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 on what seemed to them the unconstitutional resort to 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 some

what 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 to them would avert such war, and possibly enable them to stand finally as peacemakers between the hostile sections."

If this volume should happily fall into the hands of a future historian of our country, it is asked that he shall remember that the sober words just quoted, were written by a Kentuckian who served in the war as an officer of the Union army, and that they are quoted here with approval by another Kentuckian who wore the uniform of a Confederate soldier.

Attention is called to Professor Shaler's statement that the profound desire and preference of Kentucky was that "the withdrawing states should be allowed to go in peace." Those who remember that dark era in our history, will recall that Horace Greeley, a Republican and the greatest editor of that time, urged that the government "let the erring sisters go in peace."

It is the belief of this writer that had this advice of Kentucky and of Mr. Greeley been accepted by the government, the "erring sisters" as the latter termed them, would have long since returned to the Union, with slavery dead by the common consent of all the people, and that thus the horrors of internecine strife, the shedding of brother's blood by brother, the tremendous national debt and the horrors of Reconstruction might have been averted. There are those who took part on the one side or the other in that great contest,

Those were gloomy days when on the first Monday in December, 1860, congress assembled. Not for many years to come was another congress to assemble in Washington with every state represented. The record of the intervening years was to be written in crimson letters upon the battlefields of a divided country, and before the representatives of many of the states then present would in their own persons or those of their successors, again be seated there, a great war would be fought and a veritable saturnalia of thievery be inaugurated in certain of the states under the name of Reconstruction, when the carpetbagger and the "scalawag," combining with the negro just released from bondage and the cotton field, would saddle upon stricken states financial burdens under which they yet stagger though the sun of prosperity has again shone upon them.

When the congress met President Buchanan, beset by such conditions and difficulties as no president before him had known, found himself at sea, the chart and compass of the constitution not affording him apparently a safe way out of the troubles that daily grew around him. The southern states, or certain

of them, made no secret of their intention to secede from the Union. In his message to congress he recognized these conditions, but, while declaring that the right of secession did not exist within the states, he found no authority in the Federal government to prevent it. While it may have added to his fame to have taken a firmer stand against secession, it would not have prevented it. The extreme southern states were determined; their minds. had long been made up and they cherished the hope that the border states, such as Kentucky, Missouri and Maryland, would be one with them in the determination to withdraw from the Federal Union.

The message of Mr. Buchanan, in the then inflamed state of the public mind, was the object of bitter attack. Kentucky through her venerable and able senator, John J. Crittenden, ever hopeful of a peaceful solution of the great question at issue, praised the peaceful tone of the message while not wholly approving all of its features. Mr. Crittenden longed for peace, since, with prophetic eye, he saw what war would mean not only to Kentucky but to the whole country. He pleaded for a judicial rather than a passionate