These were citizens whose names commended the appointment they made to general attention and to the co-operation of all who sympathised in its object: and at the time proposed, being Thursday, the Convention assembled at Temperance Hall, Knoxville. The delegates present numbered four hundred and sixty-nine, representing twenty-six counties, which with two other counties represented by two resident proxies, constituted nearly the whole of East Tennessee. As the meeting was held in Knox County, and therefore was more easy of access to its delegates, they were much more numerously appointed and in attendance than were those from any other county. Still there were three hundred and twenty-seven present from other counties. Contiguity to the place of assembling, would of course affect more or less the relative attendance from all parts of the region included in the convention, but so too would the degrees of Union sentiment existing in them. Accordingly, of counties immediately adjacent to Knoxville and strongly devoted to the Union, there were delegates from Anderson, Blount, Jefferson, Union, Roane and Sevier, aggregating one hundred and fifty-eight; Roane sending the largest number and Jefferson the smallest. Among delegates from other counties lying in the great valley, there were twenty-eight from Greene and twenty-four from McMinn: Hamilton, at the extreme southwest, equalled McMinn in numbers, and Sullivan, at the extreme northeast, had a sufficient Union element to send six representatives. Distance lessened attendance from the mountain counties: but Johnson sent thirteen delegates from the far east, and Carter five; and although travel on horseback was difficult at a time so troubled, ten were present from Campbell County on the north, and six from Morgan on the west. In Scott County, east of Morgan, the mountains pierce the clouds, the scenery is grand and the slaves were only one in forty-five of the population. It was its people in their high and peaceful homes who did not hear that South Carolina had seceded until the event lost all its freshness as news: and possibly tidings of the convention at Knoxville had not gone to them with enough fleetness of wing to give timely information. Yet they were alive and awake to the worth of “Liberty and Union,--one and inseparable,--now and forever!” and the time would come to them for action. The tidal wave of battle would ere long toss its foam and spray upon the foundations of the everlasting hills among which they dwelt; and they would do their part in saving the ship of state from being wrecked in the storm. Rhea County and Sequatchie, a little county embedded in the mountains north of Chattanooga, were the only ones in East Tennessee unrepresented in the convention; but why, does not appear.[20]