of the Kentuckians with the ways of the Federal authorities.

"The Federal government had engaged to leave slavery as it found it in Kentucky and elsewhere. Although there was a certain amount of disgust when the Emancipation Proclamation came out, it did not, in itself, make an enduring impression on the minds of the Union men; but when, in 1864, the government began to enlist negro troops in Kentucky, the people became greatly excited over the matter. Up to this date, the commonwealth had met the requisitions for troops to carry on the war with a promptness and loyalty unsurpassed by any other state. They naturally considered it as an insult that their slaves, even though such in name only, should be taken from them and put into the army with their own volunteer soldiers. Although this state of feeling will probably not commend itself as reasonable to those who were born in non-slave holding communities, it was very natural in these Kentuckians. To them, military service had always been an honorable occupation, open only to those of the masterful race. They had refused to take into their service any recruits from the free negroes of the state. This blow at their military was keenly felt.

"The action of the Federal government in this matter of enlisting slaves was singularly vacillating. Again and again, the process was begun and abandoned, on account of the remonstrances of the state authorities. It was an unprofitable experiment; the enlistment of white troops was made difficult; a few thousand blacks were secured, but they never proved of much service to the Union army.

"This bitterness between the conservative Union men and the Federal commanders grew to such height that in September, 1864, there was grave danger of an actual revolt of the Kentuckians against their oppressors. The state authorities were now fairly arrayed against the Federal provost-marshals and their following. General Hugh Ewing, commanding the district, had ordered the county courts to levy a tax sufficient to arm and pay fifty men in each county. His order was answered by Governor Bramlette, who, in a proclamation, forbade the county courts giving effect to the order. Although Governor Bramlette represented the ultra-Union men, there can be no doubt that he would have striven to maintain his position by the use of force. Governor Bramlette was reported, at this time, as on the point of issuing a proclamation recalling the Kentucky troops from the field. President Lincoln revoked General Ewing's order and so this critical point was passed. At the same time, an examination was ordered into the conduct of certain knaves who had for

months ruled western Kentucky in a fashion that had not had its parallel since the tyrannies of the Austrian Haynau. A commission, composed of Gen. Speed, S. Fry, and Col. John Mason Brown, checked the iniquities and made such a showing that Gen. E. A. Paine, Col. H. W. Barry of the Eighth United States Negro Artillery, and Colonel McChesney of Illinois, and a number of subordinate officers, were removed. It was charged that they had been guilty of extreme cruelty and extortion.

"After a thorough investigation, Commissioners Fry and Brown, who were Union officers of the highest integrity, reported that Paine's violence and menaces had compelled many peaceful and orderly citizens to abandon their homes. His harsh and brutal language, with constant vulgarity and blasphemy towards ladies and gentlemen of refinement; his robbery and extortion of citizens; his summary arrest and imprisonment of citizens against whom not an earthly charge could be made, and his seizure and execution of prisoners and citizens without charges and trials, were among acts of notorious infamy which were fully proven. The number of persons who had suffered death at his hands from summary execution was stated by some to be as high as fortythree, and the graves were shown to prove it. The commission furnished sworn testimony that Paine and five or six high official associates, were guilty of bribery, corruption and malfeasance in office. To escape consequences, General Paine and his subordinates fled to Illinois whence they had originally come. A Colonel McChesney, at Mayfield, commanding the One Hundred and Thirty-fourth Illinois Regiment, was found to have also executed some men, four of whom were private citizens-Messrs. Kesterton, Taylor, Mathey and Hess-without a shadow of trial, and to have collected large sums of money from citizens by forcing them to do hard manual labor on useless entrenchments unless they purchased immunity by paying from five dollars to four hundred dollars each. General Meredith, who succeeded Paine, turned fifty-one prisoners loose at Mayfield and many more at Paducah.

"These blows at the system of inflictions were not to do more than subdue for the moment the worst forms of the evil. This was too deep-seated for easy remedy. General Burbridge had an over-bearing spirit. He gathered around him a set of advisers who, it was asserted, acting as a secret inquisition, sent many Union men into prison or banishment, simply because they protested against the Federal outrages. A sort of fury seemed to possess many men hitherto of good qualities as citizens or soldiers."

