James Proctor Knott, he who made Duluth famous, was born at Lebanon,
Kentucky, August 29, 1830. In 1851 he became a Missouri lawyer, and
later a member of the Missouri legislature. For a time he was
attorney-general of the state but, refusing to take certain test oaths
prescribed for officials, his office was declared vacant and he
returned to Lebanon, his birthplace. In 1866 Knott was sent to the
lower house of Congress, and he was re-elected two years later. On
January 27, 1871, he delivered his celebrated Duluth speech upon the
St. Croix and Superior land grant, which effort brought him a national
reputation as an orator and humorist, but which injured him as a
constructive statesman--if he ever was or could be such a statesman!
Knott was in Congress again from 1875 until 1883, when he was elected
governor of Kentucky. Governor Knott was not an overly forceful
executive, but the people enjoyed his witty stories and speeches, and
thus his term wore on and out. It was an era of good feeling,
Kentuckians smiling and taking their governor good naturedly at all
times. His brief eulogy to remember James Francis Leonard, the
Kentucky telegrapher, was the finest literary thing he did while
governor of Kentucky. The governor was dean of the law faculty of
Centre College, Danville, Kentucky, from 1894 to 1901, when, old age
coming on, he returned to his home at Lebanon, where the final years
of his life were passed, and where he died on June 18, 1911.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: _Oddities in Southern Life and Character_, by Henry
Watterson (Boston, 1883); _The Life of James Francis Leonard_, by
J. W. Townsend (Louisville, 1909).