86 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SEALER 



party in favor of that institution. At first this group was in- 

 significant; from what I remember, and what I have learned 

 from the people of the generation before me, not one in ten of 

 the men of Kentucky would have sided with South Carolina 

 if the nullification doctrine had led to war; I very much doubt 

 if five per cent of the voters in 1850 would have favored seces- 

 sion. It was the misfortune of the Civil War period that the 

 preliminary stage of the combat lasted so long that there was 

 a chance for the amazing hatred of the Abolitionists to develop. 

 It knit the slaveholding states together, gradually breaking 

 up the Emancipation Party, which up to about 1840 appeared 

 to make steady growth in all the Border States. This new 

 opinion came by the gathering of the young men about certain 

 leaders of distinction, themselves youthful. John C. Brecken- 

 ridge was the strongest of these strong men who adopted the 

 "States'-Rights" view of the federal relation. They were not 

 numerous, but they were able and their arguments strong. It 

 was this theory of government, rather than any affection for 

 slavery or sympathy with the plantation states, which led a 

 large part of the people to become what was then called 

 Southern sympathizers. In a way, it was a recrudescence of 

 the old motive of independence which had led to the Kentucky 

 Resolutions of 1798, a state of mind which had been to all 

 appearance long dead. 



I can just recall the excitement of the controversy as to the 

 place of Kentucky in the struggle which was assumed to be 

 inevitable in 1857. At that time I became a member of a de- 

 bating society where the most of the members were lads of about 

 my age, but older than the most I now see who count one and 

 twenty years. Such societies were common throughout the 

 state. All our interminable debates concerned the burning 

 question as to the tenets of federal and state authority. We 

 all came to know the Federalist, the Constitution, the great 

 speeches and the court decisions almost by heart. In those 

 contests I took a large part, and developed a capacity for pub- 



