Col. J. Stoddard Johnston, Confederate Military History, a library of Confederate States Military History: Volume 9.1, Kentucky
Clement Anselm Evans, Ed.

[24] friends of the South recognized that it gave an advantage to that section greater than any number of troops which she could contribute, since it guarded seven hundred miles of Ohio river front and made of the State a safe frontier in rear of which the armies of the South could organize free from molestation. They also felt an increased security against the ravages of war, granting that each side would act in good faith in maintaining the status quo; since they felt assured that self interest no less than explicit promise would prevent the compact being violated by the Southern armies, and believed that if it were broken by the other side, it would make the State practically a unit in opposition to the North. On the other hand the government at Washington assented to the truce for similar reasons; since it made the Tennessee line instead of the Ohio the limit of the Southern advance, and gave time for organization and for the ultimate occupation of Kentucky when the necessity should arise or the conditions prove favorable. No issue was raised as to either the right of the Federal troops to enter upon Kentucky soil or the duty of the State to obey the mandate of the Federal government.

The paramount power of the central authority as against the exercise of the State's right to determine her own action was not seriously questioned, and the leading Union men who afterward became prominent as civil and military officers enforcing the most arbitrary edicts, had no difficulty in advocating, as indeed they originated, the doctrine of neutrality. It was, in fact, a diplomatic stroke on their part as the only way of arresting the tide which from the beginning set so strongly toward the South. For several months both parties were playing for the advantage. It was a skirmish for position in which the result showed that the Union party won. It assumed at first the special championship of neutrality, alleging that it was the surest guarantee of peace, and operating on the fears or cupidity of those