Paducah, Kentucky

“ At the outbreak of the war he was in business with his father in Galena, Illinois. When the President called for the 75,000 men, Grant proceeded at once to make himself useful by drilling volunteer troops. He was by the governor of Illinois commissioned as colonel, and was soon promoted. His first service was in Missouri. When stationed at Cairo he seized Paducah on his own responsibility. This stroke possibly saved Kentucky for the Union, for the legislature, which had up to that time been wavering, declared at once in favor of the Union. ”

“ Getting further information in the day, he telegraphed to General Fremont he would go to Paducah unless orders to the contrary should be received. He started in the night with two regiments and a battery, and arrived at Paducah at half-past six next morning. General L. Tilghman being in the city with his staff and a single company of recruits, hurried away by rail, and Grant occupied the city without opposition. The Legislature passed a resolution "that Kentucky expects the Confederate or Tennessee troops to be withdrawn from her soil unconditionally." ”

“ At eleven o'clock on this the ninth and last day of our voyage we passed Paducah, in Kentucky, a small neat settlement on the point of junction of the Tennessee and Ohio. Preparations were going on before our eyes for our leaving the boat; our luggage and that of the L.'s, who joined company with us, was brought out; cold beef and negus were provided for us in the ladies' cabin, the final sayings were being said, and we paid our fare, fifty dollars each, for our voyage of twelve hundred miles. Smithland, at the mouth of the Cumberland river, soon appeared ”

“ Generals Hunter and Halleck, Fremont's successors, were
equally unsuccessful, and the State was harassed by a petty warfare all
the year.
In Kentucky, Governor Magoffin was inclined to secession. The
Legislature leaned the other way, but preferred neutrality to active
participation on either side. September 6th, Brigadier-General U. S.
Grant occupied Paducah, an important strategical point at the junction
of the Ohio and Tennessee rivers. ”

“ He took the town of Paducah, a strong post on the Ohio River, near the mouth of the Tennessee River, in Kentucky, by which he at once gained possession of interior navigable waters, which the traitors had been127 using for their own purposes. The strength and decision with which he took possession of the town intimidated all rebel sympathizers. He then issued the following address to the inhabitants, which is as good a specimen of condensed and effective military style as we have on record:
"I am come among you, not as an enemy, but as your fellow-American ”

“ Otego, No. 60. Paducah. Instituted by John M. Clifford and F. W. Jones the 7th of Hunting Moon, 409. Several members of the Old Otego, No. 15 became charter members, and it was practically the relighting of the old council brand. The reorganization proved successful and the tribe is one of the strongest in the Reservation.
Wichita, No. 61. ("White Man") Mayfield. Instituted 21st Beaver Moon, 409 by J. M. Clifford, but its council fire soon went out. Was visited by W. A. Crader, who attempted to relight it but without success and he reported the tribe defunct in 411. ”

“ Paducah. Instituted 21st Sturgeon Moon, 405. Organized by J. B. VanZandt and instituted by Great Sachem J. R. McConnell. Tribe was reported defunct in 406, and its Council brand was relighted by Past Great Sachem W. E. Fite on the 20th of Buck Moon, 407, but the tribe was reported defunct in 408.
Choctaw, No. 15. ("Charming voice." A numerous tribe of Indians) Louisville. Instituted 28th Corn Moon, 408 with 31 charter members, by J. B. VanZandt, but soon after consolidated with Wabee Tribe, No. 13.
Wabee, No. 15. ("White") Louisville. Instituted by the consolidation of Wabee Tribe, No. ”

“ Paducah is situated on the south bank of the Ohio river, 42 miles above Cairo, Ill., which lies on the north bank of the Ohio near its confluence with the Mississippi. An important business in each city is manufacturing and jobbing lumber. They compete in both the buying and the selling markets. Each draws its supplies of logs and lumber, in part, from the extensive region lying west of the Mississippi and south of the Arkansas river, known in the trade as the 'blanket territory.' [2] The distances from this region to Paducah are not greater than to Cairo ”

