USA > Kentucky > A history of Kentucky and Kentuckians; the leaders and representative men in commerce, industry and modern activities, Volume I > Part 42
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"If this estimate is correct, the fecundity of the Kentucky population in the first eighty years of its life, exceeds that which is re- corded for any other region in the world. There are several reasons which may account for the rapid multiplication of this people. In
the first place, the original settlers of Kentucky were of vigorous constitution ; they were not brought upon the soil by any solicitation what- ever, nor were they forced into immigra- tion by the need of subsistence. Access to the country was difficult and for some dec- ades the region was exposed to dangers from which all weak-bodied men would shrink. The employment of the early population was prin- cipally in agriculture upon soil which gave very free returns. There was plenty of un- occupied land for the rising generations, so there was no considerations of a prudential nature to restrain the increase of population. For a long time children were a source of ad- vantage to the land-tiller and apart from pe- cuniary gain, there was a curious patriarchal pride in a plenteous offspring. The clime proved exceedingly healthy. There were no low-grade malarial fevers to enfeeble the body, and the principal disease of the early days, a high-grade bilious fever, though rather deadly, did not impoverish the life as the ma- larial troubles of other regions in the Missis- sippi valley have done. Thus, the first popu- lation of Kentucky was from the purest spring that ever fertilized a country, and there was little to defile its waters. The principal evils that beset the population were two-first, the excessive use of tobacco and alcohol, which doubtless did something to lower the vitality of the population ; second, the extremely de- fective system of education which left the people essentially without the means of get- ting a training proportionate to their natural abilities.
"The institution of slavery tended to keep the industrial and the related social develop- ment confined within narrow limits. At the beginning of the century the state had an in- dustrial spirit that was fit to compare with that of New England and the other northern free siates. Many of the arts that were exer- cised by the whites took on a rapid advance, but the negro is not, by nature, a good general
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citizen, nor could he be expected to develop his capacities in a state of slavery. Gradually manual labor, except in agriculture, became in a way discreditable and distasteful to the mastering race. The mechanical industries, except those of the simpler domestic sort, were generally abandoned, even before north- ern and eastern competition came in. This want of manufacturing life was by no means an unmitigated evil, for it kept the people in
"Despite these hindrances to social devel- opment, the commercial advance of Kentucky in the first eighty years of her history, was marvelously great, especially as it was accom- plished practically without the aid of any for- eign capital whatever. This absence of im- migrant capital in Kentucky in the first sixty or eighty years of its history, is something that well deserves to be considered in measur- ing the development of the state. Until the
BIRDSEYE VIEW OF MIDDLESBOROUGH
more wholesome occupation, but it served to restrain the growth of wealth .on which the progress of education and the development of capital so much depends. The development of slavery was also marked by the progressive separation of society into a richer and a poorer class, though, from the failure of the slave element to increase with the rapidity normal in the more southern states, the effect was not as great as in those districts. The middle class of farmers in Kentucky-those who though fairly well-to-do, were not slave own- ers-always remained a very strong, in fact, a controlling element in the Kentucky popu- lation.
close of the Civil war, there was scarcely an improvement in the commonwealth that was not the result of the capital won by the people. In connection with this, it should be remembered that the expenditure of labor required to bring an acre of Kentucky land under tillage is many times as great as that required to subjugate prairie land. The mere felling of the forest and grubbing of the stumps require at least twenty days labor to the acre of ground.
"It requires a vivid imagination, or some personal experience, to conceive of the enor- mous amount of physical labor involved in the bringing of the forest land into a shape for
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the use of civilized man. In all the northern states the work of subjugation and construc- tion which is necessary upon new ground was, in good part, accomplished by the aid of cap- ital that was brought into the country in its settlement. None of these outside aids were offered to Kentucky. The first settlers had little capital beyond the price of their lands, and a few household effects that could be packed on horses or wagoned over the moun- tains. All their wealth they had to win from the soil and from their little factories.
"Two circumstances greatly helped this peo- ple to establish the foundations of their wealth. The settlements at the mouth of the Mississippi afforded, in a very early day, a considerable market for certain products of the soil, especially tobacco. This plant, which had given a basis for the early commerce of Virginia, helped, in turn, the development of Kentucky. As early as 1790, there was a considerable shipment of this article. Gen- eral Wilkinson, whose last shipments were in 1790, received, as was found in his court- martial, as much as $80,000, for a small part of his tobacco alone, from the Spanish agents, and he was only a pioneer in the business, which afterwards grew to be a great com-
merce, even before the cession of the Louis- iana territory to the United States.
