76 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SEALER 



by what is of record concerning the origin of the colonists, and 

 is well attested by the history of the people in the first two 

 generations of their life in this new field. By the middle of the 

 last century, the trials of those who found a state in the wilder- 

 ness were well by, the settlers were prosperous, the burthen of 

 life was light, the climate admirable, so that they were ideally 

 placed for further and high development in the intellectual 

 field. Just such a flowering of strength and capacity as I saw 

 in my youth was the natural, we may say the inevitable, out- 

 come of such a history. 



The failure of the Kentucky people to make good their pro- 

 mise; the fact that the youths of my time whom I judged to 

 be my betters have left no sign, is in my opinion to be accounted 

 for by a peculiar combination of circumstances, of which the 

 Civil War was the most potent. In that trial a large part of 

 the best of the youth perished, leaving no succession. There 

 are no trustworthy statistics to show the numbers who owed 

 their death or permanent invalidation to military service, but 

 the total probably amounted to not less than twenty thousand. 

 The whole number of men who stood in arms on the two sides 

 was about one hundred and thirty-five thousand, and of these 

 it is likely that at least one sixth were taken from the support 

 of their society which then had a population of less than a 

 million people. This sacrifice was in peculiarly large measure 

 from the intellectual, the state-shaping class. In far larger 

 proportion than the Northern states, this class contributed 

 men to the armies, and the percentage of deaths of these 

 natural leaders was very high. As I look back I count thirty 

 lads and young men of this group whom I knew who thus passed 

 before they came to their best years and left no children. More 

 than half the expectancy of the state that I knew was thus 

 swept away. 



Not only did the Civil War maim the generation of Ken- 

 tuckians to which I belonged, it also broke up the develop- 

 ing motives of intellectual culture of the commonwealth. Just 



