Buckner had not been idle all this time, and recruiting for "Camp Boone," the rebel Kentucky encampment, had proceeded really under his directions, but ostensibly in opposition to his wishes; and a few thousand Kentuckians, and a large force of Tennesseeans and other Southern troops, had gathered upon the southern border of the state for the purpose of seizing Louisville and other places, and establishing a defensive line along the Ohio River. Had that project not been frustrated by the position and force of Rousseau, the fate of the Confederacy would not have been sealed as soon as it was. The line of the Ohio, occupied in force by the rebels, would have been very difficult to break. If the Ohio River had been blockaded by rebel guns, the Union forces along it would have been fed and moved with great difficulty. Subsequently to the frustration of this project by Rousseau, Kentucky furnished ninety thousand men to the Union army, few or none of which would have been raised with the state under rebel occupation, and numbers of whom would have been conscripted into the rebel army. These would have been some of the results of the occupation of the Ohio, and serious disasters they would have proved to the Union cause. In the prosecution of this scheme, Buckner labored with a zeal that one could confidently expect from a man of his Cassius-like proportions. In the prosecution of the plan he went to Washington, represented himself as a Union man, and obtained from Generals Scott and McDowell much valuable information. When about to return to Kentucky he called upon General McDowell, and, in parting with him, placed both hands upon McDowell's shoulders, looked him steadily in the eye, and said, "Mack, I am going back to Kentucky to raise troops for my country."