Failing of this, free government itself might be imperiled.
I had behind me the intelligence of the Confederate soldiers almost to a man.

They at least were tired of futile fighting, and to them the war was over.

But--and especially in Kentucky--there was an element that wanted to fight when it was too late; old Union Democrats and Union Whigs who clung to the hull of slavery when the kernel was gone, and proposed to win in politics what had been lost in battle.
The leaders of this belated element were in complete control of the political machinery of the state.

They regarded me as an impudent upstart--since I had come to Kentucky from Tennessee--as little better than a carpet-bagger; and had done their uttermost to put me down and drive me out.
[Illustration: Abraham Lincoln in 1861 _From a Photograph by M B Brady_] I was a young fellow of two and thirty, of boundless optimism and my full share of self-confidence, no end of physical endurance and mental vitality, having some political as well as newspaper experience.

It never crossed my fancy that I could fail.
I met resistance with aggression, answered attempts at bullying with scorn, generally irradiated by laughter.