But whilst it is true that there is no unanimity in the Southern Confederacy in regard to the war, there was one remarkable instance of unanimity that occurred in Tennessee just about the time that we people of the Eastern portion of the State refused to vote. By a strange freak of Nature, or Providence, or something else, all the railroad bridges between Bristol and Chattanooga took fire all at once, and burned down, one night about eleven o'clock. I was not concerned in the matter, and can't say who did it. I thought to myself that the affair had been most beautifully planned and executed, and enjoyed it considerably in my quiet way. (Laughter.) It was but a little while afterward that the Legislature passed a law to disarm all the Union men of the State. Of course I was called on, in common with the rest. They did not find much to seize, however, at my house. They got a double-barreled shot gun, a Sharp's rifle, and a revolver. That was all the weapons I had. Then they commenced waiting upon all the private families. They took all the good horses that belonged to Union men. They entered their dwellings, threw off the feather-beds from the bedsteads, took all the woolen blankets and coverlets they could get hold of. They broke open chests and drawers, and pocketed what money and jewelry they could find in them. They carried away bacon, drove away fat hogs and beeves, and robbed the people of every species of moveable property. They next began to arrest them and throw them into jail. Nor was that all. Many of them were shot down upon the streets, or in the fields, in cold blood. I could give names in abundance, and dates, and places. I speak not from hearsay, but from my own personal knowledge. A man would be quietly about his work in his fields, and some one would point him out as a Union man, and the infernal rebel cavalry would shoot him down as a "damned Union-shrieking Abolitionist."--Others were stretched lengthwise upon logs of wood, raised a short distance from the ground so as to admit of their arms being tied underneath it, and were then stripped naked, and almost literally cut to pieces. And afterwards, when those men would come into courts of justice, and pull off their shirts and display the marks of the inhuman treatment they had suffered, the Judges upon the bench would coolly inform them that these were revolutionary times, and that they could give no redress for such grievances. Every prominent jail in East Tennessee was filled with Union men.