North will never know how many people at the South did so. I could not go
with the Republican Party, however, because after the death of Abraham
Lincoln it had intrenched itself in the proscription of Southern men. The
attempt to form a third party had shown no strength and had broken down.
There was nothing for me, and the Confederates who were with me, but
the ancient label of a Democracy worn by a riffraff of opportunists,
Jeffersonian principles having quite gone to seed. But I proposed to
lead and reform it, not to follow and fall in behind the selfish and
short-sighted time servers who thought the people had learned nothing and
forgot nothing; and instant upon finding myself in the saddle I sought
to ride down the mass of ignorance which was at least for the time being
mainly what I had to look to for a constituency.

Mr. Prentice, who knew the lay of the ground better than I did, advised
against it. The personal risk counted for something. Very early in the
action I made a direct fighting issue, which--the combat interdicted--gave
me the opportunity to declare--with something of the bully in the
tone--that I might not be able to hit a barn door at ten paces, but could
shoot with any man in Kentucky across a pocket handkerchief, holding myself
at all times answerable and accessible. I had a fairly good fighting record
in the army and it was not doubted that I meant what I said.

But it proved a bitter, hard, uphill struggle, for a long while against
odds, before negro testimony was carried. A generation of politicians were
sent to the rear. Finally, in 1876, a Democratic State Convention put its
mark upon me as a Democrat by appointing me a Delegate at large to the
National Democratic Convention of that year called to meet at St. Louis to
put a Presidential ticket in the field.

The Courier-Journal having come to represent all three of the English