Sketch of the First Kentucky Brigade

uth, history records no sadder tale than the retreat of the Kentuckians from their native State. For the rest of the army there was yet hope. Far to the South lay their homesteads, and their families rested still in security. Between those homesteads and those families and the advancing foe were innumerable places where battle might be successfully offered, or where at least the sons of the South might rear a rampart of their bodies over which the invader could not pass. Time, political complications, mutations of fortune, to which the most successful commanders are liable, might at any time transform the triumph of the Northmen into disaster and defeat. Months must elapse before the advancing columns of the enemy could reach the South, and ere that time arrived pestilence and malarious disease would, amid the fens and swamps of the gulf States, be crouching in their lair, ready to issue forth and grapple with the rash intruders from a more salubrious clime. But for the Kentuckians all was apparently lost. Be