"In 1860, Kentuckians had already won nearly one-half of the state's surface to the plow. The remainder was still in forests. At no time had there been any pressure for means of subsistence upon the people. The soils of the first quality were now actively under till- age or in grass. Nearly one-third of the state was still covered with original forests, rich in the best timber, and the mineral wealth of the state was essentially untouched. The ge- ological survey of Dr. David Dale Owen had shown that this country was extraordinarily rich in coal beds and iron ore deposits, but the state drew its supply of timber, coal and iron from beyond its borders. All its principal in- dustries were agricultural, and its exports were raw products and men-exports, as has been well remarked. that naturally go out to- gether, and to impoverish a country. Its growth of population was now, in the later decade of its existence, relatively slow; not that the people were less fecund than of old, but the trifling incoming of settlers along its northern borders did not in any degree re- place the constant westward tide of emigra- tion."
CHAPTER XLVI.
NOT BOUND UP IN SLAVERY-FOR UNION AND CONSTITUTION-POLITICAL PARTIES OF 1860 KENTUCKY DILEMMA-ADVICE OF KENTUCKY AND GREELEY.
The public mind of Kentucky was filled with forebodings of danger and distress in 1860. A border state, lying on the Ohio river, it may be described as being the dividing live be- tween the extreme north and the extreme south, perhaps it may be better stated as the conservative line between the extreme anti- slavery element of the northern states, and the "fire-eating" element of the slave-holding southern territory, which was ready to dare all, risk all, in defense of home rule, the right to control its own local affairs and, if you please to put it so, defense of "the peculiar in- stitution." as some one had termed slavery.
Kentucky was a slave state, but slavery in its mildest form was the characteristic of the servitude. Indeed, there is scarcely a doubt that the majority of the better informed peo- ple of the state would have been pleased had there not been a slave within its borders. But the members of no considerable political party in the state had sympathy with the radical views of those who bore what was then the opprobious name of "Abolitionists." These latter were regarded as enemies to the gov- ernment, who would not hesitate to destroy the constitution if they could thereby destroy also the institution of slavery. WVm. Lloyd Garrison, the sanest madman who ever stood upon the lecture platform for the destruction of slavery, declared the constitution of his country to be "a league with Hell and a cove- nant with Death." In these words, he recog- nized the contention of the slave-holding states
that the constitution recognized and protected slavery. The south had never claimed more than this, and not all the eloquence of Garri- son, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner or Henry Ward Beecher, the arch-enemies of slavery, could destroy the tremendous force of Garrison's admission. Wm. L. Yancey, the stormy petrel of the south, from his place in the senate, with all his forceful eloquence, voiced the sentiments of southern extremists and hurled defiance at those of the north whom he regarded as their natural enemies. Other southern statesmen, wiser and more conservative than Yancey, read the ominous signs of the times and sought in milder terms, and by compromise, to stay the rising tide. Kentucky, first-born of the Union, loved that Union and her statesmen, who from the very beginning of her statehood had taken high rank in the councils of the nation, pleaded for moderation. Mr. Clay, who through a long public career, had sought by compromise and concession, to preserve the Union intact and at the same time to conserve the rights of the states, had gone to his reward. Mr. Critten- den yet remained upon the field of active po- litical endeavor and his powerful voice was always raised for the Union, but he never forgot the state which had honored him and which he had in equal measure, honored. By his side stood Kentuckians of lesser degree, and behind him stood Kentucky, that Ken- tucky which while yet in swaddling clothes, had aided George Rogers Clark to wrest an
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empire's extent from savage foes and their no less savage associates, the British soldiery. Kentucky desired no dissolution of the Union it recognized the gravity of the situation and shuddered at that recognition. A dissolution, or even an attempt at dissolution of the Un- ion, meant more to Kentucky than to any other state. Her geographical position made this true. Her heart was not bound up in slavery, but its every pulsation was for the constitution to which she had subscribed and in every principle of which the state sin- cerely believed. If slavery had to go, let it go, but in a constitutional manner, not by the force indicated by the abolitionists of the north, who recognized no law-no consti- tutional inhibition running counter to their theories. Had there been no Abolition party in the north there would have been no War Between the States, and it is believed that there would have been today, no man a slave over whom the flag of our country floated.
The disunionists of the north forced the hands of the disunionists of the south and brought to our country its unnumbered woes. These words are written by one who never saw the day when he believed in human slav- ery, yet who served in the Confederate army until that army no longer existed. He was opposed to slavery, but, in common with thou- sands of others, was a believer in the con- stitution of his country, and did not under- stand that anyone of the provisions of that instrument justified the destruction of the prop- erty rights of one section of his country by the fanatical force of another section. In other words, he, with the people of his state and of the south, believed that the states had rights in their property which the general gov- ernment must respect, and that it had no more right to destroy that property than it had to adopt the Alien and Sedition Acts denounced by the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798-9. .
