[397] the state. Steps were taken by its officers to enroll all able-bodied male negroes in the state between the ages of twenty and forty-five years, that they might form a part of its forces. The effect of this measure was to break up the labor system of the state, and meanwhile the pseudophilanthropists furnished food for powder and indulged their ideas of freedom at their neighbors' expense. The excitement produced caused the governor to visit Washington and effect agreements by which all recruiting should cease when a county's quota was full, all recruits should be removed from the state, and other similar provisions. A year later he said to the legislature: ‘Had these agreements been carried out, a very different state of feeling would have existed in Kentucky. But, instead of carrying them out, the most offensive and injurious modes were adopted to violate them.’ The next step taken by the government of the United States in the subversion of the government of Kentucky was the destruction of the unalienable right of personal liberty of the citizens, which the state was in duty bound to protect. The Union governor of the state, whose election was aided by the United States military officers, as above stated, is the witness for the facts. In his message to the legislature of January, 1865, he says:
The gravest matter of military outrage has been, and yet is, the arrest, imprisonment, and banishment of loyal citizens without a hearing, and without even a knowledge of the charges against them. There have been a number of this class of arrests, merely for partisan political vengeance, and to force them to pay heavy sums to purchase their liberation. How the spoils so infamously extorted are divided, has not transpired to the public information. For partisan political ends, General John B. Huston was arrested at midnight preceding the election, and hurried off under circumstances of shameful aggravation. He was, however, released in a few days; but that does not atone for the criminality of his malicious arrest and false imprisonment. The battle-scarred veteran, Colonel Frank Wolford, whose name and loyal fame are part of his country's proudest memories, and whose arrest for political vengeance should put a nation's check to blush, is yet held in durance vile, without a hearing and without an accusation, so far as he or his friends can ascertain. Lieutenant-Governor Jacobs, whose yet unclosed wounds were received in battle for his country, was made a victim to partisan and personal enmity, and hurried without a hearing and without any known accusation through the rebel lines into Virginia. The action in this case is in defiance of Federal and State Constitutions and laws, in defiance of the laws of humanity and liberty, dishonors the cause of our country, and degrades the military rank to the infamous uses of partisan and personal vengeance. Other cases might be mentioned, but these are selected because they are known to the whole country; the acts of these men are part of the glorious history of loyal heroism.The next step in the progress of the subjugation of the state
