A PLEA FOR TENNESSEE. 303 the integrity and capacity of the people 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 in our mountains opened, we want deliverance and protection for a downtrodden and oppressed people who are struggling for their independence without arms. If we had had ten thousand stand of arms and ammunition when the contest commenced, we should have asked no further assistance. We have not got them. We are a rural people; we have villages and small towns-no large cities. Our population is homogenous, industrious, frugal, brave, independent; but harmless and powerless, and rode over by usurpers. You may be too late in coming to our relief; or you may not come at all, though I do not doubt that you will come; they may trample us under foot; they may convert our plains into graveyards, 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 to sou, Yes, we must triumph. Though some- 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 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 causefor 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 dis-occupants of Eastern Tennessee, was a tinguished 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-ter. ment; once more place it erect among and entered the Methodist Travelling the nations of the earth and then if we Ministry-a school of the world by no want to divide about questions that may means ill adapted to develop the qualiarise in our midst, we have a Govern- ties of an earnest manly nature. He ment to divide it." travelled ten years in this profession Another figure of some interest in the without intermission. Among his cirannals of Eastern Tennessee, at this time, cuits at this period was a ministerial was the Rev. William G. Brownlow, fa- journey through South Carolina at the miliarly known to the public as Parson height of the nullification discussion, in Brownlow, a bold, vigorous controver- which he took a part, bearing strong sialist, who, in the columns of his weekly and decided testimony to his sense of newspaper, the Knoxville Whig, launched the value of the services of General the fiercest thunders of his rhetoric and Jackson in suppressing that incipient repersonal invective against the secession-bellion. "South Carolina," he wrote 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 carpenHe then applied himself to study, 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 commenced 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 recommnendation of the secession of the State, declared its "interest and sympathies iden tical 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 |