In the far North, as in the far South, men had but to drift with the tide.
Among the Kentuckians, the forces that moulded her sons--Davis and Lincoln--were at war in the State, as they were at war in the nation. By ties of blood, sympathies, institutions, Kentucky was bound fast to the South. Yet, ten years before, Kentuckians had demanded the gradual emancipation of the slave. That far back, they had carved a pledge on a block of Kentucky marble, which should be placed in the Washington monument, that Kentucky would be the last to give up the Union. For ten years, they had felt the shadow of the war creeping toward them. In the dark hours of that dismal year, before the dawn of final decision, the men, women, and children of Kentucky talked of little else save war, and the skeleton of war took its place in the closet of every home from the Ohio to the crest of the Cumberland. When the dawn of that decision came, Kentucky spread before the world a record of independent-mindedness, patriotism, as each side save the word, and sacrifice that has no parallel in history. She sent the flower of her youth--forty thousand strong--into the Confederacy; she lifted the lid of her treasury to Lincoln, and in answer to his every call, sent him a soldier, practically without a bounty and without a draft. And when the curtain fell on the last act of the great tragedy, half of her manhood was behind it--helpless from disease, wounded, or dead on the battle-field.
So, on a gentle April day, when the great news came, it came like a sword that, with one stroke, slashed the State in twain, shearing through the strongest bonds that link one man to another, whether of blood, business, politics or religion, as though they were no more than threads of wool.
Nowhere in the Union was the National drama so played to the bitter end in the confines of a single State. As the nation was rent apart, so was the commonwealth; as the State, so was the county; as the county, the neighborhood; as the neighborhood, the family; and as the family, so brother and brother, father and son. In the nation the kinship was racial only.
Brother knew not the face of brother. There was distance between them, antagonism, prejudice, a smouldering dislike easily fanned to flaming hatred.
In Kentucky the brothers had been born in the same bed, slept in the same cradle, played under the same roof, sat side by side in the same schoolroom, and stood now on the threshold of manhood arm in arm, with mutual interests, mutual love, mutual pride in family that made clan feeling peculiarly intense.
For antislavery fanaticism, or honest unionism, one needed not to go to the far North; as, for imperious, hotheaded, non-interference or pure State sovereignty, one needed not to go to the far South. They were all there in the State, the county, the family--under the same roof. Along the border alone did feeling approach uniformity--the border of Kentucky hills. There unionism was free from prejudice as nowhere else on the continent save elsewhere throughout the Southern mountains. Those Southern Yankees knew nothing about the valley aristocrat, nothing about his slaves, and cared as little for one as for the other. Since '76 they had known but one flag, and one flag only, and to that flag instinctively they rallied. But that the State should be swept from border to border with horror, there was division even here: for, in the Kentucky mountains, there was, here and there, a patriarch like Joel Turner who owned slaves, and he and his sons fought for them as he and his sons would have fought for their horses, or their cattle, or their sheep.
It was the prescient horror of such a condition that had no little part in the neutral stand that Kentucky strove to maintain. She knew what war was--for every fireside was rich in memories that men and women had of kindred who had fallen on numberless battle-fields--back even to St. Clair's defeat and the Raisin massacre; and though she did not fear war for its harvest of dangers and death, she did look with terror on a conflict between neighbors, friends, and brothers. So she refused troops to Lincoln; she refused them to Davis.
Both pledged her immunity from invasion, and, to enforce that pledge, she raised Home Guards as she had already raised State Guards for internal protection and peace. And there--as a State--she stood: but the tragedy went on in the Kentucky home--a tragedy of peculiar intensity and pathos in one Kentucky home--the Deans'.
Harry had grown up tall, pale, studious, brooding. He had always been the pet of his Uncle Brutus--the old Lion of White Hall. Visiting the Hall, he had drunk in the poison, or consecration, as was the point of view, of abolitionism. At the first sign he was never allowed to go again. But the poison had gone deep. Whenever he could he went to hear old Brutus speak.
Eagerly he heard stories of the fearless abolitionist's hand-to-hand fights with men who sought to skewer his fiery tongue. Deeply he brooded on every word that his retentive ear had caught from the old man's lips, and on the wrongs he endured in behalf of his cause and for freedom of speech.
