The story of Kentucky's earliest foray into higher education, Transylvania Seminary, finds denominational influence writ large—Presbyterianism presents a guiding presence in the dynamics of early growth. The forces of liberal secularism are said to be ranged against those of conservative sectarianism; the victory of the former is a movement toward educational progress. The following refocuses and rebuilds the early history of Transylvania University without the benefit of denominational auspices. By finding intellectual presence in early Kentucky, this study complicates the historiographic tradition, asserting that increase, not decline, characterized early forms of higher education and educational growth in Kentucky's late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. In reinvestigating claims of educational partisanship, this work establishes a new mode of conceiving the rhetoric of localism and state-building on the antebellum American frontier.

KEYWORDS: Education, Higher Education, Transylvania Seminary, Transylvania University, State Identity