money, to collect accounts, to find gold to carry back to a home of gilded slavery, I refuse to let him pass, and I bid him to return to the bondage of which he is insensible, for in times like these every one who has an owner should be at home.

I am an exile from the graves of my kindred and the home of my nativity, branded as a traitor by the hireling press and the judicial tools of the usurper; my name held up as a by-word to those among whom my life has been spent. Yes, as my ancestors were traitors in 1776 I am one to-day; for humbly and devotedly I am imitating their example.

The purple parasites who, like colored flies, which, bloated by the corruption on which they feed, buzz around the carcass they are devouring,and which ultimately produces their own death-profligate in their embezzlements from the public treasure, received expressly as the wages of their corruption-affect surprise that I should undergo exposure in the mountains, and laugh at the idea of my obtaining a scanty subsistence in this exhausted region. Let them hear from me that no honorable sacrifice is too great for the purchase of liberty. I had rather tread the wilderness a free man than to inhabit the palace a bondman. How much more glorious was William Tell, the Swiss mountaineer, than the pampered slave of Gessler! How much more noble and infinitely more comfortable are the chains that fetter the limbs of Buckner, Hanson,and their brave comrades then those which are worn unconsciously or ingloriously by the Kentuckians who submit to the usurper Lincoln or his generals. I can tell you and these people who amuse themselves at my expense that I look upon the captivity of my son (who languishes in an Ohio prison) as glorious when compared to their condition; for I would rather see him rot in a dungeon or die ten thousand deaths than to live one moment after an ignoble compromise of his constitutional rights. The free spirit cannot be reached by manacles on the limbs. This bounding spirit of liberty is the reason the Northmen can never subdue us. They may exterminate us; they may be the leaders in securing here the repetition of the horrors of San Domingo, and with demoniac fury may wade in blood while by force of superior numbers they run riot over our country; they may even exchange the whites who inhabit the Southern States for the four millions of blacks, enfranchised and admitted into a political society with the whites of the free States in consideration of the profits which may be made during the political pupilage to be undergone by the blacks, and this association is already estimated by the manufacturing capitalists of the North as preferable to the commercial independence of the South. If the South is to remain in the hands of intelligent freemen and politically severed from the North all this may be done, but there is one thing sure-they never can conquor us; they never can subdue the present people of the South; they never can tame the free heart of the Southron while it pulsates with life nor trade him out of his birthright for a mess of pottage.

I call upon you because I am persuaded your heart throbs in sympathy with us in this great struggle, and because you were everywhere recognized as one of the leading men in Kentucky in favor of preserving and maintaining the constitutional rights of the people. These have been violated and trampled under foot before your eyes. You have been denounced because you were suspected of Southern feeling. Yet you have been passive thus far, although probably the annals of