The bitterness of the feud between the loyalists and disunionists in the Holston valley can hardly be imagined by those who did not witness it. The persecutions of the loyal mountaineers had been such that when their turn of ruling came they would have been more than human if they had not retaliated. The organization of home-guards gave to these armed bodies of men the power, and with it came the temptation to abuse it. The memory of the men who had been hanged for bridge-burning, and of those who had languished and died in prison charged with no crime but disloyalty to the Confederacy, was a constant stimulus to severity. Their blood seemed to cry from the ground. We found a constant necessity for moderating their passions, and it was not always possible to keep them within the bounds of civilized warfare. My experience in West Virginia was repeated with some phases of still greater intensity. When we got these loyal men away from home, campaigning on distant fields, there was no trouble in enforcing discipline, and they showed no more fierceness of personal retaliation than other troops. I suspect this will everywhere be true, in greater or less measure, and that in all wars it will be found for the interest of humanity not to allow local troops to garrison their own homes. The scouts and irregular organizations were, as usual, the most likely to fall into excesses. I had an example of this, falling under my own eye at the time I am speaking of, and showing how, under this intense exasperation, the "bush-whacking" degenerated into guerilla war in which no quarter was given on either side. I had sent out a reconnoissance of a party of Indiana cavalry accompanied by some thirty of the Tennessee scouts, the whole force about a hundred in number. They had encountered a hostile party of "irregulars" some thirty strong, and had routed them. They brought in fifteen prisoners, and reported ten of the enemy killed. Those who were captured had all surrendered to the Indiana men, and the Tennesseeans were disposed to complain that quarter had been given. True, the party which had been attacked was said to have committed great outrages, and to have been engaged in forcing loyal men into the Confederate Army under their conscription laws. The chief of the scouts came to my quarters, and I put to him the ordinary question as to the luck of his last expedition. "Oh," said he, in a dejected nasal tone; "some pretty good luck and some bad luck." "What bad luck?" said I, thinking some of his men had got hurt. "Oh, them Indiana cavalry fellows let the captain of the gang and fourteen of his men surrender to 'em." "And what became of the rest?" "_We_ had to deal with them," said he, significantly; "and they didn't surrender." Such is civil war when it becomes a deadly feud between old neighbors and acquaintances.