Returning to Kentucky in 1849, Rousseau was one of the few of her sons who were prepared to second or adopt the views then agitated by Henry Clay in regard to emancipating slaves. In 1855, when "Know-Nothingism" had swallowed up his old party--the Whig--and held temporarily a great majority in his city, county, and state, Rousseau became the leader of the small minority which rejected the false doctrines of the "American" party. His bitter denunciation of its practices, its tendencies to mob violence, and his persistent opposition to its encroachments on individual rights, nearly cost him his life at the hands of a mob who attacked him while defending a German in the act of depositing his vote. He was shot through the abdomen, and confined for two months to his bed, but had the satisfaction to know, when well again, that the party he had fought almost single-handed had no longer an organized existence. He was also instrumental, in 1855, in saving two of the Catholic churches of Louisville from destruction at the hands of a mob of Know-Nothings, and gained in popularity with both parties, when the passion and excitement of the time had passed away, by these exhibitions of his great courage and sense of right and justice. It was not merely, however, through the political excitement of the day that Rousseau won his popularity and established his character. For many years past--for at least two generations before the war--the courts of Kentucky have been noted for the many important and exciting criminal trials which have come up in them, and no bar presented finer opportunities for a young criminal lawyer. From the time of Rousseau's return to Kentucky in 1849 to the period when he went into the army in 1861, no important criminal case was tried in the Kentucky courts in which he did not figure on one side or the other. In 1843, the old system of pleading in the common law courts of England, as it existed before it had been clipped and modified by legislation, was in vogue at the Indiana bar, and on his advent in that state Rousseau soon found that no lawyer could practice respectably there without special pleading. A lawyer who was not a special pleader would in those days frequently find his case and himself thrown out of court, without exactly understanding how it was done. He therefore studied special pleading as a system in itself, taking the old English authors on the subject, and, after a few years' hard study and practice, soon made himself one of the best special pleaders in the West. When he returned to Kentucky, this system, not so thoroughly in use there, gave him several triumphs, which at once established his character and gave him plenty of practice. As a jury lawyer Rousseau has had no rival in his district since 1855; and the late Attorney General of the United States, James Speed, acknowledges himself indebted to Rousseau for several of his worst defeats before juries. Knowing the particular and