The true story of Kentucky neutrality is one of the most romantic episodes of the war. The visionary schemers who planned the Southern Confederacy were guilty of dozens of chimerical and fallacious schemes, whose shallowness is now so apparent that one wonders how the Southern people were ever deceived by them. The rebel leaders declared--and declared it so often that they actually believed it themselves--that the Northern people would not fight. They boasted, and boasted so frequently that they began after a time to believe, that one Southern man could really whip five Yankees. They deceived themselves for so many years with the doctrine of States Rights that leaders and people began to believe that a fraction of the body corporate could exist without the aid of the rest, and offered to this modern and enlightened age a national illustration of Æsop's fable of the stomach's folly. When the schemes of the rebel leaders were culminating, and they found that the people of the Border States were not disposed, like those of the Cotton States, to be hurried, regardless of consequences, into a war in which they had nothing to gain and every thing to lose, they instituted, with a shrewdness worthy the fame of a Philadelphia lawyer, the no less visionary schemes that there could be law without power, and that a portion of the body, and that portion the heart, could suspend its operations while the rest was being violently agitated. In Tennessee, where the first-named scheme was successful, the rebels deceived the Union men into advocating the doctrine of "no coercion." In Kentucky, where their complete success in carrying out the second design was frustrated only by the sagacity of Rousseau, the rebels deceived the Unionists into advocating the doctrine of "neutrality." Twice the people of Tennessee voted against co-operation with the rebel states; and when the rebels again dared to test the question at the polls, they embodied in the contest the principle that "the general government could not coerce a sovereign state," and into the support of this doctrine the anti-secessionists foolishly acquiesced. The first act of the President in calling for troops to enforce the laws was construed into coercion, and the state seceded. Three times the State of Kentucky voted by large majorities against secession, but the rebels did not despair, and, having failed to get the people to secede, or to declare against the right of coercion, they endeavored, with but partial success, to commit the authorities and the Unionists to what was called "a strict neutrality."