had resumed
the suspended publication of the Courier with encouraging prospects. I
had succeeded Mr. Prentice in the editorship and part ownership of the
Journal. Both Mr. Haldeman and I were newspaper men to the manner born
and bred; old and good friends; and after our rivalry of six months
maintained with activity on both sides, but without the publication of
an unkind word on either, a union of forces seemed exigent. To practical
men the need of this was not a debatable question. All that was required
was an adjustment of the details. Beginning with the simple project of
joining the Courier and the Journal, it ended by the purchase of the
Democrat, which it did not seem safe to leave outside.

V

The political conditions in Kentucky were anomalous. The Republican
Party had not yet definitely taken root. Many of the rich old Whigs, who
had held to the Government--to save their slaves--resenting Lincoln's
Emancipation Proclamation, had turned Democrats. Most of the
before-the-war Democrats had gone with the Confederacy. The party in
power called itself Democratic, but was in fact a body of reactionary
nondescripts claiming to be Unionists and clinging, or pretending to
cling, to the hard-and-fast prejudices of other days.

The situation may be the better understood when I add that "negro
testimony"--the introduction to the courts of law of the newly made
freedmen as witnesses--barred by the state constitution, was the burning
issue. A murder committed in the presence of a thousand negroes could
not be lawfully proved in court. Everything from a toothbrush to a cake
of soap might be cited before a jury, but not a human being if his skin
happened to be black.

[Illustration: Mr. Watterson's Editorial Staff in 1868, When the Three
Daily Newspapers of Louisville Were United into the "_Courier-Journal_."
Mr. George D. Prentice and Mr. Watterson Are in the Center.]

To my mind this was monstrous. From my cradle I had detested slavery.
The North will never know how many people at the South did so. I could
not go with the Republican Party, however, because after the death of
Abraham Lincoln it had intrenched itself in the proscription of Southern
men. The attempt to form a third party had shown no strength and had
broken down. There was nothing for me, and the Confederates who were
with me, but the ancient label of a Democracy worn by a riffraff of
opportunists, Jeffersonian principles having quite gone to seed. But