While Kentucky's great heart beat true to the Union, her generous sympathies were in Vol 1-19.
large part with her sister southern states, her own kindred, bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh. The day was fast approaching when a choice must be made. Either she must stand for a Union, the laws of which were to be made by a political party which knew south- ern sentiment only to deprecate and despise it, or she was to take her stand by those who were one with her in thought, affection and blood. The grandsons of Revolutionary he- roes; the sons of the men of 1812, who had twice met and driven from our shores the bat- talions of England, had now a sterner alterna- tive presented them. It was a dreadful ordeal confronting them and the result showed that it was even sterner than they thought. Upon a hundred battlefields her gallant sons con- tended before the dread conflict was ended and the question which had been asked a thousand times since our government was founded, had at last been answered.
Political parties, torn asunder by conflict- ing views, numbered in their membership to- day men who had but yesterday fought in the ranks or the leadership of opposing political forces. The Whigs who, for years had proudly dominated the politics of the state, who had sought through the American or Know Nothing party, to restore their waning political fortunes but without avail, disinte- grating as a party, after the election of 1860, found refuge in the other existing parties- some going to the Democratic party, others to what came later to be known as the Union party, these latter finally finding a congenial refuge in the Republican ranks.
The Democratic party was no more fortu- nate than the Whigs. The latter named a presidential ticket headed by John Bell, of Tennessee, for president and Edward Ever- ett, of Massachusetts, for vice-president. These appealed for support upon the shortest political platform ever submitted to the peo- ple, its simple terms declaring : "For the Un- ion : the Constitution and the Enforcement of
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the Laws." The ticket received so small a vote as to be a neglible quantity in the general result.
The Democratic party met in national con- vention at Charleston, South Carolina, having within itself the elements which foretold de- feat. The southern element stood firmly for the doctrine of "State Rights" and refused to yield an iota of its views. The Republican party. which had absorbed the Abolitionists of the earlier days of opposition to slavery and which was wholly sectional or northern, hav- ing no constituency south of Mason and Dix- on's line, had noted the weakness of the Whig or Union party, and the division in the hitherto dominant ranks of the Democracy, and gathering strength through the weakness of its opponents, had grown more arrogant and insistent upon the acceptance of its sec- tional views. Kansas and Nebraska, seeking admission into the Union, brought the slavery question to the front and into a more danger- ous position than had ever before confronted the Union. Conservatives from the northern states joined with the southern men in con- gress in efforts to stay the gathering storm, but without avail. To add to the delicacy of the situation, the internecine war between the border residents of Missouri, most of whom were native Kentuckians, and the northern settlers of Kansas, showed no signs of inter- mission or conclusion. The "irrepressible conflict," which term was invented by Hinton Rowan Helper, of North Carolina, and after- wards adopted as his own by William H. Sew- ard, of New York, had begun in Kansas its deadly work, which before its conclusion, was to drench our country in the blood of its young men; give a new meaning to the con- stitution of the United States and read into the history of the world a new power hence- forth to be known as a Nation. Disguise it as we may; think of State Rights as we may ; of the decisions of the supreme court as we may, the United States of today are a Nation
to be reckoned with by all the world. It may be said that this condition came only after the war with Spain, yet it cannot be denied that the beginning was at Appomattox in 1865, if not at Fort Sumter in 1861.
When the Charleston Convention met in 1860, Stephen A. Douglas, a senator from Il- linois, known as "The Little Giant of Dem- ocracy," who had but recently emerged from a political discussion with Abraham Lincoln, which had attracted the attention of the coun- try and brought the latter into a prominence hitherto denied him, was the candidate of a wing of the Democratic party, who endorsed his views of "squatter sovereignty," which sought to solve the slavery problem by leaving to the settlers in any territory the right to vote upon the question as to whether or not slavery should exist therein. This idea ap- pealed neither to the radical north nor to the now thoroughly aroused south, and resulted in a failure of the convention to make a nom- ination. Douglas, a man of great intellect and yet greater ambition, had long had his ambi- tious eyes upon the presidency, but his great desire to reach that eminency had led him "to palter in a double sense" with the people of the north and of the south. In the ruder lan- guage of the day, he had attempted "to carry water on both shoulders" and failed in the effort. In the fifty-seven ballots cast in the convention at Charleston he failed to receive the two-thirds vote required by the rules to secure a nomination and, no other candidate having received the required two-thirds vote, the convention adjourned to reassemble at a later date at Baltimore. It is a historical fact that at the Charleston convention, Benjamin F. Butler, of Massachusetts, of subsequent in- famous memory in the south, cast fifty-three votes for Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, as the Democratic candidate for the presidency.
