KENTUCKY.
[FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRE5rONDENT.)
Louisville, May 6. Iv was in Kentucky that the insurrection received its first ()heck. Had Kentucky- voted for secession the whole of the Border Slave States would have gone with the South ; and the suppression of the insurrection would have been indefinitely, perhaps fireilly, postponed. The sentiment of Kentucky—being as she is an offshoot of postponed. The all with the South, but her interests were all with the West. In this conflict of opinion she stood neutral; and in all insurrections it is eminently true, that "whosoever is not with you is against you." So it proved here. The famous declaration of neutrality issued by Kentucky was of no service to the South, and was disregarded by both parties. In utter defiance of their favourite doctrine of State Rights the Confederates resolved to force Kentucky into active co-operation, and it was for this purpose, according to his own con- fession, that General Sidney Johnston (the ablest of the Confederate generals, and whose death at Pittsburg landing has been a heavy blow to their cause) occupied Bowling Green. His motive in so doing, as he stated in his report to Jefferson Davis, was political rather than military. Happily kir the North, the Union feeling of Kentucky was roused at this preparation for invasion, and troops enough were raised in the State to check the Confederate advance till the Federal forces had time to form their armies.
By a sort of moral retribution, the only State in the Union which proposed to remain neutral has, in reality, suffered most from the effects of the war. I recollect, at the time of the annexation of Savoy, seeing a statement in one of the Imperialist Savoyard papers that where our rivers ran there our hearts run also." The saying would be far more true of the Western States. Their very life flows with the course of their rivers. The stoppage of the Mississippi and the streams which pour into it is absolute death to the trade of the West. Free access to the Gulf of Mexico is essential to its existence. So Kentucky, though it has been saved from much actual war, has suffered perhaps more than any other State. In the country districts the suffering has not been so great. Wheat and Indian corn have fetched universally good prices, and the demand for Government sup- plies caused by the war has created an artificial market for cattle. In the towns there has been nothing to neutralize the paralyzing effects of war, and the complete stoppage of the Southern trade. Louisville, the virtual though not the nominal capital of the State, has suffered perhaps more than any other town. Out of seventy jobbing houses, which were in trade here a year ago, there are only two left. The others have failed or have removed elsewhere. The pork trade, which was a very large one, has completely fallen off. The country trade on the Ohio river is altogether at an end except for Government stores. The iron and metal factories have all sus- pended work. There is not absolute distress amongst the working classes ; the country is so rich that actual want is a thing unknown ; but there is a total stoppage of all progress, or rather retrogression. Within forty years, Louisville had grown from a city of 4000 to upwards of 70,000. In the last year it is believed to have diminished by some 10,000 souls. These facts which I state 011 the authority of one of the oldest resident merchants in Louisville, are borne out by the look of the town. Everywhere you see big wharves, large stores, and spacious factories, but there is nothing doing. The streets are empty; the steam-boats have no freights; and there are no trucks about the streets loaded with goods. I have talked to many of the common people, especially the Germans, of whom, as in all Western cities, there is an immense population, and from one and all I hear the same story, that the cost of living is enormously high, that work is very slack, and that instead of making money as in former years the most they can hope for is to pay their way. Still with all this the country is so rich that it seems impossible for a stranger to associate with it the idea of distress. During my stay here I have been a good deal out into the surrounding country. The institution of slavery has not been able to mar the appearance of prosperity, and that is saying a good deal. I doubt whether even a Bourbon regime could destroy it,—under a century. Even more than the State of Ohio, Kentucky is the garden country of the States. When you get out into the little country towns, you seem to have got into an England, where the sun shines, and where there ia
