Another interesting book on the Mountain people of the South.  Those who are familiar with the mountain missions of the A.M.A. will hail this new volume with special delight.  Those who read it will understand better the magnitude and importance of this great field into which the A.M.A. has pushed out its vanguard, and the necessity of following up these advances with a solid phalanx of intelligent and enthusiastic missionaries.  This historical sketch brings prominently before us the heroic manhood of these American Highlanders during the years of bitter and systematic persecution by the rebel government.  There is stuff in these Highland chieftains and their clans!

Three facts that stand out from the pages of this history must intensify our interest in these American Highlanders.  One, the systematic and brutal outrages inflicted upon them by the rebel authorities and their heroic endurance; second, their unimpeachable and unswerving loyalty to the country; third, the tremendous debt the loyal Christian people of the North owe them.  Take the following order issued by J.P.  Benjamin, Secretary of War, November 25, 1861, which appears on the 140th page of this book;

“First. All such as can be identified in having been engaged in bridge-burning are to be tried summarily by drum-head court martial, and, if found guilty, executed on the spot by hanging.  It would be well to leave their bodies hanging in the vicinity of the burned bridges.”

The State had voted in February, by sixty thousand majority, to remain loyal to the Union.  These Highlanders had sought to save their section of the State from rebellion, and to defend their cabin homes from outrage and butchery.  In doing so, they had burned bridges, and for this the government at Richmond deliberately instructs its army officers to hold a mock trial, to hang, and to brutally expose the bodies of those who had been executed, so that surviving friends would have to look upon these sickening horrors!  It seems almost impossible that any man could deliberately perpetrate such monstrous cruelties.  But the order was issued by the rebel government and carried into effect.  Indeed, the brutalities went even farther than this.  In December, 1861, two men by the name of Harmon, father and son, were hanged.  Only one gallows was provided, and the authorities compelled the father to stand by and see his own son pass through the horrors of strangulation while awaiting his own execution. (Page 151).

The diary of Parson Brownlow, from which abundant quotations are given in this volume, furnishes many similar instances of cruelty perpetrated against these loyal mountaineers; but they were true to the flag from beginning to end.  They left their homes, and camped in the forests and “down the coves” of their own wild mountains.  Parson Brownlow encamped for days in concealment in Tuckaleeche and Wear’s Coves in the great Smoky Mountains.  Had fair and honorable means been used, these loyal mountaineers would have saved Tennessee from that disgraceful chapter in her history which records the dark story of her treason.  This book must stir the patriotism and Christian enthusiasm of every one who reads it.  It ought to lead us to make genuine sacrifices to show our appreciation of their supreme devotion to the country by sending to this Mountain Work, opened by the A.M.A., generously of men and of means.