On the reassembling of the convention at Baltimore, a large portion of the southern delegates withdrew after registering a protest
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against the action of the convention. Those remaining named Stephen A. Douglas, for president and Herschel V. Johnson, of Georgia, for vice-president, the selection of the latter being, of course, a bid for the south- ern support needed for the success of the ticket.
The delegates who withdrew from the con- vention nominated for president John C. Breckinridge, of Kentucky, and Joseph Lane, of Oregon, for vice-president.
The Republican party, in convention at Chi- cago, had named for the presidency. Abra- ham Lincoln, who was chosen over the men who had for years been recognized as the leaders of that party. For the vice-presidency, Hannibal Hamlin, of Maine, was nominated. This ticket was successful in the national elec- tion by an entirely sectional vote, and for the first time a Republican president was to sit in the chair of the chief magistrate of our coun- try. In Kentucky, Bell and Everett received 66,016 votes ; Breckinridge, and Lane, 52,836 votes ; Douglas and Johnson, 25,644 votes, and Lincoln and Hamlin 1.366 votes, the latter vote showing the weakness of the anti-slav- ery element in the state at that time though the passage of time and the strange muta- tions of politics were to give the electoral vote of the state to William McKinley, the Repub- lican candidate for the presidency in 1896, thirty-six years later.
With the announcement of the election of Mr. Lincoln the War Between the States was practically declared, and which was to end one phase of the negro question only to leave in its stead another and equally vexatious phase of the same question which yet remains to be solved, not by war nor perhaps even by states- manship, but by the sound common sense of the people, north and south, as they come to know the problem and themselves better, and to trust each other more.
John C. Breckinridge while serving as vice- president, having been chosen on the ticket
with Mr. Buchanan in 1856, had been elected a United States senator from Kentucky in De- cember, 1859, before the division shown in 1860 had come to that party. The governor of the state, Beriah Magoffin, was also a Democrat. Thus the States Rights Demo- crats appeared to have control of the state and the power to direct its policies at this critical period, but this was only apparent on the sur- face. The presidential elections were held as now in November, but the state elections were then held on the first Monday in August quad- rennially. At the August election held in 1860, for the choice of a clerk of the court of appeals, Leslie Combs, Union or Whig can- didate, received 68,165 votes; Clinton Mc- Clarty, Breckinridge Democrat, 44,942 votes ; and R. R. Bolling, Union Democrat, 10,97I votes, thus showing a Union or anti-Demo- cratic majority of 34,194.
Professor Nathaniel Shaler, a native of Kentucky, a Union soldier, and for many years an honored professor at Harvard Uni- versity, says of this result in his "Kentucky Commonwealth :" "It would not be proper to represent this feeling of the conservative party as an unqualified approval of the project of remaining in the Union without regard to con- ditions. The state of mind of the masses at this time is hard to make clear to those who, by geographical position, were so fortunate as to have their minds borne into a perfectly defi- nite position in this difficult question of na- tional politics. The citizen of Massachusetts or the citizen of South Carolina, surrounded by institutions and brought up under associa- tions which entirely committed him to a course of action that was unquestionably the will of the people, had only to float on a current that bore him along. Whatever the issue might be, unity of action within his sphere was eas- ily attained. Not so with the citizen of Ken- tucky. The commonwealth was pledged by a generation of conservatism, the sentiment of which had been repeatedly enunciated in
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MAJ. GEN. JOHN C. BRECKINRIDGE
Former Vice-President, United States. Later, Secretary of War, Confederate States
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county and state conventions and in many as- semblies 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 sym- pathy, and in which she could not expect much comfort. Surely, never was a people more unhappily placed. Out of this chaos of anx- ious doubt there came a curious state of mind which soon took shape and action. The gen- eral opinion of Kentucky was that the war was an unnatural strife which would neces- sarily 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 govern- ment had the constitutional or other right to coerce them back into the Union. Their pro- found 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 re- turn to the fold. If the Federal government determined on what seemed to them the un- constitutional 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, bid- ding them not to invade her soil with their hostile armies. In the wild talk of the time, this neutrality project of Kentucky was de- nounced as cowardly. There may be in the world people whom it would be proper to de- fend from this accusation, but not in this history. With Kentucky, this attitude was a sorrowful and noble, though, it must be con- fessed 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 ra- tional standing ground. If war came into Kentucky, it would be internecine and frat- ricidal. 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 be- tween 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 offi- cer of the Union army, and that they are quoted here with approval by another Ken- tuckian who wore the uniform of a Confeder- ate soldier.
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