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somehow that man had dominion over the beasts of the forest; and because he had, he said he had a right to shear a wolf. A friend remonstrated with him, and asked him if he had considered the danger and the difficulty of the attempt to shear a wolf; and after the shearing was over, what would it be worth? 'Oh no,' said he, in the midst of his frenzy and madness, 'I have a right to shear a wolf, and therefore I will shear a wolf.' Yes, they have sheared the wolf, and what has come? They have gone out of the Union; and, I repeat again, they have got taxes, usurpations, blood and civil war."

In reference to his own State, and especially to that portion of it, Eastern Tennessee, which looked more immediately to his protection, he said of the wrongs endured by his people at the hands of the rebels :-"Since I left my home, having only one way to leave the State through two or three passes coming out through Cumberland Gap, I have been advised that they had even sent their armies to blockade these passes in the mountains, as they say, to prevent Johnson from returning with arms and munitions to place in the hands of the people to vindicate their rights, repel invasion, and put down domestic insurrection and rebellion. Yes, sir, there they stand in arms environing a population of three hundred and twenty-five thousand loyal, brave, patriotic, and unsubdued people; but yet powerless, and not in a condition to vindicate their rights. Hence I come to the Government, and I do not ask it as a suppliant, but I demand it as a constitutional right, that you give us protection, give us arms and munitions; and if they cannot be got there in any other way, to take them there with an invading army,

and deliver the people from the oppression to which they are now subjected. We claim to be the State. The other divisions may have seceded and gone off; and if this Government will stand by and permit those portions of the State to go off, and not enforce the laws and protect the loyal citizens there, we cannot help it; but we still claim to be the State, and if two-thirds have fallen off, or have been sunk by an earthquake, it does not change our relation to this Government. If the Government will let them go, and not give us protection the fault is not ours; but if you will give us protection we intend to stand as a State, as a part of this Confederacy, holding to the flag that was borne by Washington through a seven years' struggle for independence and separation from the mother country. We demand it according to law; we demand it upon the guarantees of the Constitution. You are bound to guaranty to us a republican form of government, and we ask it as a constitutional right. We do not ask you to interfere as a party, as your feelings or prejudices may be one way or other in reference to the parties of the country; but we ask you to interfere as a Government according to the Constitution. Of course we want your sympathy, and your regard, and your respect; but we ask your interference on constitutional grounds.

"The amendments to the Constitution, which constitute the bill of rights, declare that 'a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.' Our people are denied this right secured to them in their own constitution and the Constitution of the United States; yet we hear no com

A PLEA FOR TENNESSEE.

303

plaints here of violations of the Constitu- We ask the Government to come to our tion in this respect. We ask the Gov-aid. We love the Constitution as made ernment to interpose to secure us this by our fathers. We have confidence in constitutional right. We want the passes the integrity and capacity of the people in our mountains opened, we want de- to govern themselves. We have lived liverance and protection for a downtrod- entertaining these opinions; we intend to den and oppressed people who are strug- die entertaining them. The battle has gling for their independence without commenced. The President has placed arms. If we had had ten thousand stand it upon the true ground. It is an issue of arms and ammunition when the con- on the one hand for the people's Governtest commenced, we should have asked ment, and its overthrow on the other. no further assistance. We have not got We have commenced the battle of freethem. We are a rural people; we have dom. It is freedom's cause. We are villages and small towns-no large cities. resisting usurpation and oppression. We Our population is homogenous, industri- will triumph; we must triumph. Right ous, frugal, brave, independent; but is with us. A great and fundamental harmless and powerless, and rode over principle of right, that lies at the foundby usurpers. You may be too late in ation of all things, is with us. We may coming to our relief; or you may not come meet with impediments, and may meet at all, though I do not doubt that you with disasters, and here and there a dewill come; they may trample us under feat; but ultimately freedom's cause must foot; they may convert our plains into triumph, forgraveyards, and the caves of our mountains into sepulchres; but they will never take us out of this Union, or make us a land of slaves-no, never. We intend to stand as firm as adamant, and as unyielding as our own majestic mountains that surround us. Yes, we will profit by their example, resting immovably upon their basis. We will stand as long as we can; and if we are overpowered, and liberty shall be driven from the land, we intend before she departs, to take the flag of our country, with a stalwart arm, and a patriotic heart, and an honest tread, and place it upon the summit of the loftiest and most majestic mountain. We intend to plant it there, and leave it, to indicate to the inquirer who may come in after times, the spot where the Goddess of Liberty lingered and wept for the last time, before she took her flight from a people once prosperous, free and happy.

