of another that Anderson, Kentuckian,
hurled back, in heroic defence of the flag struck for the first time by
other than an alien hand.

CHAPTER 19.

THE BLUE OR THE GRAY

In the far North, as in the far South, men had but to drift with the
tide. Among the Kentuckians, the forces that moulded her sons--Davis
and Lincoln--were at war in the State, as they were at war in the
nation. By ties of blood, sympathies, institutions, Kentucky was bound
fast to the South. Yet, ten years before, Kentuckians had demanded the
gradual emancipation of the slave. That far back, they had carved a
pledge on a block of Kentucky marble, which should be placed in the
Washington monument, that Kentucky would be the last to give up the
Union. For ten years, they had felt the shadow of the war creeping
toward them. In the dark hours of that dismal year, before the dawn of
final decision, the men, women, and children of Kentucky talked of
little else save war, and the skeleton of war took its place in the
closet of every home from the Ohio to the crest of the Cumberland. When
the dawn of that decision came, Kentucky spread before the world a
record of independent-mindedness, patriotism, as each side gave the
word, and sacrifice that has no parallel in history. She sent the
flower of her youth--forty thousand strong--into the Confederacy; she
lifted the lid of her treasury to Lincoln, and in answer to his every
call, sent him a soldier, practically without a bounty and without a
draft. And when the curtain fell on the last act of the great tragedy,
half of her manhood was behind it--helpless from disease, wounded, or
dead on the battle-field.

So, on a gentle April day, when the great news came, it came like a
sword that, with one stroke, slashed the State in twain, shearing
through the strongest bonds that link one man to another, whether of
blood, business, politics or religion, as though they were no more than
threads of wool. Nowhere in the Union was the National drama so played
to the bitter end in the confines of a single State. As the nation was
rent apart, so was the commonwealth; as the State, so was the county;
as the county, the neighborhood; as the neighborhood, the family; and
as the family, so brother and brother, father and son. In the nation
the kinship was racial only. Brother knew not the face of brother.
There was distance between them, antagonism, prejudice, a smouldering
dislike easily fanned to flaming hatred. In Ke