schemers--aided by the designs of a
money-loving and interested populace--laid Kentucky, like Maryland,
bound hand and foot at the feet of the Federal government; when the
Union council of the state strove to disarm or put them in the Union
ranks, the soldiers of the "State Guard" left unhesitatingly and joined
the army of the South in large numbers.

Late in November, 1861, a convention had met; and, declaring all bonds
with the Union dissolved, passed a formal Ordinance of Secession and
sent delegates to ask admission from the Richmond Congress. A month
later Kentucky was formally declared a member of the Confederacy; but
before that time Buckner and Breckinridge had received the commissions,
with which they were to win names as proud as any in the bright array
of the South; a Kentucky brigade--whose endurance and valiant deeds
were to shed a luster on her name that even the acts of her recreant
sons could not dim--were in General Johnston's van; some of her ablest
and most venerable statesmen had given up honors and home for the
privilege of being freemen! All the South knew that the admission of
the state was but an empty form--powerless alike to aid their cause, or
to wrest her from the firm grasp the Federal government had set upon
her.

At the time of the first conscription the few men left in Kentucky, who
had the will, could not make their way into Confederate camps; far less
could the unwilling be forced to come.

Tennessee, also, had been a source of uneasiness to the Richmond
Government from the spread of Union tendencies among a portion of her
inhabitants. Though she had been a member of the Confederacy near a
year, still the half civilized and mountainous portions of her
territory, known as East Tennessee, had done little but annoy the army
near it, by petty hostilities and even by a concerted plan for burning
all the railroad bridges in that section and thus crippling
communications.

Fortunately this scheme had been frustrated, and the half-savage
population--for the better class of Tennesseeans were almost unanimous
in expression of loyalty to the South--kept in subjection.

But now with her soil overrun by Federal soldiers, and with a Federal
fleet in every river, the state could not respond to the call of the
South; and, of course, the soldiers she yielded the conscription were
from the narrow tracts in Confederate possession only.

One hears much of the "Union feeling" in the South during the