r the
acceptance of the inevitable. The line of cleavage between the old
and the new South I had placed upon the last three amendments to the
Constitution, naming them the Treaty of Peace between the Sections.
The negro must be invested with the rights conferred upon him by these
amendments, however mistaken and injudicious the South might think
them. The obsolete Black Laws instituted during the slave regime must be
removed from the statute books. The negro, like Mohammed's coffin, swung
in midair. He was neither fish, flesh nor fowl, nor good red herring.
For our own sake we must habilitate him, educate and elevate him, make
him, if possible, a contented and useful citizen. Failing of this, free
government itself might be imperiled.

I had behind me the intelligence of the Confederate soldiers almost to
a man. They at least were tired of futile fighting, and to them the war
was over. But--and especially in Kentucky--there was an element that
wanted to fight when it was too late; old Union Democrats and Union
Whigs who clung to the hull of slavery when the kernel was gone, and
proposed to win in politics what had been lost in battle.

The leaders of this belated element were in complete control of the
political machinery of the state. They regarded me as an impudent
upstart--since I had come to Kentucky from Tennessee--as little better
than a carpet-bagger; and had done their uttermost to put me down and
drive me out.

[Illustration: Abraham Lincoln in 1861 _From a Photograph by M B Brady_]

I was a young fellow of two and thirty, of boundless optimism and my
full share of self-confidence, no end of physical endurance and mental
vitality, having some political as well as newspaper experience. It
never crossed my fancy that I could fail.

I met resistance with aggression, answered attempts at bullying with
scorn, generally irradiated by laughter. Yet was I not wholly blind to
consequences and the admonitions of prudence; and when the call for a
Liberal Republican Convention appeared I realized that if I expected to
remain a Democrat in a Democratic community, and to influence and lead a
Democratic following, I must proceed warily.

Though many of those proposing the new movement were familiar
acquaintances--some of them personal friends--the scheme was in the air,
as it were. Its three newspaper bellwethers--Samuel Bowles, Horace White
and Murat Halstead--were especially well known to me; so were Horace
Greeley,