'Freedom's battle once begun,

Bequeathed from bleeding sire tc sou,
Though baffled oft, is ever won.'

Yes, we must triumph. Though some-
times I cannot see my way clear in mat-
ters of this kind, as in matters of religion,
when my facts give out, when my reason
fails me, I draw largely upon my faith.
My faith is strong, based on the eternal
principles of right, that a thing so mon-
strously wrong as this rebellion is, cannot
triumph. Can we submit to it? Can
bleeding justice submit to it? Is the
Senate, are the American people, pre-
pared to give up the graves of Washing-
ton and Jackson, to be encircled and
governed and controlled by a combina
tion of traitors and rebels? I say let the
battle go on-it is freedom's cause—un ·
til the Stars and Stripes (God bless them)
shall again be unfurled upon every cross
road, and from every house top through-

out the Confederacy, North and South. ists who beset him. Privileged by his Let the Union be reinstated; let the law be enforced; let the Constitution be supreme. If the Congress of the United States were to give up the tombs of Washington and Jackson, we should have rising in our midst another Peter the Hermit, in a much more righteous cause for ours is true, while his was a delusion -who would appeal to the American people and point to the tombs of Washington and Jackson, in the possession of those who are worse than the infidel and the Turk who held the Holy Sepulchre. I believe the American people would start of their own accord, when appealed to, to redeem the graves of Washington and Jackson and Jefferson, and all the other patriots who are lying within the limits of the Southern Confederacy. I do not believe they would stop the march, until again the flag of this Union would be placed over the graves of those distinguished men. There will be an uprising. Do not talk about Republicans

now;
do not talk about Democrats now;
do not talk about Whigs or Americans
now; talk about your country and the
Constitution and the Union. Save that;
preserve the integrity of the Govern-
ment; once more place it erect among
the nations of the earth and then if we
want to divide about questions that may
arise in our midst, we have a Govern-
ment to divide it."

Another figure of some interest in the annals of Eastern Tennessee, at this time, was the Rev. William G. Brownlow, familiarly known to the public as Parson Brownlow, a bold, vigorous controversialist, who, in the columns of his weekly newspaper, the Knoxville Whig, launched the fiercest thunders of his rhetoric and personal invective against the secession

profession as a Methodist clergyman, though there were regions in the South where that would have been of but little avail, and probably more by the influence of his press and his intimacy with the public men of the region, his loudest denunciations of the disunionists were for a long time suffered to pass without interruption other than the threats of the faction he opposed; but at length with other patriots he was persecuted and prescribed, compelled to hide himself from the storm, to discontinue his newspaper, and then to undergo a cruel imprisonment, the story of which, and of the sufferings of his associates, as it is recorded in the diary of these dark hours, which he has given to the public, recalls some of the bloodiest scenes of the proscription in the French Revolution. Mr. Brownlow, with many other occupants of Eastern Tennessee, was a native of Virginia. His parents were poor, and dying when the son was about ten years of age, he was left to a life of hard labor in his youth, completing this first stage of his education in an apprenticeship to the trade of a house carpenter. He then applied himself to study, and entered the Methodist Travelling Ministry-a school of the world by no means ill adapted to develop the qualities of an earnest manly nature. He travelled ten years in this profession without intermission. Among his circuits at this period was a ministerial journey through South Carolina at the height of the nullification discussion, in which he took a part, bearing strong and decided testimony to his sense of the value of the services of General Jackson in suppressing that incipient rebellion. South Carolina," he wrote

