The loyal mountaineers of TennesseeHumes, Thomas William
Philosophy
The loyal mountaineers of Tennessee
Humes, Thomas William
Tennessee, East -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865
This Bible Colporteur was Rev. Herman Bokum, a Minister of the German
Reformed Church and a Pennsylvanian, who had resided for five years
on a farm near Knoxville. His education was superior in kind, and he
had the Germanic conscientiousness with which Martin Luther was so
magnificently gifted. Under his eccentric, decidedly brusque manners,
there lay hidden a tender heart and a deep vein of piety. Whatever
disturbances his mind had once suffered from outward troubles, it
certainly had emerged from them (as is sometimes the outcome in such
cases,) with a sharpness of discernment, of which minds are blameless
that have never been moved from their even tenor and plodding ways.
His mental astuteness was of little or no use to him in the conduct
of his own affairs,--his poverty always keeping in front along with
his sincerity. But he early saw the fatal drift of the Secession
movement and the magnitude of the proportions to which it would grow.
Dr. Hill, then President of Harvard University, told a Tennesseean
after the war had closed, that his eyes had been first opened by
Mr. Bokum, to the reality of the Rebellion, early in its progress,
as _a great and portentous fact_. Being an ardent Union man and
of a fearless nature, he soon became obnoxious to the Confederate
authorities. Eventually they detailed a file of soldiers to arrest
him at his home. But he heard of their coming and made his escape
over the mountains through Kentucky to Philadelphia. There he was
appointed a Hospital Chaplain and in 1863 published in pamphlet, “A
Refugee’s Testimony,”--being a narrative of his personal experiences
in Tennessee.
APPENDIX: NOTE E: Page 95.
The young New-Yorker soon went on his way homewards. At Washington
City he was forced to tarry, and from there he wrote to his friend at
Knoxville as follows:
April 23, P. M., 1861.
“I have succeeded in effecting a junction with my other
forces--my brother and brother-in-law--but we are all now
prisoners of war! Not that I would give you to understand that we
are in the power of either of the belligerents, but because of
the war we are most decidedly prisoners in this place.
I found the whole line of the road in a blaze of enthusiasm and
excitement from Knoxville to Lynchburg, which place I reached the
next morning. Having occasion for a business purpose to introduce
myself to ----, Warden of the Church there, (the Clergyman
being absent), he very kindly asked me to stay at his house,
which I did until Monday morning, when I came on here without
interference.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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