OPERATIONS IN KENTUCKY AND TENNESSEE. [CHAP.XII.

leave it perfectly apparent that the Northern Army were at liberty to invade Kentucky at such times and places as suited its pleasure or convenience.

Contemporaneously with all this, it should be noted that in the city of Louisville, the great commercial mart of the State, a strict and severe embargo, was being enforced, so that the trade of Kentucky was obstructed and the means of disposing of our surplus absolutely denied to us.

As we draw nearer to the present period of time you will see the cloud thickens over the State, and the purposes and designs of the Government at Washington become more and more apparent.

Congress convened on the 4th of July. Was there any intimation of a purpose in that body to treat Kentucky, otherwise than a State in the Union, and bound by her allegiance to all the duties and obligations of that relation as understood and construed, not by Kentucky herself, but by the Northern Black Republican States? None whatever. In all the vast arrangements in the form of 500,000 men and $500,000,000 of money devised and voted for the prosecution of the war,for the overrunning Southern States, butchering her soldiery and reducing their citizens to bondage, the State of Kentucky and the people of Kentucky were as fully embraced and included as the people and the States of Massachusetts or New York. Fearful the onerous tax imposed upon the people fore the purpose of raising this blood money would be resisted in Kentucky, we find an army being raised and quartered in the very heart of the State, officered, equipped, fed, and armed by the General Government; held ready in the very center of the State to proceed to either extremity and assist that Government in placing the heel of power upon the neck of the people and constraining them into submission to unconstitutional usurpation and tyranny.

We have recently witnessed the spectacle of a thousand armed men, under General Rousseau, marching with loaded guns through the principal streets of the city of Louisville. We have witnessed the spectacle of another armed force, under Colonel Bramlette, marching into the city of Lexington, to place an unarmed populace under duress and compel them to submit to have Federal guns distributed from their city and a depot for Federal arms established in their midst. We have witnessed the placing of two gunboats at anchor in front of our own town, with a battery from each frowning upon our dwellings and menacing our citizens. We have seen the property of the city of Columbus-the ferry franchise- obstructed and the steam ferry-boat sunk and destroyed. We have seen bombs thrown into the city of Hickman. We have, sir, finally, witnessed the inhuman and fiendish act of a bomb hurled into our own town, bursting near a private residence, and in the very midst almost of shrinking, affrighted women. We have spent anxious days and sleepless nights in constant apprehension of the destruction of our town and the death of our wives and children.

Can you not then conceive of the sincerer delight with which we hail the approach of the army under your command? But will fall far short of a just conception of the lively sentiment of pleasure we derive from the sense of restored confidence and the enjoyment of a consciousness that now our families and our property are safe. It is from hearts filled with such emotions as these that this entire community extends to you an to your gallant army a cordial welcome.

GEORGE C. TAYLOR ET AL.