On the same river whose surroundings were thus described, was also born and still dwelt, Nathaniel G. Taylor--a near kinsman of the post-prandial orator. He it was who in debate at Knoxville during the Presidential canvass of 1860, spoke with almost prophetic tongue of the civil war and its train of dreadful ills, which he alleged, the malcontent politicians of a great party were preparing to bring upon the country if Mr. Lincoln were elected. So vivid was the picture which he then drew of those evils, that, as before related, some of his hearers wept. But the tears they shed, compared with the many that fell from the eyes of women and children during the war, were as the few scattering drops that clouds in summer send down to tell of the torrents of rain, with which the land is soon to be drenched. The eloquent speaker on that occasion, had been, in 1863, grieved for more than two years by seeing and hearing of the unjust violences to which the Union people of East Tennessee were subjected. It is impossible now to determine with strict accuracy the details of wrongs they suffered from their enemies. To use his words, those wrongs included: “The confiscation of property, merciless conscription, arrest, imprisonment, the execution of the death sentence by drum-head court-martial, running the gauntlet of rebel bullets and bayonets for great distances by 30,000 men to reach the United States flag and join its army; the martyrdom of from 2,000 to 3,000 non-combatant, unarmed Union people in thirty-one counties, by shooting, hanging or slaughtering in cold blood;[57] the despoilment of personal property, and consequent upon all these, a widespread destitution of the very necessaries of life.”