no poverty. The German element has not penetrated there, and the old English element of Virginia still reigns supreme. In the plainer words, Kentucky is a slave-holding State, and therefore town of Leziegton, for instance, there is nothing but the railroad running through the street to show you that you are not in an English country town. The main street, with its quiet little shops, its depots of agricultural implements, its !Mull town-houies'standing a little way back from the road, with the plots of lawn in front, and its whole sleepy, lazy air, is the exact counterpart of an English high street. The inn, too, was not a house, nor even an hotel, but an inn with an old-fashioned English sign of the Pluenix swinging over the door; and the stage which met the train was like a resus- citated four-horse coach, only that the coachman was a negro. All round the town there are country-houses standing in their own grounds, which seem to have been transported bodily from England. At this early May time, the weather is like that of an English sum- mer, and the pasture-land is as green, and the crops as rich, and the fields as carefully tilled and hedged in, as they would be in Leices- tershire. -There was hardly a trace of that slovenliness I have observed in every other Slave State; and the slaves themselves were better dressed, and looked happier. In the houses, too, whose doors were thrown open to let in the cool air, you would see the negro children playing about carelessly in a way that was pleasant to look upon. From all inquiries I can make I gather the feelings of Kentucky with regard to secession to be of a very mixed character. Till within the last three months a considerable part of Southern Kentucky was in the hands of the Confederates. The first of the Union victories was that of Mill Springs in Kentucky, where General Zollicoffer was killed; but with this exception there has been little fighting in the State; and with the evacuation of Bowling Green the authority of the Union was restored without resistance. In the Federal armies there are thirty-two Kentucky regiments, which would represent a force of some 25,000 men, and there are 6000 Kentackians in the Confederate service. At the battle of Shiloh, two Kentucky Federal
and, charged one Confederate regiment from their own State; n d the belief is, judging from their own heavy loss, that they de- stroyed nearly half of it. In Kentucky, perhaps more than in any other State, this war has produced that division of families and Mends, which is the most fearful consequence of the struggle. I suppose there is not a Kentuckian who has not friends or relations fighting on both sides. As far as I can collect, whenever it has come to an open struggle, the Union party has carried everything before it in Kentucky. During the palnnest days of insurrection, the largest Secession vote ever given in Louisville was 900 out of 9000 voters. At the last election, Mr. Crittenden, the Union candidate, was carried by a large majority against an opponent who was supposed to look favourably on Secession ; but still, when Mr. Crittenden wished the other day to resign his seat in order to be appointed Senator, the Union Electoral Committee requested him not to do so, as with a candidate less personally popular than himself they could not be sure of carrying the election. There is, however, a very large, and what is more, a very noisy Secession element in Kentucky. It is a strong fact that the Govern- ment has had to prohibit the burial of Confederate soldiers in Ken- tucky, on account of the Secession demonstrations to which they gave place. The other day, at the funeral of a Confederate officer in Louisville, over 3000 persons assembled to escort the corpse. It is true that the officer was well known and beloved in the town, and that his wife was the daughter of the most popular of the Episcopalian clergymen in the city ; but still these facts would not account for a tenth part of the crowd. Again, soon after the battle of Pittsburg landing, a wounded Louisiana Confederate soldier—a private—who died of his wounds on the voyage up the Ohio, was left at the little town of Owenboro for burial. He was not known at the place, but this is the account of his funeral as given by a local paper : "A meeting was called by the Southern citizens of the town, and preparations made for a suitable burial. . . . Long before the appointed time our streets were thronged with people from all sections of the county, who had come to witness the solemn ceremony. At two o'clock the remains were conveyed to the Methodist church, where an impressive and eloquent funeral oration was delivered by Rev. Dr. Nicholson. The number of spectators at the church was variously estimated at from 1000 to 1500. After the exercises at the church were con- cluded the procession repaired to the cemetery, where they deposited the remains of the brave but unfortunate soldier, who died while nobly battling in defence of his country and his country's cause.
"It may be some consolation to the friends of the deceased to know, that though buried among strangers in a strange land, he was interred in a manner becoming his cause, and that thousands of sympathizing tears were shed over his grave, for the loved ones at home, and many a fervent prayer offered up to God for his safe deli. verance to that haven of rest where strife, dissensions, and abolitionism never enter, and where peace and harmony reign for ever."
