April 12, 1861. |
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to the great delight and encouragement of the conspirators, and the dismay of the friends of American nationality, in the following words:--
“The President's Proclamation has reached us. We are struck with mingled amazement and indignation.
The policy announced in the Proclamation deserves the unqualified condemnation of every American citizen.
It is unworthy not only of a statesman, but of a man. It is a policy utterly hare-brained and ruinous.
If Mr. Lincoln contemplated this policy in his Inaugural Address, he is a guilty dissembler; if he has conceived it under the excitement aroused by the seizure of Fort Sumter, he is a guilty Hotspur.
In either case, he is miserably unfit for the exalted position in which the enemies of the country have placed-him.
Let the people instantly take him and his Administration into their own hands, if they would rescue the land from bloodshed and the Union from sudden and irretrievable destruction.”
1
Thus spoke the organ of the “Conservatives” of the great and influential State of Kentucky,2 and, indeed, of the great Valley of the Mississippi below the Ohio.
Its voice was potential, because it represented the feelings of the dominant class in the Border Slave-labor States.
From that hour the politicians of Kentucky, with few exceptions, endeavored to hold the people to a neutral attitude as between the National Government and the insurgents.
They were successful until the rank perfidy of the conspirators and the destructive invasions of the insurgent armies taught them that their only salvation from utter ruin was to be found in taking up arms in support of the Government.
The effect of that neutral policy, which, in a degree, was patriotic, because it seemed necessary to prevent the State from being properly ranked with the “seceding” States, will be observed hereafter.
There seemed to be calmness only at Montgomery, the Headquarters of the conspirators.
These men were intoxicated with apparent success at Charleston.
In profound ignorance of the patriotism, strength, courage, temper, and resources of the people of the Free-labor States, and in their pride and arrogance, created by their sudden possession of immense power which they had wrested from the people, they coolly defied the National Government, whose reins of control they expected soon to hold.
Already the so-called Secretary of War of the confederated conspirators (L. P. Walker) had revealed that expectation, in a speech from the balcony of the Exchange Hotel in Montgomery, in response to a serenade given to Davis and himself, on the evening of the day on which Fort Sumter was attacked.
“No man,” he said, “can tell when the war this day commenced3 will end; but I will prophesy that the flag which ”
1 Louisville Journal, April 16, 1861.
2 Kentucky was largely represented, at that time, by men prominent in public life. It was the native State of President Lincoln; Jefferson Davis; the late Vice-President Breckenridge; Senator John J. Crittenden; James Guthrie, Chairman of the committee on resolutions in the. Peace Convention at Washington; Major Anderson; Joseph Holt, late Secretary of War; General Harney, and several others of less note.
3 During the war it was often asserted by the conspirators, and by the opponents of the war in the Free-labor States, that the conflict was commenced by the National Government. This authoritative declaration of the War Minister of the “Confederacy”--“the war this day commenced”--settles the question.
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