the use of civilized man. In all the northern states the work of subjugation and construction which is necessary upon new ground was, in good part, accomplished by the aid of capital that was brought into the country in its settlement. None of these outside aids were offered to Kentucky. The first settlers had little capital beyond the price of their lands, and a few household effects that could be packed on horses or wagoned over the mountains. All their wealth they had to win from the soil and from their little factories.

"Two circumstances greatly helped this people to establish the foundations of their wealth. The settlements at the mouth of the Mississippi afforded, in a very early day, a considerable market for certain products of the soil, especially tobacco. This plant, which had given a basis for the early commerce of Virginia, helped, in turn, the development of Kentucky. As early as 1790, there was a considerable shipment of this article. GenGeneral Wilkinson, whose last shipments were in 1790, received, as was found in his courtmartial, as much as $80,000, for a small part of his tobacco alone, from the Spanish agents, and he was only a pioneer in the business, which afterwards grew to be a great com

merce, even before the cession of the Louisiana territory to the United States.

"In 1860, Kentuckians had already won nearly one-half of the state's surface to the plow. The remainder was still in forests. At no time had there been any pressure for means of subsistence upon the people. The soils of the first quality were now actively under tillage or in grass. Nearly one-third of the state was still covered with original forests, rich in the best timber, and the mineral wealth of the state was essentially untouched. The geological survey of Dr. David Dale Owen had shown that this country was extraordinarily rich in coal beds and iron ore deposits, but the state drew its supply of timber, coal and iron from beyond its borders. All its principal industries were agricultural, and its exports were raw products and men-exports, as has been well remarked, that naturally go out together, and to impoverish a country. Its growth of population was now, in the later decade of its existence, relatively slow; not that the people were less fecund than of old, but the trifling incoming of settlers along its northern borders did not in any degree replace the constant westward tide of emigration."

The public mind of Kentucky was filled with forebodings of danger and distress in 1860. A border state, lying on the Ohio river, it may be described as being the dividing line between the extreme north and the extreme south, perhaps it may be better stated as the conservative line between the extreme antislavery element of the northern states, and the "fire-eating" element of the slave-holding southern territory, which was ready to dare all, risk all, in defense of home rule, the right to control its own local affairs and, if you please to put it so, defense of "the peculiar institution," as some one had termed slavery.

Kentucky was a slave state, but slavery in its mildest form was the characteristic of the servitude. Indeed, there is scarcely a doubt that the majority of the better informed people of the state would have been pleased had there not been a slave within its borders. But the members of no considerable political party in the state had sympathy with the radical views of those who bore what was then the opprobious name of "Abolitionists." These latter were regarded as enemies to the government, who would not hesitate to destroy the constitution if they could thereby destroy also the institution of slavery. Wm. Lloyd Garrison, the sanest madman who ever stood upon the lecture platform for the destruction of slavery, declared the constitution of his country to be "a league with Hell and a covenant with Death." In these words, he recognized the contention of the slave-holding states

that the constitution recognized and protected slavery. The south had never claimed more than this, and not all the eloquence of Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner or Henry Ward Beecher, the arch-enemies of slavery, could destroy the tremendous force of Garrison's admission. Wm. L. Yancey, the stormy petrel of the south, from his place in the senate, with all his forceful eloquence, voiced the sentiments of southern extremists and hurled defiance at those of the north whom he regarded as their natural enemies. Other southern statesmen, wiser and more conservative than Yancey, read the ominous signs of the times and sought in milder terms, and by compromise, to stay the rising tide. Kentucky, first-born of the Union, loved that Union and her statesmen, who from the very beginning of her statehood had taken high rank in the councils of the nation, pleaded for moderation. Mr. Clay, who through a long public career, had sought by compromise and concession, to preserve the Union intact and at the same time to conserve the rights of the states, had gone to his reward. Mr. Crittenden yet remained upon the field of active political endeavor and his powerful voice was always raised for the Union, but he never forgot the state which had honored him and which he had in equal measure, honored. By his side stood Kentuckians of lesser degree, and behind him stood Kentucky, that Kentucky which while yet in swaddling clothes, had aided George Rogers Clark to wrest an

the Laws." The ticket received so small a vote as to be a neglible quantity in the general result.

