CHAPTER III.
JOHN BRECKINRIDGE, THE MOVER OF THE RESOLUTIONS.
John Breckinridge was sprung from a sturdy Scotch-Irish stock. His ancestry, in the earliest days to which they can be traced, lived in Ayrshire, and are found sharing the sentiments for which their friends and neighbors became famous. They were early converted to Protestantism, and became staunch Calvinists and Covenanters in due course. The wars of the Puritan revolution brought little good to their county or themselves, and between king and commons. Papists and Protestants, Presbyterians and Independents, and a hundred factional bitternesses, they were sorely crushed and harried. But there was even a worse fate in store for them. The seemingly tireless struggle of years wore itself out, and sank to rest beneath the firm hand of Cromwell, and for a brief space there was a lull in the storm, but when Charles the Second, "that young man that was the late king's son," as Cromwell called him, found himself firmly seated on his throne, he woke once more the old issues. Fearing his vengeance, the heads of the Breckinridge family, together with many others who had played
49
