Johnson had made a bungling attempt to carry out the policies of
Lincoln and had gone down in the strife. The Democratic Party had
reached the ebb tide of its disastrous fortunes.
It seemed the merest reactionary. A group of influential Republicans,
dissatisfied for one cause and another with Grant, held a caucus and
issued a call for what they described as a Liberal Republican
Convention to assemble in Cincinnati May 1, 1872.
A Southern man and a Confederate soldier, a Democrat by conviction and
inheritance, I had been making in Kentucky an uphill fight for 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 régime 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, Carl Schurz and Charles Sumner, Stanley Matthews being my
kinsman, George Hoadley and Cassius M. Clay next-door neighbors. But
they were not the men I had trained with—not my “crowd”—and it was a
question how far I might be able to reconcile myself, not to mention my
political associates, to such company, even conceding that they
proceeded under good fortune with a good plan, offering the South
extrication from its woes and the Democratic Party an entering wedge
into a solid and hitherto irresistible North.
Nevertheless, I resolved to go a little in advance to Cincinnati, to
have a look at the stalking horse there to be displayed, free to take
it or leave it as I liked, my bridges and lines of communication quite
open and intact.