The Democratic party met in national convention at Charleston, South Carolina, having within itself the elements which foretold defeat. The southern element stood firmly for the doctrine of "State Rights" and refused to yield an iota of its views. The Republican party, which had absorbed the Abolitionists of the earlier days of opposition to slavery and which was wholly sectional or northern, having no constituency south of Mason and Dixon's line, had noted the weakness of the Whig or Union party, and the division in the hitherto dominant ranks of the Democracy, and gathering strength through the weakness of its opponents, had grown more arrogant and insistent upon the acceptance of its sectional views. Kansas and Nebraska, seeking admission into the Union, brought the slavery question to the front and into a more dangerous position than had ever before confronted the Union. Conservatives from the northern states joined with the southern men in congress in efforts to stay the gathering storm, but without avail. To add to the delicacy of the situation, the internecine war between the border residents of Missouri, most of whom were native Kentuckians, and the northern. settlers of Kansas, showed no signs of intermission or conclusion. The "irrepressible conflict," which term was invented by Hinton Rowan Helper, of North Carolina, and afterwards adopted as his own by William H. Seward, of New York, had begun in Kansas its deadly work, which before its conclusion, was to drench our country in the blood of its young men; give a new meaning to the constitution of the United States and read into the history of the world a new power henceforth to be known as a Nation. Disguise it as we may; think of State Rights as we may; of the decisions of the supreme court as we may, the United States of today are a Nation

to be reckoned with by all the world. It may be said that this condition came only after the war with Spain, yet it cannot be denied that the beginning was at Appomattox in 1865, if not at Fort Sumter in 1861.

When the Charleston Convention met in 1860, Stephen A. Douglas, a senator from Illinois, known as "The Little Giant of Democracy," who had but recently emerged from a political discussion with Abraham Lincoln, which had attracted the attention of the country and brought the latter into a prominence hitherto denied him, was the candidate of a wing of the Democratic party, who endorsed his views of "squatter sovereignty," which sought to solve the slavery problem by leaving to the settlers in any territory the right to vote upon the question as to whether or not slavery should exist therein. This idea appealed neither to the radical north nor to the now thoroughly aroused south, and resulted in a failure of the convention to make a nomination. Douglas, a man of great intellect and yet greater ambition, had long had his ambitious eyes upon the presidency, but his great desire to reach that eminency had led him "to palter in a double sense" with the people of the north and of the south. In the ruder language of the day, he had attempted "to carry water on both shoulders" and failed in the effort. effort. In the fifty-seven ballots cast in the convention at Charleston he failed to receive the two-thirds vote required by the rules to secure a nomination and, no other candidate having received the required two-thirds vote, the convention adjourned to reassemble at a later date at Baltimore. It is a historical fact that at the Charleston convention, Benjamin F. Butler, of Massachusetts, of subsequent infamous memory in the south, cast fifty-three votes for Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, as the Democratic candidate for the presidency. On the reassembling of the convention at Baltimore, a large portion of the southern delegates withdrew after registering a protest

against the action of the convention. Those remaining named Stephen A. Douglas, for president and Herschel V. Johnson, of Georgia, for vice-president, the selection of the latter being, of course, a bid for the southern support needed for the success of the ticket.

The delegates who withdrew from the convention nominated for president John C. Breckinridge, of Kentucky, and Joseph Lane, of Oregon, for vice-president.

The Republican party, in convention at Chicago, had named for the presidency. Abraham Lincoln, who was chosen over the men who had for years been recognized as the leaders of that party. For the vice-presidency, Hannibal Hamlin, of Maine, was nominated. This ticket was successful in the national election by an entirely sectional vote, and for the first time a Republican president was to sit in the chair of the chief magistrate of our country. In Kentucky, Bell and Everett received 66,016 votes; Breckinridge, and Lane, 52,836 votes; Douglas and Johnson, 25,644 votes, and Lincoln and Hamlin 1,366 votes, the latter vote showing the weakness of the anti-slavery element in the state at that time though the passage of time and the strange mutations of politics were to give the electoral vote of the state to William McKinley, the Republican candidate for the presidency in 1896, thirty-six years later.

With the announcement of the election of Mr. Lincoln the War Between the States was practically declared, and which was to end one phase of the negro question only to leave in its stead another and equally vexatious phase of the same question which yet remains to be solved, not by war nor perhaps even by statesmanship, but by the sound common sense of the people, north and south, as they come to know the problem and themselves better, and to trust each other more.

John C. Breckinridge while serving as vicepresident, having been chosen on the ticket

with Mr. Buchanan in 1856, had been elected a United States senator from Kentucky in December, 1859, before the division shown in 1860 had come to that party. The governor of the state, Beriah Magoffin, was also a Democrat. Thus the States Rights Democrats appeared to have control of the state and the power to direct its policies at this critical period, but this was only apparent on the surface. The presidential elections were held as now in November, but the state elections were then held on the first Monday in August quadrennially. At the August election held in 1860, for the choice of a clerk of the court of appeals, Leslie Combs, Union or Whig candidate, received 68,165 votes; Clinton McClarty, Breckinridge Democrat, 44,942 votes; and R. R. Bolling, Union Democrat, 10,971 votes, thus showing a Union or anti-Democratic majority of 34,194.

Professor Nathaniel Shaler, a native of Kentucky, a Union soldier, and for many years an honored professor at Harvard University, says of this result in his "Kentucky Commonwealth:" "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 at this time is hard to 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