“ The increase in population is not more astonishing than the development of various industries. They show a vigorous, modern activity for which this part of the State has not, so far as I know, been generally credited. The traveller will find abundant evidence of it in Owensborough, Henderson, Hopkinsville, Bowling Green, and other places. As an illustration: Paducah, while doubling its population since 1880, has increased its manufacturing 150 per cent. The town had in 1880 twenty-six factories, with a capital of $600,000, employing 950 men ”

“ Here, where the hand of violence shed the blood of the innocent; where the horrid yells of savages and the groans of the distressed sounded in our ears, we now hear the praises and adorations of our Creator; where wretched wigwams stood, the miserable abodes of savages, we behold the foundations of cities laid, that, in all probability, will equal the glory of the greatest upon earth. And we view Kentucky, situated on the fertile banks of the great Ohio, rising from obscurity to shine with splendor equal to any other of the stars of the American hemisphere. ”

“ We are a hardy free-born race,
Each man to fear a stranger;
Whate'er the game, we join in chase,
Despising toil and danger:
And if a daring foe annoys,
Whate'er his strength or force is,
We'll show him that Kentucky boys
Are Alligator-horses.
I s'pose you've read it in the prints,
How Pakenham attempted
To make old Hickory Jackson wince,
But soon his schemes repented;
For we, with rifles ready cock'd,
Thought such occasion lucky,
And soon around the general flock'd
The hunters of Kentucky.
I s'pose you've heard how New Orleans
Is famed for wealth and beauty ”

“ Hence you may assail the Kentuckian on many grounds, and he will hold his peace. You may tell him that he has no great cities, that he does not run with the currents of national progress; but never tell him that the home life of his fellows and himself is not as good as the best in the land. Domesticity is the State porcupine, presenting an angry quill to every point of attack. To write of homes in Kentucky, therefore, and particularly of rural homes, is to enter the very citadel of the popular affections. ”

“ We cannot wonder that, at the close of an impassioned address upon the Alien and Sedition Laws, the multitude should have pressed about him, and borne him aloft in triumph upon their shoulders; nor that Kentucky should have hastened to employ him in her public business as soon as he was of the requisite age. At thirty he was, to use the language of the stump, "Kentucky's favorite son," and incomparably the finest orator in the Western country. Kentucky had tried him, and found him perfectly to her mind. He was an easy, comfortable man to associate with, wholly in the Jeffersonian taste. ”

“ A population of some two millions with only one interior town that contains over five thousand white inhabitants. Hence Kentucky makes no impression abroad by reason of its urban population. Lexington, Bowling Green, Harrodsburg, Winchester, Richmond, Frankfort, Mount Sterling, and all the others, where do they stand in the scale of American cities? Hence, too, the disparaging contrast liable to be drawn between Kentucky and the gigantic young States of the West. Where is the magnitude of the commonwealth, where the ground of the sense of importance in the people? ”

“ Coalmining Potomac Appalachia has more common economic and cultural outlook with eastern Kentucky than with the Potomac Tidewater; southern Maryland and the Northern Neck [Pg 94c] and the Monocacy's dairy farmers all have their own ways of interpreting human existence and defending themselves against its pitfalls. Within the county governments and the Congressional and State-legislative districts, these local and regional viewpoints choose political leaders who joust for them in higher arenas, often aligning there with forces from outside the Basin. ”

“ Coming back to the present, the huge yellowish-red stage-coach rolls to-day over the marbled roads of the blue-grass country. Families may be found living exactly where their pioneer ancestors effected a heroic settlement—a landed aristocracy, if there be such in America. Family names come down from generation to generation, just as a glance at the British peerage will show that they were long ago being transmitted in kindred families over the sea. One great honored name will do nearly as much in Kentucky as in England to keep a family in peculiar respect, after the reason for it has ceased. ”

