As the _ante-bellum_ decade drew nigh its close, a South Carolina gentleman of distinction visited the same very interior town. Currently told, he was father of the saying that “the Yankees know nothing of government; their only idea of it is that the majority shall rule.” To this sentiment a ready-witted editor responded, that its author “differed from the Yankees in but one particular, his only idea of government being that the minority shall rule.” This gentleman was of an aristocratic turn of mind. Evidently he considered the countrymen among whom he dwelt for the time fit subjects for a study, the precise nature and conclusions of which others could only conjecture. One day at his hotel he was wrapped in long and quiet but intent contemplation of the people on the street. A citizen-friend who had looked on him as he mused, fancied in the light thrown back on memory by the flames of war shortly afterwards kindled, that the silent reflections of the stranger had reference to the impending conflict; not as an emissary from a disaffected State, much less bent individually upon unfriendly espionage of the land, but as a political philosopher, forming an estimate of the capacity of the people before him for sharing in a life and death national struggle, and weighing in the scales of his judgment the relative probabilities of their inclining to favor one or the other of the antagonists in that struggle. In 1860, late in the canvass for the Presidency of the United States, a political discussion took place at Knoxville between three of the candidates for Elector from the State at large: Mr. W. C. Whitthorne on the Breckenridge ticket, Mr. Nathaniel G. Taylor on the ticket for Bell, and Mr. Hopkins on that for Douglass. Mr. Whitthorne spoke respectably well. Mr. Taylor was truly eloquent. His description of the civil war, which he declared the friends of Mr. Breckenridge were contriving to bring upon the country in the event of their party being defeated and the Republican candidate’s election to the Presidency, was vivid and powerful. Few, if any, of his hearers, however, had a real expectation that the calamity he so graphically depicted would shortly befall the land. He said that the people of East Tennessee were “determined to maintain the Union by force of arms against any movement from the South throughout their region of country to assail the Government at Washington with violence, and that the secessionists of the cotton States in attempting to carry out their nefarious design to destroy the Republic, would have to march over his dead body and the dead bodies of thousands of East Tennessee mountaineers slain in battle.”