It must be understood that these statements above quoted are from the pen of a Kentuckian, an honorable gentleman and a gallant soldier in the Union army. No one can say that they are the prejudiced statements of a former Confederate soldier. The object of this work from its first page to its last, has been to set down naught in malice and to state the exact truth in all things. Some statements that have been written; some that remain to be written, will excite comment, friendly or otherwise, perhaps mostly of the latter character; but the author has now the sense of having written no other than the truth and the determination to write nothing hereafter that is not the truth as he sees it. This is not a plea for forbearance upon the part of his possible critics, as he has no desire to make such plea but is willing to stand, four-square to all the world, upon that which has been or may hereafter be written by him in this work.

That the iniquitous rule of General Burbridge may be fully and exactly known to all who honor this work with a reading, further quotations are made from Professor Shaler's admirable and entirely honest work. Pursuing the subject of Burbridge's bloody rule, he

says:

"It is the painful duty of the historian to go yet further in the history of the pernicious system that was developed by General Burbridge's agents. All that he did in his efforts to suppress the guerrillas and to clear the state of treason, may be set down as grave blunders of a most misguided soldier. The next series of acts had, it was generally believed, the purpose of improperly taking money from the farmers of the state. The first step in this new class of inflictions was to order the farmers to sell their 'hogs to designated agents at a fair price; next, Burbridge commanded that no hogs should be sent out of the state without a special permit, and should be sold to the aforesaid specified agents. These agents offered a price considerably below that paid in the Cincinnati market. The ostensible reason of this action was that the Federal government had given a contract to certain persons in Louisville to furnish one hundred thousand head of swine and if the farmers were allowed to sell in their natural markets,

the contractors would not be able to obtain a sufficient supply.

"General Burbridge's agents supported this demand by many threats of confiscation and other penalties. Naturally, the beginning of a system of confiscation of private property aroused an even more general and furious indignation than the mere political acts of oppression. Here again, the protests of the state government were heard by President Lincoln, and, after about a month of wrestling with the evil, Burbridge's famous ‘hog order' was revoked by the Federal government. Notwithstanding the revocation of this order, General Burbridge was retained in command for some months afterward and the citizens were yet to suffer under this man, more exasperating inflictions than came to them from the honorable war of other years. There can be no doubt that the people of Kentucky endured 'far more outrage from the acts of the Federal provost-marshals than they did from all the acts of the legitimate war put together."

Burbridge, perhaps grown weary of making war upon the prisoners in his hands and the defenseless farmers of Kentucky, in October, 1864, at the head of four thousand troops, left Kentucky for the purpose of capturing and destroying the saltworks at Saltville, Virginia. The troops in his command were the Eleventh Kentucky cavalry, Colonel Graham; the Thirteenth Kentucky cavalry, Colonel Weatherford; and mounted infantry as follows: Twenty-sixth Kentucky, Colonel Maxwell; Thirtieth Kentucky, Colonel Alexander; Thirty-fifth Kentucky, Colonel Starling; Thirty-seventh Kentucky, Colonel Hanson; Thirty-ninth Kentucky, Colonel Mim; Fortieth Kentucky, Colonel True; Forty-fifth Kentucky, Colonel Clark, and Major Quiggin's Sandy Valley Guards. En route, they met a force of two thousand men commanded by Gen. John S. (Cerro Gordo) Williams. Included in this command were the First Kentucky Cavalry, the Ninth Kentucky Cavalry and some smaller Kentucky commands, under Col. W. C. P. Breckinridge. Burbridge's advance from Pound Gap was sturdily resisted by Col. Henry M. Giltner, of the Fourth Ken

tucky Cavalry, who at Clinch Mountain and Laurel Gap put up a most stubborn defense. When the attack on Saltville occurred, there was desperate fighting. Kentuckians were meeting Kentuckians and neither side cared to give way.

"Cerro Gordo" Williams never

knew what it was to be whipped and he hammered the attacking forces remorsely, rallying his men time and again, and finally he drove Burbridge from the field and saved the salt works so important to the Confederate army. General Burbridge retreated in some disorder into Kentucky, followed for some distance by the Confederates.

Kentucky, after this period, saw little of the war. Her brave soldiers of the Union and of the Confederacy, were in the main, far beyond her borders, doing their duty nobly and never stopping to inquire whether the war was nearing an end or not. They only knew that they had enlisted for the war, let its duration be for months or years. Sherman, with his Union legions, was marching to the sea, the hundred days of battle being apparently ended; Hood's disastrous campaign into Tennessee, with its frightful results at Franklin and Nashville, had begun and ended; Grant at Petersburg, was closing his legions about that splendid army of General Lee, the like of which has never been known, and the fate of the Confederacy seemed to be sealed. But the army never wavered; it stood resolute and ready, and gave not an inch until driven back by overwhelming force. Kentucky began to breathe freer. Burbridge was gone from command; a soldier had succeeded him and the fear that had oppressed the good people of the state was no more known. Let come what would, they were ready for it, for surely no more oppressive rule could be known. The prison cell was theirs no more; the proceeds of their farms they sold where markets offered and provost marshals no longer disturbed nor made them afraid. It seemed almost like those days when war had not been known and peace had ruled in all the land.

