te even as free men and their
transportation to their native African soil. Henry Clay of all others
was the most persistent advocate of colonization.

We have seen that the general trend of public opinion from about 1798
had been progressively in favor of gradual emancipation provided it
was coupled with some form of colonization which would remove the
liberated Negroes from the State. Public sentiment, however, received
a serious set-back about 1838 with the beginning of the Underground
Railroad system and the incoming of the abolitionist literature. In a
speech in the Kentucky legislature of 1838 James T. Morehead, one of
the leading anti-slavery statesmen of the State, portrayed the coming
of the newer era in the history of Kentucky slavery when the people
would make more strenuous efforts to hold firmly to the slavery
institution. Morehead pictured the popular mind in these words: "Any
man who desires to see slavery abolished--any friend of emancipation,
gradual or immediate--- who supposes for a moment that now is the time
to carry out this favorite policy, must be blind to the prognostics
that lower from every quarter of the political sky. Sir, the present
is not the period to unmanacle the slave in this or any other state of
the Union. Four years ago you might have had some hope. But the wild
spirit of fanaticism has done much to retard the work of emancipation
and to rivet the fetters of slavery in Kentucky.... The advocates of
abolition--the phrenzied fanatics of the North, neither sleep nor
slumber. Their footsteps are even now to be seen wherever mischief can
be perpetrated--and it may be that while the people of Kentucky are
reposing in the confidence of fancied security, the tocsin of
rebellion may resound through the land--the firebrand of the
incendiary may wrap their dwellings in flames--their towns and cities
may become heaps of ashes before their eyes and their minds drawn off
from all thoughts of reforming the government to consider the means
necessary for their self-preservation--the protection of their
families and all that is dear to men."[441]

Such was the idea of one of the most prominent public men of Kentucky
and such became in time the opinion of the average citizen who had
come to believe in gradual emancipation as the hope and solution of
the Negro problem in the State. The future course of events regarding
slavery in Kentucky is to be explained by this radical change of
mind. Thus did th