ntucky the brothers had
been born in the same bed, slept in the same cradle, played under the
same roof, sat side by side in the same schoolroom, and stood now on
the threshold of manhood arm in arm, with mutual interests, mutual
love, mutual pride in family that made clan feeling peculiarly intense.
For antislavery fanaticism, or honest unionism, one needed not to go to
the far North; as, for imperious, hotheaded, non-interference or pure
State sovereignty, one needed not to go to the far South. They were all
there in the State, the county, the family--under the same roof. Along
the border alone did feeling approach uniformity--the border of
Kentucky hills. There unionism was free from prejudice as nowhere else
on the continent save elsewhere throughout the Southern mountains.
Those Southern Yankees knew nothing about the valley aristocrat,
nothing about his slaves, and cared as little for one as for the other.
Since '76 they had known but one flag, and one flag only, and to that
flag instinctively they rallied. But that the State should be swept
from border to border with horror, there was division even here: for,
in the Kentucky mountains, there was, here and there, a patriarch like
Joel Turner who owned slaves, and he and his sons fought for them as he
and his sons would have fought for their horses, or their cattle, or
their sheep.
It was the prescient horror of such a condition that had no little part
in the neutral stand that Kentucky strove to maintain. She knew what
war was--for every fireside was rich in memories that men and women had
of kindred who had fallen on numberless battle-fields--back even to St.
Clair's defeat and the Raisin massacre; and though she did not fear war
for its harvest of dangers and death, she did look with terror on a
conflict between neighbors, friends, and brothers. So she refused
troops to Lincoln; she refused them to Davis. Both pledged her immunity
from invasion, and, to enforce that pledge, she raised Home Guards as
she had already raised State Guards for internal protection and peace.
And there--as a State--she stood: but the tragedy went on in the
Kentucky home--a tragedy of peculiar intensity and pathos in one
Kentucky home--the Deans'.
Harry had grown up tall, pale, studious, brooding. He had always been
the pet of his Uncle Brutus--the old Lion of White Hall. Visiting the
Hall, he had drunk in the poison, or consecration, as was the point of
view, of abolitionism. At th
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