slavery an evil and hoped to see it abolished, but while the majority of their fellow countrymen held on to it they did so too.  Many Kentuckians, moreover, were like that restless class of Westerners who, dissatisfied with the society based on slavery, had taken up land beyond the mountains, where the poor man could toil up from poverty.[12] Kentucky was the first section west of the Allegheny mountains settled by these daring adventurers because they were there cut off from the North by the French and from the South by the Spanish, and in Kentucky, a section hemmed in by these foreign possessions, the settlers were less liable to be disturbed.  And even when the barrier of foreign claims had been removed, the movement of population from the East to the West took place along lines leading to the States later organized in the West rather than into Kentucky.  The people of Kentucky, therefore, were not radically changed in a day by the influx of population.  On the contrary, many of them, especially the mountaineers, have not changed since the days of Boone and Henderson.  Some of them having left the uplands of the colonies because they were handicapped by slavery, were naturally opposed to the bold claims of that institution in 1861.  They, like the Westerners, learned to look to the General Government for the establishment of commonwealths, the building of forts, and the maintenance of troops,[13] and, therefore, adhered to it when it was threatened with destruction.

Another cause, moreover, was equally as potential.  In Kentucky as in some other Southern States, there had grown up a considerable number of prosperous country towns, where resided lawyers, merchants, bankers, teachers, and mechanics, who had little property interest in slavery, who felt their own “intellectual superiority to the country squires and their fox-hunting, horse-racing, quarrelsome sons, and who consequently asserted social independence of them and social equality with them."[14] They were hostile to the aristocratic masters, whom they generally denounced as “oligarchs,” “slavocrats,” “Lords of the Lash,” and “Terror Engenders."[15] This mercantile and professional class, inspired by such men as Hinton Rowan Helper, contemplated the removal of the Negroes and the bringing of white laborers into the South.[16]

In view of this cleavage, it was difficult in the beginning of the struggle to characterize the situation.  There were unconditional Secessionists and unconditional Union men.  Judging from the condition then obtaining, no one could tell exactly which way the State would go.  “Sympathy, blood, and the community of social feeling growing out of slavery,” says one, “inclined her to the South; her political faith which Clay more than any other man had inspired her with and which Crittenden now loyally represented held her fast to the Union."[17] Many of the people, though believing in States’ rights, did not think that the grievances of the South were such as