because of "some treasonable articles in late numbers of the Whig." I have reproduced those two "treasonable articles" on the first page of this issue, that the unbiased people of the country may "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" the treason. They relate to the culpable remissness of these Knoxville leaders in failing to volunteer in the cause of the Confederacy. According to the usages of the court, as heretofore established, I presume I could go free, by taking the oath these authorities are administering to other Union men; but my settled purpose is not to do any such thing. I can doubtless be allowed my personal liberty, by entering into bonds to keep the peace and to demean myself toward the leaders of Secession in Knoxville, who have been seeking to have me assassinated all summer and fall, as they desire me to do; for this is really the import of the thing, and one of the leading objects sought to be attained. Although I could give a bond for my good behavior, for one hundred thousand dollars, signed by fifty as good men as the county affords, I shall obstinately refuse to do even that; and if such a bond be drawn up and signed by others, I will render it null and void by refusing to sign it. In default of both, I expect to go to jail, and I am ready to start upon one moment's warning. Not only so, but there I am prepared to lie in solitary confinement until I waste away because of imprisonment or die from old age. Stimulated by a consciousness of inno cent uprightness, I will submit to imprisonment for life, or die at the end of a rope, before I will make any humiliating concession to any power on earth! I have committed no offence. I have not shouldered arms against the Confederate Government, or the State, or encouraged others to do so. I have discouraged rebellion, publicly and privately. I have not assumed a hostile attitude toward the civil or military authorities of this new Government. But I have committed grave, and, I really fear, unpardonable offences. I have refused to make war upon the Government of the United States; I have refused to publish to the world false and exaggerated accounts of the several engagements had between the contending armies; I have refused to write out and publish false versions of the origin of this war, and of the breaking up of the best Government the world ever knew; and all this I will continue to do, if it cost me my life. Nay, when I agree to do such things, may a righteous God palsy my right arm, and may the earth open and close in upon me forever! The real object of my arrest and contemplated imprisonment is to dry up, break down, silence, and destroy the last and only Union paper left in the eleven seceded States, and thereby to keep from the people of East Tennessee the facts which are daily transpiring in the country. After the Hon. Jeff Davis had stated in Richmond, in a conversation relative to my paper, that he would not live in a Government that did not tolerate freedom of the press,—after the judges, attorneys, jurors, and all others filling positions of honor or trust under the "permanent Constitution," which guarantees freedom of the press, and after the entire press of the South had come down in their thunder tones upon the Federal Government for suppressing the Louisville Courier and the New York Day-Book, and other Secession journals,—I did expect the utmost liberty to be allowed to one small sheet, whose errors could be combated by the entire Southern press! It is not enough that my paper has been denied a circulation through the ordinary channels of conveyance in the country, but it must be discontinued altogether, or its editor must write and select only such articles as meet the approval of a pack of scoundrels in Knoxville, when their superiors in all the qualities that adorn human nature are in the penitentiary of our State! And this is the boasted liberty of the press in the Southern Confederacy! I shall in no degree feel humbled by being cast into prison, whenever it is the will and pleasure of this august Government to put me there; but, on the contrary, I shall feel proud of my confinement. I shall go to jail-as John Rodgers went to the stake-for my principles. I shall go, because I have failed to recognize the hand of God in the work of breaking up the American Government, and the inauguration of the most wicked, cruel, unnatural, and uncalled-for war |