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Doc. 6.-Geo. B. Crittenden's proclamation.

The Proclamation was taken from the fortified entrenchments near Mill Springs:

proclamation.

division headquarters, Mill Springs, Ky., January 6th, 1862.
To the People of Kentucky:
When the present war between the Confederate States and the United States commenced, the State of Kentucky determined to remain neutral. She regarded this as her highest interest, and balancing between hope for the restoration of the Union and love for her Southern sisters, she declared and attempted to maintain a firm neutrality.

The conduct of the United States Government toward her has been marked with duplicity, falsehood, and wrong. From the very beginning, the President of the United States, in his messages, spoke of the chosen attitude of Kentucky with open denunciation, and on the one hand treated it with contempt and derision, while, on the other hand, he privately promised the people of Kentucky that it should be respected. In violation of this pledge, but in keeping with his first and true intention, he introduced into the State arms which were placed exclusively in the hands of persons known or believed to be in favor of coercion, thus designing to control the people of Kentucky, and to threaten the Confederate States. Then the government of the Confederate States, in self-defence, advanced its arms into your midst, and offers you their assistance to protect you from the calamity of Northern military occupation.

By the administration of your State government, Kentucky was being held to the United States, and bound at the feet of Northern tyranny. That government did not rest upon the consent of your people. And now, having thrown it off, a new government has been established, and Kentucky admitted into the Southern Confederacy. Can Kentuckians doubt which government to sustain? To the South you are allied by interest, by trade, by geography, by similarity of institutions, by the ties of blood, and by kindred courage. The markets of the North do not invite your products; your State is, to the centre of its trade, society, and laws, but a distant province, despised for its customs and institutions; your heroic lineage forbids association in arms with their warriors of Manassas, of Leesburg, and of Belmont; and your former devotion to the Union must intensify your hatred toward that section which has, in its abolition crusade, broken to pieces the Constitution, and which is now vainly endeavoring to destroy the liberty of the Southern States!

At first you may have been deceived as to the purposes of the North. They talked of restoring the Union. Do you not see that it is hopelessly lost in the storm of war, and that while the rotten government of the North is shaking over its ruins the South has erected out of them a new, powerful, and free constitutional republic! And now, indeed, the mask is thrown off, and you find the North through its President, and Secretary of War, and public journals, and party leaders, giving up the claim of Union, and proclaiming the extinction of slavery and the subjugation of the South. Can you join in this enterprise? The South would never in any event consent to a reconstruction. She is contending with unconquerable spirit, with great military power, with unbroken success, for constitutional freedom and for her own national government. Where is your spirit of other days, that you do not rush to her victorious standard? Shall the sons of Tennessee, Virginia, Mississippi, and other Southern States, with whom you have gathered the laurels on other battle-fields, win them all in this war of Independence, while you are inactive and lost in slothful indolence? May the proud genius of my native Kentucky forbid it.

In these mountains, where freedom and patriotism stir the human heart, can you sleep with the clarion of a glorious war ringing in your ear? True, you have refused to bear the arms and wear the livery of Northern despotism. Their base hirelings have been among you, but have not seduced you into their ranks. Will you stay at home and let noble bands of soldiers, armed in your cause as in their own, pass on to battlefields on your own soil, consecrated by no deed of your valor?

Having assumed command of the forces of the Confederate States on Cumberland river, in south-eastern Kentucky, I make this appeal to you. You are already assured that we come among you as friends and brothers, to protect you in your persons, liberties, and property, and only to make war against the invaders of your home and our common enemies. I invoke you to receive us as brothers, and to come to our campand share with us the dangers and the honor of [18] this struggle. Come to these headquarters, as individuals or in companies, and you will be at once accepted and mustered in, with pay and arms from the government of the Confederate States. At first many Kentuckians entered the army of the South for the great cause it supports, now this has become the cause of Kentucky, and it is your duty to espouse it. Duty and honor unite in this call upon you. Will you join in the moving columns of the South, or is the spirit of Kentucky dead?

Geo. B. Crittenden, Major-General.

--Louisville Journal, Jan. 29.

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