Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 9.djvu/27

Rh States by similarity of institutions, by close ties of blood, of trade and political sympathy, her people yet too plainly saw the effect of her geographical position in case of war and had too broad a sense of the value of the Union to look with indifference upon the evidences of the gathering storm. There was comparatively little secession sentiment in the State. With all her sympathy for the South, Kentucky hoped to the last that the threatened dissolution of the Union could be averted. Her relations with her neighbor States to the north were cordial. In January, 1860, by invitation of the Ohio legislature, the legislature of Kentucky had visited Columbus as a body and the members of the two bodies had fraternized in the enjoyment of the most unrestrained sociability. In fact, the Ohio river, which was nominally a boundary between separate commonwealths, seemed rather to unite them only the more closely, and no human foresight could have predicted that within a little more than twelve months there would be such altered conditions. The presidential election of 1860 found the people of Kentucky much divided in political sentiment. The split in the Democratic party at the Charleston convention resulted in two Democratic tickets, and out of a vote in Kentucky of 145,862, Breckinridge and Lane received 52,836, Douglas and Johnson 25,644, while the Constitutional Union ticket of Bell and Everett received 66,016 and Lincoln and Hamlin but 1,366. So that it will be seen that while the Bell and Everett ticket received a plurality of about thirteen thousand votes, the combined vote for the Democratic tickets was nearly as much in excess of that for the former. The small vote for the Republican ticket shows that even if it did not include all who sympathized in the objects of that party, it indicated the slight foothold it had obtained in Kentucky. On the other hand, while the platforms of all three of the other organizations were antagonistic to the