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.