liar 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