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 there was an element, especially in Kentucky, which wanted to fight when it was much 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.
I was a young fellow of two and thirty, of boundless optimism and with my full share of self-confidence, no end of physical endurance and mental vitality, and 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 I was not wholly blind to consequences and the admonitions of prudence, and when the call for a Liberal Republican Convention appeared, I realized that, interested as I was in what might come of it, if I expected to remain a Democrat in a Democratic community, and to influence and lead a Democratic following, I must proceed with caution. Though many of those proposing the new movement were familiar acquaintances, some of them personal friends, the scheme was, as it were, in the air. Its three newspaper bell-wethers, Samuel Bowles of the Springfield “Republican,” Horace White of the Chicago “Tribune,” and Murat Halstead of the Cincinnati “Commercial,” were specially well known to me; so were Horace Greeley, Carl Schurz, and Charles Sumner. Stanley Matthews was my kinsman; George Hoadley and Cassius M. Clay were 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 Republicanism.
From a photograph taken about 1872, owned by Mr. F. H. Meserve
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS
Nevertheless, I resolved to go a little in advance to Cincinnati, to have a look at the stalking-horse there to be offered, free to take it or leave it, as I liked, my bridges and lines of communication still open and intact.
III
A LIVELIER and more variegated omnium-gatherum was never assembled. They had already begun to pour in when I arrived. There were long-haired and spectacled doctrinaires from New England, and short-haired and blatant emissaries from New York, mostly, as it turned out, friends of Horace Greeley. There were brisk Westerners from Chicago and St. Louis. If Whitelaw Reid, who had come as Greeley’s personal representative, had his retinue, so had Horace White and Carl Schurz. There were a few rather overdressed persons from New Orleans brought up by Governor Warmouth, and a motley array of Southerners of every sort, who were ready to clutch at any straw that promised relief to intolerable conditions. The full contingent of Washington correspondents was there, of course, with sharpened eyes and pencils, to make the most of what they had already begun to christen a conclave of cranks.
