CHAPTER VI 



POLITICAL CLOUDS GATHER 



BEFORE taking up the story of my life as a student at Harvard, 

 it is well to round out the necessarily rambling account of my 

 boyhood life by telling something of the political life of the 

 years immediately preceding the Civil War, especially of the end- 

 less discussions concerning the slavery question and the place 

 of Kentucky in the war between North and South which all 

 sagacious persons foresaw. From the time I was twelve years 

 old, my grandfather in his Sunday afternoon lessons used often 

 to say to me : " My lad, when this comes, you belong on the side 

 of the Union." He, as others, knew the issue to be inevitable, 

 and his exhortation did much to determine my eventual state 

 of mind. He, too, was an Abolitionist, though he shaped the 

 purpose on the lines of the Liberian colonization project, on 

 which he abundantly discoursed to me. 



In my boyhood, say from 1855 on, the idea of secession be- 

 gan to be discussed. It had but few advocates among the noted 

 men, who were generally Henry Clay Whigs, with nothing but 

 denunciation for Calhoun and all his works. I recall being held 

 in my father's arms when I was perhaps eight years old to 

 hear Clay make a short but impassioned speech. I cannot re- 

 member anything about it, but I can see that eager face and 

 swaying body, and hear the cheers of his audience. In this 

 period, from 1850 onward, the irritation between the slave- 

 holding and the non-slaveholding sections became steadily more 

 and more intense. Now and then negroes ran away. About 

 1857, those belonging to my grandfather, my aunts, and my 

 mother, all household servants, some of them old people, de- 

 camped in one night. I remember the excitement when at 

 dawn a certain Sam Morton, who had also suffered from the 