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and published in a pamphlet in 1832, in who wrote thus in 1832 was not to be the midst of the nullifiers, "is looking to taken off his guard by the rebellion of the formation of an independent Prov-1861,-the full-grown treason which he ince, but will not be allowed any such had known in its cradle. He commenceŭ privilege, as her leading men will infer the editorship of the Knoxville Whig from the proclamation of Old Hickory. about 1840, and had since that time been **This attempt by mob-law to nullify a devoted advocate of the political printhe laws of the General Government is ciples which the name of the paper implied. but the development of a well-planned Of course in that period he had been in scheme for the ulterior wicked purpose opposition to the democrat Andrew Johnof destroying our Government. It is a son, but the present rebellion, by the symwild, visionary and supremely ridiculous pathy of a common persecution, had rescheme, and will be put down, at all moved all disagreement on that score. As hazards, by General Jackson. In fact, he took occasion to say in one of the he has now crushed it out, and I rejoice speeches in his triumphal progress to the in its overthrow, though it may starve North after his liberation, "I have fought me out and drive me from your limits. that man for twenty-five long and terrible I shall fall back into Tennessee, where years; I fought him systematically, perthe people appreciate the blessings of severingly and untiringly; but it was upthe best Government in the world, and on the old issues of whiggery and democwhere the gospel is likely to produce racy; and now we will fight for one some other effect than that of arraying another. We have merged in Tennessee the people against the legal and consti- all other parties and predilections in this tuted authorities of the land." The man great question of the Union."

CHAPTER XXI.

PROCEEDINGS IN MISSOURI.

NEXT to the situation of affairs on the a national point of view, to relinquish Potomac, the condition of Missouri be- Missouri to the rebellion would be to came a subject of anxious solicitude at make the Mississippi the western boundthe outbreak of the rebellion. The posi-ary of the United States, abandon at tion of this rich State, prosperous and once the vast region of the Territories, everywhere abounding in elements of and surrender the very principle of the wealth, controlling the great highways struggle. There were other States which of western travel, influencing Illinois might be left to their folly to reap the and Kentucky on the east, bordered on fruits of the war and repent at leisure, the south by Arkansas, a bulwark and but there could be no such indifference protection to Kansas on the west, ren- toward Missouri. To give up the State dered its possession of the foremost im- would be fatal to the cause of Union and portance to the contending parties. In the Government. It must be held at all

hazards and by every effort. The task of Missouri, he denounced the Proclama

thus imperative, it very soon became evident, was attended with no slight difficulties. A large portion of the population, hardened in the rough manners of frontier life, had already shown themselves, in their participation in the affairs of Kansas, ready for any deed of violence or usurpation undertaken in behalf of slavery. The sympathies also of many wealthy slaveholders throughout the State were with the South. The Governor, Claiborne F. Jackson, fully represented the old democratic proslavery party, strongly imbued with Southern sympathies and in alliance with Southern leaders, which had long held the State in subjection. On the other hand, throughout the State north of the Missouri river, and particularly in the large German population of St. Louis, there was a numerous body of intelligent freemen, devoted to the free soil principles of the administration, animated with a love of the Union, and ready to defend the heritage for their children with their lives. Nor were many of the slaveholders themselves indifferent to the blessings of the national government under the old flag of the Republic, as was fully shown in the result of the election of representatives to the Convention which had been ordered by the Legislature. When the vote was taken the unconditional Union ticket was everywhere in the ascendant.

Unhappily, the Governor was thoroughly disaffected to the Government. We have seen his harsh and disloyal reply to the Secretary of War in answer to the call for troops for the National defence.* A fortnight after, on the 3d of May, in a message to the Legislature

* Ante, p. 128.

tion of the President as unconstitutional, and while avoiding a direct recommendation of the secession of the State, de clared its "interest and sympathies identical with those of the slaveholding States, and necessarily uniting its destiny with theirs." With a strange disregard of the northern geographical position of the State, and the character of its neighbors on the north, east and west, and the avowed diversity of opinion of its citizens on its domestic policy, he had the hardihood to add that "the similarity of our social and political institutions, our industrial interests, our sympathies, habits and tastes, our common origin, territorial contiguity, all concur in pointing out our duty in regard to the separation now taking place between the States of the old Federal Union." He therefore recommended the arming the State immediately, enjoining obedience to the constituted authorities, meaning himself and not the Government of the Union, and invited an "endeavor ultimately to unite all our citizens in a cordial coöperation for the preservation of our honor, the security of our property and the performance of all those high duties imposed upon us by our obligations to our families, our country, and our God." The design or tendency of all these piously and patriotically worded inculcations was evidently to manage the affairs of the State in the interests of the Southern Confederacy. Meanwhile he set forth a policy of armed neutrality-a dangerous proceeding for the liberties of the country when the use of that army depended upon his own treasonable inclinations. The efforts of the Legislature were directly bent to hold military possession of the State, which was

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