seem safe to leave outside.



V


The political conditions in Kentucky were anomalous. The Republican Party
had not yet definitely taken root. Many of the rich old Whigs, who had held
to the Government--to save their slaves--resenting Lincoln's Emancipation
Proclamation, had turned Democrats. Most of the before-the-war Democrats
had gone with the Confederacy. The party in power called itself Democratic,
but was in fact a body of reactionary nondescripts claiming to be Unionists
and clinging, or pretending to cling, to the hard-and-fast prejudices of
other days.

The situation may be the better understood when I add that "negro
testimony"--the introduction to the courts of law of the newly made
freedmen as witnesses--barred by the state constitution, was the burning
issue. A murder committed in the presence of a thousand negroes could not
be lawfully proved in court. Everything from a toothbrush to a cake of
soap might be cited before a jury, but not a human being if his skin
happened to be black.

[Illustration: Mr. Watterson's Editorial Staff in 1868, When the
Three Daily Newspapers of Louisville Were United into the
"_Courier-Journal_." Mr. George D. Prentice and Mr. Watterson Are in
the Center.]

To my mind this was monstrous. From my cradle I had detested slavery. The