, deemed necessary to prevent the navigation of the Mississippi,
was occupied by General Leonidas Polk with a force of 22,000 men,
but on being threatened with attack by Commodore Foote and General
W. T. Sherman, was evacuated March 2, 1862.(31) The State of
Kentucky thus became practically free from Confederate occupancy,
and the Mississippi, for a considerable distance below Cairo was
again open to navigation from the North.

( 1) _War Records_, vol. iii., pp. 255, 442.

( 2) _War Records_, vol. iii., pp. 255, 442.

( 3) _Ibid_., pp. 466, 469, 485, 553, 567.

( 4) _War Records_, vol. iii., pp. 466, 469, 485, 533, 567

( 5) _Ibid_., pp. 144, 274, 312.

( 6) _Ibid_., vol. iv., pp. 296-7, 300, 314, and 333, 341.

( 7) _War Records_, vol. v., p. 570.

( 8) Sherman was, in January, 1861, Superintendent of the Military
Academy at Alexandria, Louisiana, over the door of which, chiselled
in marble, was its motto: "_By the liberality of the General
Government of the United States. The Union--Esto perpetua_."

As early as January 9th, an expedition of five hundred New Orleans
militia under Colonel Wheat, accompanied by General Braxton Bragg,
went by boat to Baton Rouge and captured the United States arsenal
with a large amount of arms and ammunition. The Confederates sent
two thousand muskets, three hundred Jaeger rifles and a quantity of
ammunition to Sherman at Alexandria, to be by him received and
accounted for. Finding himself required to become the custodian
of stolen military supplies from the United States, and having the
prescience to know that war was inevitable, he, January 18, 1861,
resigned his position, settled his accounts with the State, and
took his departure North.

Later we find him in St. Louis, President of the Fifth Street
Railroad, and when, May 10th, the rebels at Camp Jackson were
surrounded and captured, he, with his young son, "Willie"--now
Father Sherman, and high in the Catholic Church--were on-lookers
and in danger of losing their lives when the troops, returning from
camp, were assailed and aggravated to fire upon the mob, killing
friend and foe alike. Sherman fled with his boy to a gulley, which
covered him until firing ceased.--Sherman's _Memoirs_, vol. i.,
pp. 155, 174.

( 9) _War Records_, vol. iv., pp. 349, 358.

(10) The Seventeenth Brigade consisted of the 3d, 10th and 13th
Ohio, and 15th Kentucky.--_War Records_., vol. vii., p. 476.

(11) _Ibid_., p. 479.