Beginning with the simple project of joining the Courier and the Journal, it ended by the purchase of the Democrat, which it did not seem safe to leave outside.
V 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.