On the 20th of January, 1862, the battle of Fishing Creek, or Mill’s Springs, Kentucky, was fought and the victory won by General Thomas, of the United States army, produced a strong, disturbing sensation among the Confederates at Knoxville. For this there were good reasons. The battle-field was not far distant; it was the first fight of any importance that was at all near the town; the Confederate chief Zolicoffer and his subordinate Generals, Crittenden and Carroll, had been successively in command at Knoxville, and many of their troops had been stationed there at different times. Upon their defeat, they went according to the rule with Buonaparte’s soldiers upon their defeat at Waterloo: _sauve qui peut_; and some of them in the pell-mell flight were not slow in reaching Knoxville. The tidings they carried created intense excitement, anger and fear. At first the blame of the defeat was attributed chiefly to Gen. Crittenden and his inferior in office, Gen. Carroll, both of whom, it was alleged, were drunk on the eve of the occasion. The story ran, that Zolicoffer, who was slain in the fight, had opposed the attack upon the Federal army, and that being over-ruled, he had entered on it reluctantly. All the reproaches visited upon Crittenden and Carroll grew out of, or were plausibly justified by, their reputation for using spirituous liquors to excess. When the agitation subsided, the Fishing Creek tales were found to be untrue. Gen. Crittenden, from being cursed as an inebriate and almost suspected as a traitor, became an object of friendly sympathy as a victim of ill luck in war. Popular opinion is always capricious and prone to undue elation or depression in prosperous or adverse circumstances. The wrath to which calamities move the thoughtless and passionate must be vented upon somebody, and it is apt to turn upon him through whose well known frailty the calamity may easily have been incurred. The intemperate man has to suffer for a time at least, on occasions of ill to which he is a party, from the quick presumption in people’s minds that his vicious indulgence stands as an open door to all blunder and disaster.