emigrated to Kentucky,
locating at Lexington, in 1806, for the practice of law. He later
abandoned law for pedagogy, opening an academy at Versailles,
Kentucky. Some years later he taught in Maysville and Frankfort, and
was then called to a professorship in Transylvania University,
Lexington, where he remained for several years. In 1831 Butler removed
to Louisville, where he was engaged in teaching for fifteen years. His
_History of Kentucky_ (Louisville, 1834; Cincinnati, 1836) was, after
Filson's florid sentences, Rafinesque's imagination, and Marshall's
prejudices and castigations, most welcome and timely. He was
microscopic in finding facts, fair, having no enemies to punish, an
excellent chronicler, in short, and doing a work that was much needed.
The Kentucky legislature took a keen interest in his history,
rendering him great assistance. Butler's _Appeal from the
Misrepresentations of James Hall, Respecting the History of Kentucky
and the West_ (Frankfort, 1837), was a just criticism of the
Cincinnati writer's _Sketches of History in the West_ (Philadelphia,
1835), a work in which fact and fiction are well-nigh inseparable.
Mann Butler spent the last seven years of his life in St. Louis,
teaching and in preparing a history of the Ohio valley, which he left
in manuscript, but which, together with his library, was afterwards
destroyed by Federal soldiers during the Civil War. He was killed in
Missouri, in 1852, while a passenger on a Pacific train which was
wrecked by the falling of a bridge spanning the Gasconade river. Mann
Butler had many of the qualities required in a great historian, and
the work he did has lived well and will live longer.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _History of Kentucky_, by R. H. Collins (Covington,
1882); Appletons' _Cyclopaedia of American Biography_ (New York,
1887, v. i).