Escape from East Tennessee to the federal lines

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.