I have not space here to enter as I could wish into the details of Rousseau's military career. He must always remain a representative of one of the peculiar phases of the late war, and every event I could give will in the future be valuable; but at this time it is impossible to allude farther to his military career. He left the army soon after the battle of Nashville (during which engagement he held the left position of Thomas's line at Fortress Rosecrans, near Murfreesborough), and returned to Louisville at the request of his friends, to contest with Robert Mallory, Esq., the latter's place in Congress. That congressional race was nothing more nor less than a crusade against the remnant of slavery left by the war in Kentucky, probably as a punishment for her attempted crime of neutrality. It was another brilliant triumph won by the exercise of the same decisive action which has always characterized him. The Convention which nominated Rousseau was, in political parlance, merely a "pocket convention," and its nominee found, on leaving the military field to examine the political course, that he had really no party to back him. He had to build up a party, and without hesitation he decided that it should be an avowedly abolition party in principle and purpose. He began by announcing that he favored the adoption by the State of Kentucky of the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, and denounced slavery as unjust, unwise, and impolitic--a curse and blight on the state. When he first made the speech in which he declared this, the people wildly stared at him, and when he had done they pronounced him insane. They were so completely blinded by their prejudices that they could or would not see the truth of his arguments, and at last he resorted to ridicule with better effect. "I wish to say again," he said, on one occasion, "that slavery, thank God, is dead. Its own friends have destroyed it. They placed it at the foundation of Jeff Davis's government, and invited, nay, forced us to assail it. They forced the whole liberal world to make war upon it, and presented to us the alternative to destroy slavery or see our government perish. Our duty was a plain one, to kill slavery and rebellion with it, and let the government live. Both of these things are accomplished facts, and in the whole Christian world there remain but three slave states--_Cuba, Brazil, and Kentucky_."