A DIVIDED PEOPLE 



173 



I recall seeing in this time the parties of recruits going their 

 several ways to their appointed places in the opposing armies, 

 the Unionists to Camp Dick Robinson or other recruiting points 

 in the state, and the Confederates to places beyond its lines, 

 where the most of them were to leave their bones. In one in- 

 stance I saw groups of these parting men pass on the way with 

 salute and courtesy ; we had got by the first fury of the debate, 

 that of hot words, and were making ready for the tussle which 

 both sides knew would be hard. It was evident that the Con- 

 federacy was to have what seemed to be and indeed was 

 the flower of our youth and manhood ; nearly all the young men 

 who by their qualities seemed to be the natural leaders of their 

 generation, cast in their lot with the South. There remained 

 a strong body of the middle-aged and the old, the abler of the 

 generations that were passing and the youths of the plainer sort, 

 more numerous than we then judged them to be, whose reason 

 discounted their sympathies ; for it is to be confessed that all 

 of us were in a sense sympathizers with the South in our hearts 

 - it was our heads that kept us in the Union. In that time it 

 was the presumption, the fatal presumption, of Breckinridge 

 and his advisers that this social sympathy would force all of us 

 who were well-born to cast aside our rational part and to join 

 with them. Thus while I was known as a Unionist of the States'- 

 Rights group, I found, from a friend who had gone South and 

 was captured in 1862, that a place had been long kept for me 

 on the staff of a certain Confederate general, and there was 

 surprise that I had not turned up there. At the moment, this 

 did not seem to me strange, though it gave me a peculiar kind 

 of grief to think that I was parted from my friends. Nearly all 

 those friends of my youth were then under the Southern flag, 

 and I felt curiously lonely in being parted from them. So far 

 as I can remember of the some score with whom I had been in 

 intimate association only Foley, John Mason Brown, and James 

 Jackson were on the Union side. 



My survey of the situation in Kentucky led me to feel that I 



