Cold Spring Election Declared Null

February 10, 1866    The seats of the following senators were contested, declared vacant, and new elections ordered: . . .R. Tarvin Baker, of Campbell Co..

These seats were declared vacant because the election in each case was “neither free nor equal in the sense required in the constitution.”

“. . .At the Cold Spring precinct, in Campbell co., several witnesses  swore that Capt. Jas. W. Read, 53rd Ky., arrested seven voters, separately, and put them under guard in a pen, 15 steps from the polls, and in full view of the turnpike; that he grossly insulted, abused, and cursed one, threatened to shoot, and threatened to gag him; that he tied two of them with ropes, their backs to a tree, their arms drawn behind them and tied - in which position they were kept from about 8 a.m. until 7 1/2 p.m.”

February 22, 1866  Capt Jas. W. Read, late of the 55rd Ky., fine $4,000 by the jury in the circuit court at Alexandria, Campbell co. - upon two indictments charging him with preventing legal voters from voting.

excerpted from Collins' History of Kentucky, by Lewis Collins, and enlarged and reprinted by his son Richard H. Collins in 1874