you preserve the Union or rush into the
vortex of revolution under the name of secession?"[10] J. T. Boyle said in
the same convention that there could be no benefit or advantage, no civil
or political rights, no interest of any kind whatever, secured by
government in the Southern Confederacy which the people did not then enjoy
in the "blessed Union formed by our fathers." In his opinion, it was the
duty of Kentuckians "to stand by the Star Spangled Banner and cling to the
Union."[11] Some of the most influential newspapers were fearlessly
advocating the Union cause. Among others were the Frankfort _Daily
Commonwealth_, the Louisville _Courier_ and the _Democrat_.

Exactly what support these leaders of the differing factions would obtain
was determined by forces for centuries at work in that State. Southerners
who thought that, because Kentucky was a slave State it should go with the
South, had failed to take these causes into consideration. In the first
place, not every slaveholder was an ardent proslavery agitator. There were
masters who like Henry Clay considered 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,