Then came the end. General Lee surrendered at Appomattox and presently Gen. Joe Johnston, in North Carolina, had made terms with Sherman. What mattered it that the government at Washington had refused to approve the terms of General Johnston's surrender? It meant only a few days more in which new terms could be arranged and signed. The end had come. There was to be no more war. The great questions which had so long vexed the minds of statesmen were now settled. There was to be no more slavery; there was to be no more secession, because the war had settled the question of expediency, not the question of right.

But there were some Kentuckians in the Confederate army who were yet in doubt as to whether or not they were whipped. The most difficult problem ever confronting a Kentuckian is as to the exact point when he is whipped. So far as his experience extends, he never reaches that point. The Kentuckians in the Confederacy knew that General Lee had surrendered; they knew that Gen. Joe Johnston had surrendered, but they also knew that they had not. The Kentucky cavalry knew that President Davis had not surrendered, and therefore they went along with him. There were the remnants of General Morgan's command-their gallant leader having been murdered at Greenville, Tennessee— and soldierly Duke rode at their head, not knowing the meaning of defeat; Col. Wm. C. P. Breckinridge, gallant to the last day of the Confederacy's life, led the shattered remnants of his own brave regiment, the Ninth Kentucky cavalry, and the few gallant boys of the First Kentucky cavalry who had survived the battles, skirmishes and scouts of four years of warfare; and on the ninth of May, 1865, one month after Appomattox, these men for the first time in their soldierly career, laid down their arms and ceased to be soldiers. Before they had surrendered Gen. John C. Breckinridge had come to them, counseling them to abandon the idea of going to Mexico,

there to join the forces of Maximillian. "Go to your Kentucky homes," said that splendid soldier and gentleman, "and there make such citizens as you have made soldiers, and your future is assured."

There was no further talk of Mexico; the Kentuckians surrendered, came home to Kentucky, and have endeavored to make as good citizens as they were soldiers.

The war was now ended and with it, slavery, the curse of the land, ceased to exist. It had come first to blight the north and later the south, through the grasping of the earliest settlers of New England for unearned wealth; it had been transferred to the south from climatic reasons and had continued to exist there until the descendants of those responsible for its introduction had, in their madness, forced the country into the greatest civil war known to history. Say what one may, but for slavery, there would have been no war. No sane man of today makes a plea for its existence; no statesman who takes reason as his guide, excuses slavery or would ask for its reintroduction. It has gone and the Lord God of Hosts and of our reunited country, be thanked that it no longer exists to disturb our people, or put into armed opposition to each other the former opposing sections. But as Kentucky was one of the states where slavery in its mildest form existed-if there can be a mild form of human slavery a review of the end of that institution in this State may be of interest. The author, at this point, renews a statement of his indebtedness to his kinsman, Mr. A. C. Quisenberry of the war department, and a native of Kentucky, for many of the details in this chapter, and who, in the Lexington, (Ky.) Herald has collated many facts, not only relating to

the first negro slaves held in Kentucky, but as to the passing of slavery.

On September 22, 1862, President Lincoln issued a proclamation announcing that, unless the Confederate states should sooner return to their allegiance to the United States, he would, on the first day of the following January next, issue another proclamation freeing the slaves in those states. Of course, every one knows that the southern states composing the Confederacy, paid no attention to this proclamation. Accordingly, in January, 1863, Mr. Lincoln issued what has ever since been known as "The Emancipation Proclamation," in which, "as a fit and necessary measure for suppressing the rebellion," he declared, "that all persons held as slaves within the designated states (now in rebellion) are and henceforward shall be free."

Kentucky, which had been considered by the Federal authorities as having remained loyal to the United States government, notwithstanding that it had its due and proper representation in the congress of the Confederate states, was not one of the states designated in the Emancipation Proclamation; consequently that document did not, of itself set free any slaves in the state, though many of them took advantage of it in order to leave their former masters and, in most cases, no very strenuous