“A more interesting region, or one more entitled to our most active sympathy, is not to be found within the limits of the United States. Forming a part of the noble State of Tennessee, it is in many respects a State in itself, and not a small one either. It consists of the broad valley of the magnificent river, which traverses it from northeast to southwest, three hundred miles in length, and with a varying width of from fifty to seventy-five miles--and of the slopes of the mountains, which separate it on the north from Kentucky, on the southwest from Middle Tennessee, and on the southeast from North Carolina and Georgia: a beautiful valley, between beautiful enclosing hills, fertile many of them to their summits, sparkling with a hundred tributaries to the noble stream which forms its principal feature. “That river is in some respects one of the most remarkable on the continent. Its northern affluents rise in the State of Virginia, but, as if to read a lesson of patriotism in the very face of the soil, as if to prop the fabric of the Union by the eternal buttresses of the hills, instead of flowing to the Atlantic like the other rivers of Virginia, it gathers up the waters of its tributary streams, Holston and Clinch and French Broad, and connecting Virginia and the Carolinas with East Tennessee, flows southward down to the northwestern corner of Georgia. There, after kissing the feet of the glorious hills of Chattanooga, instead of flowing to the Gulf, its seeming natural direction, it coquets with Northern Alabama, breaks into the Muscle Shoals, plants Decatur at their head and Florence at their feet, and then sweeping back to its native North, traverses the entire width of Tennessee a second time, apparently running up hill--for while it is flowing northward, the Mississippi, parallel to it, and at no great distance, is rolling its floods southward--enters the State of Kentucky, and empties into the Ohio, fifty miles above the junction of that river with the Mississippi, thus binding seven States in its silver circuit, and connecting them all with the great central basin of the continent. “The soil of Eastern Tennessee is rich; the mountains are filled with coal and almost every variety of ore; their slopes bubble with mineral springs; the climate is temperate and healthful; the territory divided into farms of a moderate size, for the most part tilled by frugal, industrious men, who own the soil, which yields them its well-earned abundance. In no part of the State are there so few slaves; in none is there a more substantial population; in no part of the South is the slave interest so feeble. East Tennessee greatly resembles the lower ranges and fertile valleys of the Alps, and it has been often called the American Switzerland. It is divided into thirty counties, and its population does not, I think, fall short of 300,000 souls.[4]