The treatment of the Border States in the crisis of 1861 has received from historians the same attention as Saxony, the objective point between Prussia and Austria in the Seven Years’ War.  Directing special attention to Kentucky requires some explanation.  The possession of this commonwealth was for several reasons more important than that of some other border States.  The transportation facilities afforded by the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers furnished the key to carrying out the plan to divide the South.  The possession of the State by the Confederates was of strategic importance for the invasion of the North too for the reason that the Ordinance of 1787 had been so interpreted as to fix the boundary of Kentucky on the north side of the Ohio River.  It was, moreover, the native State of Abraham Lincoln and it was important to have that commonwealth support this untrained backwoodsman whom most statesmen considered incapable of administering the affairs of the nation.

In the beginning, the situation was not the least encouraging to the Unionists.  The Breckenridge Democrats had carried the State in 1859 on a platform favoring Southern rights.  Their chief spokesman had become such a defender of their faith that in 1860 he was chosen to lead the radically proslavery party which had come to the point of so doubting the orthodoxy of their Northern adherents as to deem it advisable to separate from them.  Unalterably in favor of the rights of the slave States, the leaders of this persuasion had expressed themselves in terms that could not be misunderstood.[1] One of their spokesmen Humphrey Marshall contended that slavery is not a creature of municipal law.  He believed that the institution followed the flag.  He wanted Union but only with that equality which involved the recognition of the right of property in slaves everywhere.[2] Speaking in the House of Representatives on January 30, 1861, John W. Stephenson, another of this faction, said on the same topic:  “Equality underlaid the whole Federal structure, and protection to persons and property within the Federal jurisdiction, was the price of allegiance of the States to such General Government, as delegated and prescribed in the constitution.  Wherever the American banner floated upon the seas or land, all beneath it was entitled to the protection of the flag."[3]

On this question, their leader John C. Breckenridge, “a believer in the old Democratic creed and a supporter of the South and her institutions,"[4] took the same, if not higher ground.  Referring to the Dred Scott decision in a speech delivered in Ashland, Kentucky, in 1859, Breckenridge said:  “After this decision we had arrived at a point where we might reasonably expect tranquillity and peace.  The equality of rights and property of all the states in the common Territory, having been stamped by the seal of judicial authority, all good citizens might well acquiesce."[5] When the Southern States seceded because of the threatened infringement