A body of refugees numbering six or seven hundred, assembled early one day at Blain’s Cross Roads, Grainger County, and took up their line of march for the mountains on the northern frontier. More than half safely escaped from the Confederate cavalry which pursued them, but over three hundred, who had in the morning been unintentionally separated from their companions, were taken prisoners. Cowardice was imputed to them by ready censors for surrendering at once to a force numerically inferior. But they were surrounded by their enemies in an open field--they were comparatively unarmed--had no able and efficient leader nor any military training--and were mostly of immature age. As these young men, with weary eyes and feet, were marched under guard through the streets of Knoxville on their way to jail in the South, for the crime of trying to escape enforced service in arms against the United States, an observer who loved the Union might be pardoned if his throat choked with a throb of pity from his heart and his cheek flushed hot with righteous indignation at the violence. How many of the prisoners, most of whom were only just old enough to be included in the conscript law, ever saw their homes again it is impossible to say. Probably some died in a Georgia prison or on the way to it. Some probably in utter hopelessness were persuaded to wear the grey, and died in the Confederate service. Some may have escaped at one time or another to within the Union lines. It is doubtful if more than a few of them ever returned. “Parson Brownlow,” as he was often called, made this entry in his Diary for 1862, while he was in prison: SATURDAY, MARCH 1.--Thirty Union men, well dressed, were arrested by the cavalry who found them leaving for Kentucky to avoid the draft ordered by Governor Harris. Seventeen of them agreed to join the Confederate army to keep out of jail. But a Sabbath past they brought twenty Union men out of jail, arms tied behind them with strong ropes, and marched them with bayonets to the depot, cursing and insulting them, and sent them off to Tuscaloosa to be held as prisoners of war.... To have seen them coming out of the jail yard and entering the street would have brought tears from the eyes. Brownlow, two days afterwards, started for Nashville, and the work of arresting refugees had then only begun.