It seemed the merest reactionary. A group of influential Republicans,
dissatisfied for one cause and another with Grant, held a caucus and issued
a call for what they described as a Liberal Republican Convention to
assemble in Cincinnati May 1, 1872.

A Southern man and a Confederate soldier, a Democrat by conviction and
inheritance, I had been making in Kentucky an uphill fight for the
acceptance of the inevitable. The line of cleavage between the old and the
new South I had placed upon the last three amendments to the Constitution,
naming them the Treaty of Peace between the Sections. The negro must be
invested with the rights conferred upon him by these amendments, however
mistaken and injudicious the South might think them. The obsolete Black
Laws instituted during the slave regime must be removed from the statute
books. The negro, like Mohammed's coffin, swung in midair. He was neither
fish, flesh nor fowl, nor good red herring. For our own sake we must
habilitate him, educate and elevate him, make him, if possible, a contented
and useful citizen. Failing of this, free government itself might be
imperiled.

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--and especially in Kentucky--there was an element that wanted to
fight when it was 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