The political conditions in Kentucky were anomalous. The Republican Party had not yet definitely taken root. Many of the rich old Whigs, who had held to the Government--to save their slaves--resenting Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, had turned Democrats. Most of the before-the-war Democrats had gone with the Confederacy. The party in power called itself Democratic, but was in fact a body of reactionary nondescripts claiming to be Unionists and clinging, or pretending to cling, to the hard-and-fast prejudices of other days.

The situation may be the better understood when I add that "negro testimony"--the introduction to the courts of law of the newly made freedmen as witnesses--barred by the state constitution, was the burning issue. A murder committed in the presence of a thousand negroes could not be lawfully proved in court. Everything from a toothbrush to a cake of soap might be cited before a jury, but not a human being if his skin happened to be black.

Mr. Watterson"s Editorial Staff in 1868, When the Three Daily Newspapers of Louisville Were United into the "Courier-Journal." Mr. George D. Prentice and Mr. Watterson Are in the Center.
Mr. Watterson's Editorial Staff in 1868, When the Three Daily Newspapers of Louisville Were United into the "Courier-Journal." Mr. George D. Prentice and Mr. Watterson Are in the Center.

To my mind this was monstrous. From my cradle I had detested slavery. The 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 dailies of the city the public began to rebel. It could not see that instead of three newspapers of the third or fourth class Louisville was given one newspaper of the first class; that instead of dividing the local patronage in three inadequate portions, wasted upon a triple competition, this patronage was combined, enabling the one newspaper to engage in a more equal competition with the newspapers of such rival and larger cities as Cincinnati and St. Louis; and that one of the contracting parties needing an editor, the other a publisher, in coming together the two were able to put their trained faculties to the best account.

Nevertheless, during thirty-five years Mr. Haldeman and I labored side by side, not the least difference having arisen between us. The attacks to which we were subjected from time to time drew us together the closer. These attacks were sometimes irritating and sometimes comical, but they had one characteristic feature: Each started out apparently under a high state of excitement. Each seemed to have some profound cause of grief, to be animated by implacable hate and to aim at nothing short of annihilation. Frequently the assailants would lie in wait to see how the Courier-Journal's cat was going to jump, in order that they might take the other side; and invariably, even if the Courier-Journal stood for the reforms they affected to stand for, they began a system of misrepresentation and abuse. In no instance did they attain any success.

Only once, during the Free Silver craze of 1896, and the dark and tragic days that followed it the three or four succeeding years, the paper having stood, as it had stood during the Greenback craze, for sound money, was the property in danger. It cost more of labor and patience to save it from destruction than it had cost to create it thirty years before. Happily Mr. Haldeman lived to see the rescue complete, the tide turned and the future safe.