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Escape from East Tennessee to the federal lines

Chapter 2: INTRODUCTION.
By Robert A. Ragan
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About This Book

A first-person wartime memoir recounts an East Tennessee resident's efforts to reach Federal lines amid civil conflict, narrating hazardous crossings of mountains and rivers, nights spent outdoors, capture and confinement, and repeated attempts to guide other Union sympathizers through hostile country. The narrative combines episodic escape stories with local political background and militia service, vivid rural landscape detail, and practical descriptions of evasive routes. It emphasizes divided loyalties, the material and emotional hardships of clandestine movement, and the personal costs of prolonged danger and separation.

Copyright 1910, by
R. A. RAGAN.

INTRODUCTION.

I lay no claim to literary attainments, but undertake to tell in simple words the story of my experiences, hardships and sufferings, lying out in the cold weather many nights, trying to make my way across the mountains and rivers to Kentucky, where the Union Army was encamped.

There have been a number of books written since the Civil War, dealing with the loyalty, heroism and suffering of the Union people of East Tennessee during that period, but few men have given their individual experience from 1861 to 1864.

I am, so far as I can ascertain, the only East Tennessee pilot living. I give the following names of those who piloted Union men through the lines: Daniel Ellis, James Lane, A. C. Fondren, James Kinser and David Fry. These men have all died since the War, except James Lane, who was killed at the foot of the Cumberland Mountain, in Powell’s Valley, while conveying men to Kentucky.

R. A. R.