freedom of the press. The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus had already been suspended by the dicta of the petty instruments of usruped power. The Constitution, which was the basis of our old Union, had been violated in all its essential provisions. Our citizens, for no other reasons than then advocacy of the principles of the Constitution, were torn from their home and from our State to languish in Northern prisons and denied alike the knowledge of their accusers and the priviliges of a fair trial. The judicial department of the Government was virtually suppressed. The Constitution, the only basis of Union, was overthrown, and all its powers usurped by the Executive and the degraded instruments whom he chose, to oppress a free and a gallant people. Even then the Washington Government was a revolutionary power, built upon the ruins of the Constitution and wieded by an unpricipled Executive for the suppression of the liberties of the peple. As a citizen of a State so dear to its own soons, and so renowned throughout the word for its love of freedom, I felt it was not only my right, but my highest duty, to resist these encreachments upon our constitutional rights. It was in this spirit that I addressed you. The events of the past year have justified the decision of those who from the beninning opposed the turany which has since oppressed us. A Northern army, flushed with a temporary success, has pursued its marauding career with a ferocity and a contempt for the claims of justice and humanity which have astonished the civilized world. Your property has been stolen or destroyed; your salves have been taken from you on the plea that you are disloyal-disloyal to the tyranny and the usurpation which seek to take from even the right of peaceful remonstrance; your houses have been invaded by armed soldiers; you have been compelled to endure, at the point the bayoned, unwarrantable searches; our fair women have been compelled to render the most menial services to the hirelings of the North, who have assumed to be your matters; no firesides have been ssacred from these ruthless intrusions. The unoffending victims of this relentless despotism have been dregged to the jails and to other loathsome prisons to grafity private malice or to satiate the lust of tyrannical power. Adn when the prisons of our own State were filled with freemen and free women, the penitentaries and bastiles of the North still opened to receive others, until the numbers are now so astounding that even the names of the vicitms are not permitted to be known. The once-boasted land of freedom, under abolition domination, is one vast prison-house. The starry banner, once so famed in Southern song, has been converted, in the hands of Summer, and Garret Davis, and Steward, and Lincoln, and Hunter, and Pope, and Turchin, and Boyle, and Bulter, into the emblem of all that is oppressive to man and cruel and disrespectul to womam. Yet to this emblem, degraded by being so upheld, we are required submissively to bow, as to a talisman which will sanctify the most atrocious of crimes.

Freemen of Kentucky! It needs not that you look abroad upon the burning cities and viliges and the devastated fields of Tennessee and the Mississippi Valley and of our mother State, Virginia, to convince yourselves of the true character of our oppressors. Our own State shows suffiecient evidences of their tyranny. Nor need you listen to the piercing cries of the women of Norhtern Alabama. Our oppressors would teach us tghat the nameless brutalities of Mitchel and Turchin were sanctified by the foldx of the immaculate banner under which these deeds were prepareated; for we learn that their master has rewarded