adjusted. Ten days later there appeared upon the doorsteps of the city in
place of the three familiar visitors, a double-headed stranger, calling
itself the Courier-Journal. Our exclusive possession of the field thus
acquired lasted two years. At the end of these we found that at least the
appearance of competition was indispensable and willingly acepted an offer
from a proposed Republican organ for a division of the Press dispatches
which we controlled. Then and there the real prosperity of the
Courier-Journal began, the paper having made no money out of its monopoly.



IV


Reconstruction, as it was called--ruin were a fitter name for it--had just
begun. The South was imprisoned, awaiting the executioner. The Constitution
of the United States hung in the balance. The Federal Union faced the
threat of sectional despotism. The spirit of the time was martial law. The
gospel of proscription ruled in Congress. Radicalism, vitalized by the
murder of Abraham Lincoln and inflamed by the inadequate effort of Andrew
Johnson to carry out the policies of Lincoln, was in the saddle riding
furiously toward a carpetbag Poland and a negroized Ireland.

The Democratic Party, which, had it been stronger, might have interposed,
lay helpless. It, too, was crushed to earth. Even the Border States, which
had not been embraced by the military agencies and federalized machinery
erected over the Gulf States, were seriously menaced. Never did newspaper
enterprise set out under gloomier auspices.

There was a party of reaction in Kentucky, claiming to be Democratic,