The cry of the petrel heralding the coming storm never fell with more ominous forebodings on the sailor's ears than did the conspiring incidents. and notes of warning of the inevitable crisis and catastrophe of conflict. between the two sections of the Union, on the issue of slavery. It is doubtful if the people of any other State bore the incubus of apprehension upon their spirits with more of regretful sadness than did those of Kentucky. Certainly none more clearly forecast and appreciated the appalling dangers of the irrepressible strife. With the people of the North, the desperate determination of the South to hazard the peace of the country and the perpetuity of slavery, upon the fact of a disruption of the Union, as the lesser in a choice of evils, could not be realized in an estimate of the situation. The fear of a destruction of the Federal fabric, therefore, did not so strongly appeal to their patriotism. With the people of the extreme South, the virtues of patriotic devotion to the Union had been engulfed in the universal consciousness that their rights and chief interests were jeopardized by the accession to power of an anti-slavery administration; that safety could only be sought in dissolution and separate government, and that such solution could be attained without the probabilities of a war of conquest, and the

THE FEELING IN KENTUCKY.

destruction of the peculiar institution.

595

In the intense resentments of the

two extremes, reason became obscured by passion, with both parties.

The great heart of Kentucky did not fully share in the arbitrary views. of the one section or the other. Her convictions and traditions, her interests and hopes, her devotions and desires, were with the Union; her sympathies, her partialities, her kinship, were with the South. With this conflict of emotions, she was called upon to make a choice between alternate evils, from one of which she shrank as with a horror of fratricide; from the other, with the terrors of ungrateful disloyalty and anarchy. Earliest, above the mutterings of the storm, were the voices of her sage and venerable statesmen signaling the dangers, and the putting forth every human device to avert the catastrophe, or to postpone the dreaded crisis. The last years of Henry Clay were overcast with the shadow of the dark trouble coming. His compromises had served a purpose for the time; but the great upheaving waves of sectional and party fury were beating away these barriers, soon to inundate the whole country with their destructive wrath. His distinguished colleague and bosom friend, John J. Crittenden, followed in this lead of warning danger, and of averting compromise. By such statesmen and patriots the people of Kentucky had their views and feelings reflected. Their training and experience in the most practical politics gave them an instinctive sense of the magnitude of the dangers besetting the Commonwealth and the whole country.

Kentucky, as the central border State, with a large slave element within easy distance of the Ohio-river line, was subjected to repeated annoyances. and irritations from the loss of this species of property. Organized agencies. were multiplied on the northern side, with their emissaries traversing and ramifying this portion of the State, for the purpose of abducting and running across the river the slaves of this section. With the zeal of martyrs, some of these emissaries, by speech and tract, prosecuted their work as though moved by the spirit of religious fanaticism. The arrest, conviction, and imprisonment in the penitentiary, did not stay the work, or abate the zeal. The temper of the people on the north side made it dangerous to pursue the fugitives, and more than doubtful to seek redress in the courts, under the provisions of the "Fugitive slave law." "The underground railroad," though an invisible institution to ordinary outsiders, gave too many practical evidences of daily use to leave any doubt on the mind of its existence. The title became a household word in every mouth.

With these agitations and upheavals, which were but the symptomatic vibrations of the earthquake to come, political chaos spread her sable wings over the land. The old Whig party, after reeling into the arms of Know Nothingism, soon forsook such a refuge, and tottered back upon its base, only for a brief respite. Rapid decay set in, and the disintegrating elements almost as rapidly merged into the Republican party organization, in the Northern States, only to be massed against the fragments of the Democratic

party, soon to be sundered, and against the forlorn hope of the old Whig party on its last battlefield.

In 1860, the Republican party nominated Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin for president and vice-president of the United States; and the Union party, John Bell and Edward Everett. 1 The Democratic party had been divided in twain, and irreconcilably. The people of the South, through all the rage of the tempest of political wrath let loose over the whole country, had firmly and immovably held to the traditional doctrine and precedent of "States' Rights;" that the people of each new State, at the time of coming into the Union, had the right to form their own State government, and say whether slavery should be adopted in the constitution or not. By 1860, the party of encroachment had assumed gigantic and threatening proportions. When the territorial governments of Kansas and Nebraska were about to be thus formed, the conservative men of the North joined the men of the South, in Congress, and repealed the restrictive measures of compromise which had been adopted before by this body. On the border line between these territories and the slave State of Missouri a state of internecine warfare had for some years existed, between those in favor of carrying their slave property into the territories and the propagandists of abolition. The episode was but a phase of the "irrepressible conflict," that hastened the event of dissolution. The repeal of the compromise measures

made the excitement furious.

Stephen A. Douglas, a senator from Illinois, though a man of vigorous and able mind, yet more of the shifty politician than the sagacious and discreet statesman, conceived and advocated a method of relief, which was entitled the doctrine of "squatter sovereignty." This doctrine proposed to leave to the settlers in the territory the question of the introduction or holding of slaves therein. Though its plausibility carried away multitudes from the ranks of Democracy, it proved neither to conciliate the exasperated North nor to be acceptable to the South, yet an apple of discord in the Democratic Troy. The national convention met at Charleston, South Carolina, and, after fifty-seven ballots, failed to nominate; then adjourned to Baltimore. Here a large portion of the delegations withdrew from the meeting, after protesting against certain action. The remaining delegates nominated Stephen A. Douglas and Herschel V. Johnson for the presidential ticket, while the seceding members formed and nominated John C. Breckinridge and Joseph Lane.