“ There is a Kentucky sentiment, expending itself in complacent, mellow love of the land, the people, the institutions. You speak to them of the happiness of living in parts of the world where life has infinite variety, nobler general possibilities, greater gains, harder struggles; they say, "We are just as happy here." "It is easier to make a living in Kentucky than to keep from being run over in New York," said a young Kentuckian, and home he went. ”

“ When Kentucky came to have a legislature of its own, it decreed that each of the counties in the state should receive six thousand acres of land wherewith to start a seminary; and that all these county seminaries were to train students for this long-dreamed-of central institution. That they might not be sent away—to the North or to Europe. When, at the end of the Civil War, a fresh attempt (and the last) was made to found in reality and in perpetuity a home institution to be as good as the best in the republic, the people rallied as though they had never known defeat. ”

“ Away back in 1780, while every man, woman, and child in the western wilderness ness was in dire struggle for life itself, those far-seeing people had induced the General Assembly of Virginia to confiscate and sell in Kentucky the lands of British Tories, to found a public seminary for Kentucky boys—not a sectarian school. These same broad-minded pioneers had later persuaded her to give twenty thousand acres of her land to the same cause and to exempt officers and students of the institution from military service. ”

“ For, within a hundred years, the only thing to take possession of it, slowly, sluggishly overspreading the region of its foot-hills, its vales and fertile slopes—the only thing to take possession of it and to claim it has been a race of mountaineers, an idle, shiftless, ignorant, lawless population, whose increasing numbers, pauperism, and lawlessness, whose family feuds and clan-like vendettas, have for years been steadily gaining for Kentucky the reputation for having one of [276] the worst backwoods populations on the continent, or, for that matter, in the world. ”

“ Within a few decades from the day when the first cabins were erected in the region, a population of 70,000 people had entered the State, and it had half as many inhabitants as Massachusetts.
Compared with the Scotch tone of Tennessee, Kentucky was overwhelmingly English in aspect. Virginia was definitely its progenitor, a large part of its early population having come through the Shenandoah Valley. Next as feeders were Pennsylvania and North Carolina, while other regions contributed but small minorities, those from Maryland being probably the most numerous. ”

“ Paul amid the native corn, and muses on the surpassing beauty of David as he rides his favorite horse through green pastures and beside still waters.
Hence, to be a farmer here implies no social inferiority, no rusticity, no boorishness. Hence, so clearly interlaced are urban and rural society that there results a homogeneousness of manners, customs, dress, entertainments, ideals, and tastes. Hence, the infiltration of the country with the best the towns contain. More, indeed, than this: rather to the country than to the towns in Kentucky must one look for the local history of the home life. ”

“ Fast came the changes in Kentucky. The prophecy which John Gray had made to his school-children passed to its realization and reality went far beyond it. In waves of migration, hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of settlers of the Anglo-Saxon race hurried into the wilderness and there jostled and shouldered each other in the race passion of soil-owning and home-building; or always farther westward they rushed, pushing the Indian back. Lexington became the chief manufacturing town of the new civilization, thronged by merchants and fur-clad traders ”

“ The century just past had not begun the race of its many-footed years when a neighborhood of Kentucky pioneers, settled throughout the green valleys of the silvery Elkhorn, built a church in the wilderness, and constituted themselves a worshipping association. For some time peace of one sort prevailed among them, if no peace of any other sort was procurable around. But by and by there arose sectarian quarrels with other backwoods folk who also wished to worship God in Kentucky, and hot personal disputes among the members—as is the eternal law. ”

“ Thus keeping out railroads, it has kept out manufactures, kept out commerce, kept out industrial cities. For three-quarters of a century generations of young Kentuckians have had to seek pursuits of this character in other quarters, thus establishing a constant draining away from the State of its resolute, vigorous manhood. Restricting the Kentuckians who have remained to an agricultural type of life, it has brought upon them a reputation for lack of enterprise. More than all this has that great barrier wall done for the history of Kentucky. ”