I quote this article, not only as a proof of the Secession feeling, but as evidence of the extreme freedom of speech allowed by the Federal Government in Kentucky. Even in Ireland the Nation could hardly be more outspoken without danger of suppression. In the same way, it has been found necessary to exclude all women, suspected of Secession proclivities, from the military hospitals, be- cause they insulted the wounded Union soldiers. In fact, the feeling of the State towards Secession is entirely different from what it is in the North. Events have proved that the majority, the great majority, of Kentuckians, are opposed to Secession, and are ready to suppress it at all costs. They look upon it as unwise, destructive to their own interests, sad unjustified by law; but they do not, as Northern men do, look upon it as unprovoked. They sympathize keenly with the sentiment of Secession, though they disapprove its active course. In
against her judgment, and in spite of her interests, cannot help sympathizing with slaveholders. The bitterness here against the Abolitionists and the Administration is extreme. The constant cry in all the newspapers is, that Northern Secessionism must be put down as well as Southern, and that Wendell Phillips and Simmer deserve the same punishment as Davis and Floyd. Here is a speci- men of the sort of article which appears daily in the Kentucky and Tennessee papers, and which I picked out of the Nashville Union, the
official organ of the unlit vernor : "The Louisville journal con- tains a scathing notice olviWgendell Phillips. It is a well-merited castigation of that flashy blasphemous incendiary, and half-crazed Jacobin. Phillips is as vile a dis-Unionist as Jeff. Davis or Wm. L. Yancey. May the Devil seize the tribe." Here in Kentucky the Washington Administration is regarded as completely in the hands of the Abolitionist party. The emancipation of the slaves in the district of Columbia has given great offence, and is -stated openly by Union men to be a certain step towards prolonging the war. I was much struck the other day in talking to an old Kentucky statesman—a most staunch Union man, and a member some years ago of the Federal Government—about the rumoured intention of the Border States' members to withdraw from Congress, that he completely approved of the idea, if, by rendering either House unable to form a quorum, it would bring the anti-slavery legislation to a dead lock. This gentleman, I should add, was not a slaveholder, and had never, as a matter of personal feeling, held slaves, but his sympathies as a Ken- tuckian were all Slave State sympathies. I perceive that all the old democratic politicians reckon confidently that when the insurrection is suppressed, the insurgent States will resume their seats in Con- gress, and that throughout the North there will be a great reaction, after the war, against the republican party, and that, in consequence, there will be a return of something like the old pro-slavery demo- cratic regime.
I believe myself this calculation would probably turn out correct, at least for a certain period, if the insurgent states had wisdom enough to see their own interests, and accept frankly the restoration of the Union. On the other hand, the course of events in Kentucky and Tennessee since the Union authority has been restored, does not seem to me to show that such will be the case. As I heard a leading republican politician say the other day to Mr. Sumner—" What will save us will not be our own merits, but the mistakes of our enemies." And I take this to be true.
Already in the Free State papers you can see indications of impa- tience at the want of loyalty shown towards the Union in the Border States; and even, in other than Abolition organs, the opinion is beginning to be suggested that the power of the slaveholding interest is the one obstacle in the way of reunion. It is symbolical of this tone of feeling that Mr. Maynard, one of the Tennessee representatives who has just been through the State, declared on his return to the House, that his journey had convinced him of the necessity of some measure of confiscation. So in the Cincinnati papers there have been letters published lately urging on Union, not on Abolition, grounds that the slaveholders are, and always will be, hostile to the Union, and that the power of hostility mast be removed from their hands. All these things arc indications only, straws showing which way the wind is beginning to blow. It is clear that the Confederates have utterly lost heart, and if they give in shortly, the party throughout all the States anxious for an immediate restoration of the Union on any terms will carry all opposition before it. If not, if the Southern States decline to accept the restoration, then the North will stick at nothing, neither at confiscation, nor even at abolition, to restore the Union. I recollect we all laughed very much a year ago at Mr. Seward's declaration that there was no need for alarm at Secession, because, somehow or other, the one thing certain was that the Union would be preserved. There was more in the words than we thought then. He expressed the resolute, unreasoning will of the American people to preserve the Union at all costs and all risks; and with a people winch has the power, and wealth, and courage of the North, the old saying is mostly tree, that "what the people wills God wills
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