But I knew better. I had discovered that the field, no matter how worked, was not big enough to support two rival dailies. There was toward the last of October on the edge of town a real-estate sale which Mr. Haldeman and I attended. Here was my chance for a play. I must have bid up to a hundred thousand dollars and did actually buy nearly ten thousand dollars of the lots put up at auction, relying upon some money presently coming to my wife. I could see that it made an impression on Mr. Haldeman. Returning in the carriage which had brought us out I said: “Mr. Haldeman, I am going to ruin you. But I am going to run up a money obligation to Isham Henderson I shall never be able to discharge. You need an editor. I need a publisher. Let us put these two newspapers together, buy the Democrat, and, instead of cutting one another’s throats, go after Cincinnati and St. Louis. You will recall that I proposed this to you in the beginning. What is the matter with it now?” Nothing was the matter with it. He agreed at once. The details were soon adjusted. Ten days later there appeared upon the doorsteps of the city in place of the three familiar visitors, a double-headed stranger, calling itself the Courier-Journal. Our exclusive possession of the field thus acquired lasted two years. At the end of these we found that at least the appearance of competition was indispensable and willingly accepted an offer from a proposed Republican organ for a division of the Press dispatches which we controlled. Then and there the real prosperity of the Courier-Journal began, the paper having made no money out of its monopoly. IV Reconstruction, as it was called—ruin were a fitter name for it—had just begun. The South was imprisoned, awaiting the executioner. The Constitution of the United States hung in the balance. The Federal Union faced the threat of sectional despotism. The spirit of the time was martial law. The gospel of proscription ruled in Congress. Radicalism, vitalized by the murder of Abraham Lincoln and inflamed by the inadequate effort of Andrew Johnson to carry out the policies of Lincoln, was in the saddle riding furiously toward a carpetbag Poland and a negroized Ireland. The Democratic Party, which, had it been stronger, might have interposed, lay helpless. It, too, was crushed to earth. Even the Border States, which had not been embraced by the military agencies and federalized machinery erected over the Gulf States, were seriously menaced. Never did newspaper enterprise set out under gloomier auspices.