Virginia, as the phrase goes, 'secede from secession'; it drew out
a horde of one hundred thousand volunteers, when Lincoln called for
troops, depleting Jackson County, Kentucky, for instance, of every
male under sixty years of age and over fifteen; and it raised a
hostile barrier between the armies of the coast and the armies of
the Mississippi. The North has never realized, perhaps, what it
owes for its victory to this non-slaveholding southern
mountaineer."

President Frost, of Berea College, says:

"The loyalty of this region in the Civil War was a surprise to both
northern and southern statesmen. The mountain people owned land
but did not own slaves, and the national feeling of the
revolutionary period had not spent its force among them. Their
services in West Virginia and east Tennessee are perhaps generally
known. But very few know or remember that the whole mountain region
was loyal [except where conscripted]. General Carl Schurz had
soldiers enlisted in the mountains of Alabama, and the writer has
recently seen a letter written by the Confederate Governor of South
Carolina in which he relates to General Hardee the troubles caused
by Union sentiment in the mountain counties.

"It is pathetic to know how these mountain regiments disbanded with
no poet or historian or monument to perpetuate the memory of their
valor. The very flag that was first on Lookout Mountain and 'waved
above the clouds' was lost to fame in an obscure mountain home
until Berea discovered and rescued it from oblivion and
destruction."

It may be added that no other part of our country suffered longer or
more severely from the aftermath of war. Throughout that struggle the
mountain region was a nest for bushwhackers and bandits that preyed upon
the aged and defenseless who were left at home, and thus there was left
an evil legacy of neighborhood wrongs and private grudges. Most of the
mountain counties had incurred the bitter hostility of their own States
by standing loyal to the Union. After Appomattox they were cast back
into a worse isolation than they had ever known. Most unfortunately,
too, the Federal Government, at this juncture, instead of interposing
to restore law and order in the highlands, turned the loyalty of the
mountaineers into outlawry, as in 1794, by imposing a prohibitive excise
tax upon thei