The result was the election of the Republican candidates, Lincoln and Hamlin, by a sectional vote. Kentucky gave to Bell and Everett 66,016 votes; to Breckinridge and Lane, 52,836; to Douglas and Johnson, 25,644; and to Lincoln and Hamlin, 1,366. John C. Breckinridge, at the time vicepresident, had been, on the 12th of December before, elected to the Senate of the United States, showing the Democratic party then to be in the as

I Collins, Vol. I., Annals.

TRIUMPH OF THE UNION TICKET.

597

GENERAL JOHN C. BRECKINRIDGE, son of Joseph Cabell Breckinridge, and grandson of Hon. John Breckinridge, was born near Lexington, January 21, 1821; graduated at Centre College, and completed his law studies at Transylvania; practiced at Lexington, and at Burlington, Iowa; entered the Mexican war as major of the Third Kentucky Regiment; was elected to the Legislature in 1849; to Congress in 1851 and 1853, from the Lexington district, and soon took rank as the most elegant and popular orator of that body, rising rapidly to political eminence; in 1856, was elected vice-president of the United States on the ticket with James Buchanan; defeated for president in 1860; elected United States senator in 1861, and resigned the same year to join his fortunes with the Confederate cause. His brilliant military career at Bowling Green, Shiloh, Vicksburg, Baton Rouge, Murfreesboro, Jackson. Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, and in West and South-west Virginia, are of historic record. He was Confederate States secretary of war at the close, escaping by way of Cuba and England to Canada, finally returning to Lexington and devoting himself to the construction of the Lexington & Big Sandy railroad, of which he was vice-president until his death, May 17, 1875. This country has, perhaps, never produced a man more richly endowed with imposing personal presence and manly form and features, with elegant and popular manners, and with magnetic and graceful oratory. The juggernaut of war never stained its wheels with nobler blood nor left a grander spirit in ruins.

cendency in the Legislature, with a Democratic governor. It will thus appear that the Democratic or States' Rights party had the destiny of the State in their hands at the outbreak of the civil war. A very large number of the leaders of the party were doubtless inclined to follow the South, if disunion should be the alternative adopted in the event of Mr. Lincoln's election. Their motives were mainly held in reticence for a time, though gradually they became apparent from many indices of expression. Would the great mass of the people follow this element of leadership when the moment of decisive action came? A test was had in advance at the State election in August, 1860. Leslie Combs, Union, received 68,165 votes; Clinton McCarty, Breckinridge Democrat, 44,942; and R. R. Bolling, Union Democrat, 10,971, showing a majority leaning to the side of the Union of 39,184.

2 Shaler well says of this state of political affairs: "It would not be proper to represent this feeling of the conservative party as an unqualified approval of the project of remaining in the Union without regard to conditions. The state of mind of the masses of the people at this time is hard to 1 Shaler's Commonwealths, p. 233

2 Kentucky Commonwealths, pp. 234-37.

make clear to those who, by geographical position, were so fortunate as to have their minds borne into a perfectly-definite position in this difficult question of national politics. The citizen of Massachusetts, or the citizen of South Carolina, surrounded by institutions and brought up under associations which entirely committed him to a course of action that was unquestionably the will of the people, had only to float on a current that bore him along. Whatever the issue might be, unity of action within his sphere was easily attained. Not so with the citizen of Kentucky. The Commonwealth was pledged by a generation of conservatism, the sentiment of which had been repeatedly enunciated in county and State conventions and in many assemblies of the people. At the same time, if the Union should go to pieces utterly, what should she do to save her own staunch ship from the general peril? The ties of blood and of institutions bound Kentucky with the Southern States, which were soon to drift away from the Union. The pledge of political faith tied her to the fragment of the Union with which she had not much of social sympathy, and in which she could not expect much comfort. Surely, never was a people more unhappily placed. Out of this chaos of anxious doubt there came a curious state of mind, which soon took shape and action.

"The general opinion of Kentucky was that the war was an unnatural strife, which would necessarily result in the certain, though, as hoped, temporary disruption of the Union they loved so well. They did not believe that the States had a moral right to secede; on the other hand, they did not believe that the Federal Government had the constitutional or other right to coerce them back into the Union. Their profound desire and preference was that the withdrawing States should be allowed to go in peace. She would stay where her pledges kept her, and, after a sorrowful experience, she believed that her erring sisters would return to the fold. If the Federal Government determined what seemed to them the unconstitutional process of arms to compel the States to return into the Union, Kentucky would have no part in the process. She would stand aloof, while both North and South left the paths of duty under the Constitution, bidding them not to invade her soil with their hostile armies. In the wild talk of the time, this neutrality project of Kentucky was denounced as cowardly. There may be in the world people whom it would be proper to defend from this accusation; but not in this history. With Kentucky, this attitude was a sorrowful and noble, though, it must be confessed in the after-light of events, a somewhat Quixotic, position. In the rage of the storm almost ready to break in its fury upon the country, it appeared at the time a very rational standing ground. If war came into Kentucky, it would be internecine and fratricidal. It was not the fear of war, for the losses and dangers it might bring; but our people did look with terror on the fight between friends and neighbors and brothers. They were justified in their own minds, and will be justified in the reasonable opinions of mankind, in adopting what appeared