ruin to all Southern slaveowners, and the absolute enmity of every
slave State.

But that task of steering between the two has been very difficult.
I fear that the task of so steering with success is almost
impossible. In England it is thought that Mr. Lincoln might have
maintained the Union by compromising matters with the South--or, if
not so, that he might have maintained peace by yielding to the
South. But no such power was in his hands. While we were blaming
him for opposition to all Southern terms, his own friends in the
North were saying that all principle and truth was abandoned for the
sake of such States as Kentucky and Missouri. "Virginia is gone;
Maryland cannot go. And slavery is endured, and the new virtue of
Washington is made to tamper with the evil one, in order that a show
of loyalty may be preserved in one or two States which, after all,
are not truly loyal!" That is the accusation made against the
government by the abolitionists; and that made by us, on the other
side, is the reverse. I believe that Mr. Lincoln had no alternative
but to fight, and that he was right also not to fight with abolition
as his battle-cry. That he may be forced by his own friends into
that cry, is, I fear, still possible. Kentucky, at any rate, did
not secede in bulk. She still sent her Senators to Congress. and
allowed herself to be reckoned among the stars in the American
firmament. But she could not escape the presence of the war. Did
she remain loyal, or did she secede, that was equally her fate.

The day before I entered Kentucky a battle was fought in that State,
which gave to the Northern arms their first actual victory. It was
at a place called Mill Spring, near Somerset, toward the south of
the State. General Zollicoffer, with a Confederate army numbering,