The Governor communicated this paper to the Legislature by the following message. “STATE OF TENNESSEE. “EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT, NASHVILLE, November 22, 1865. “_Gentlemen of the Legislature_: The reputation being acquired by Nashville, the capital of your State and the great commercial emporium of Middle Tennessee, is humiliating to every friend of law and order. Murders, robberies, and burglaries are the order of the day. No man is safe, day or night, within a circuit around Nashville whose radius is eight or ten miles. The most of these outrages grow out of the abundant use of intoxicating spirits, connected with those gambling hells to be found in full blast on every street in the city. The same may be said, to a considerable extent, of all the larger cities and towns in the State. Life and property must be protected, or the country will go to ruin. I therefore call upon you, most respectfully, but earnestly, by prompt and decisive legislation, to remedy this growing and alarming evil. Should you fail to apply the necessary remedy, my next appeal will be made to Major-General Thomas to close up all these dens of wickedness, so prolific of fights, murders, and robberies of every description. The Sabbath is violated, the sanctuary of the Lord is ruthlessly invaded, and ladies and gentlemen are insulted at every corner and on every highway. Again I appeal to you, Gentlemen, to relieve the suffering people from this outrageous condition of affairs. “W. G. BROWNLOW.”[33] I add a few sentences from a Tennessee paper, “The Southern Loyalist.” “Do the authorities at Washington realize the fact that there is very great danger of wide-spread anarchy and bloodshed? Do they realize that it is the supineness and imbecility, or worse, with which the Freedmen’s Bureau has been conducted at this point, that is the cause of danger, and, it may be, of much bloodshed? God knows we speak in all sincerity, and we believe we speak the sentiment of nine tenths of the loyal men of Memphis. “When colored men have remonstrated against injustice,--against the very discriminations against freedmen that the War Department declared should not exist,--they have been told, ‘If you damned niggers think I am going to give you any rights that you had not under the old State laws, you are damnably mistaken.’ This may not be exactly literal, but it is very nearly so. When colored people have asked for wages hardly earned in the cotton-field, but not paid by rascally employers, they have been in very many cases told to go about their business, or left to get their claims as they could.”