severely felt by the Unionists; and Fremont, resolving to retrieve it, at once put in motion an army of more than twenty thousand men to drive Price and his followers out of Missouri.
Early in the summer the disloyal governor of Kentucky declared that arrangements had been made at Cincinnati, with General McClellan, that neither National nor Confederate troops  should enter Kentucky. McClellan denied the truth of the assertions; but for several months the neutrality of Kentucky was as much respected as if such an arrangement was in force; and the purposes of the governors of Kentucky and Tennessee were promoted, for it gave them more time to prepare for war. In the meantime Pillow had been unsuccessfully trying to capture Cairo by military operations in Missouri. He urged the seizure of the bluff at Columbus, in Western Kentucky, from which he believed he might take Cairo in reverse, turn its guns upon Bird's Point, drive out and disperse the Nationals, and so make a free passage for the Confederates to St. Louis. The solemn pledges of his masters to respect Kentucky neutrality, restrained Pillow; but in September (1861) the Confederates resolved to violate that neutrality. General (Bishop) Polk seized the strong position at Columbus, with a considerable body of troops, under the pretext that National forces were preparing to occupy that place. The Confederate secretary of war publicly telegraphed to Polk to withdraw his troops; and at the same  time Jefferson Davis privately telegraphed to him to hold on, saying: "The necessity must justify the means." So Columbus was held by the Confederates. The loyal members of the Kentucky Legislature requested the governor to call out the militia of the State to expel the invaders, and asked the National Government to aid him. The governor did nothing; but General Ulysses S. Grant, then in command of the district around Cairo, took military possession of Paducah, in Northern Kentucky, at the mouth of the Tennessee River. The seizure of Columbus by the Confederates opened the way to all the horrors of war which Kentucky suffered; and the occupation of Paducah by National troops ended the "neutrality" of that State. Thenceforth Kentucky was numbered among the loyal States.
On the day after Polk seized Columbus, a Confederate force under General Zollicoffer (formerly a member of Congress) invaded Kentucky from East Tennessee, where the loyalists were suffering peculiar hardships at the hands of the Secessionists. At the same time, Simon B. Buckner, who had been placed in command of the professed "neutral" Kentucky State Guard, formed a Confederate camp in Tennessee, just below the Kentucky border, and, acting in co-operation with Polk and Zollicoffer, attempted to seize Louisville. He was foiled by the vigilance of General Anderson (late of Fort Sumter), who was in command there, with General W. T. Sherman as his lieutenant. Buckner fell back to Bowling Green, on the Nashville and Louisville Railroad, and there established a camp as a nucleus of a powerful Confederate force that was gathered soon afterward.
Buckner's raid and the invasion of Zollicoffer aroused the Unionists of Eastern Kentucky, who flew to arms under various leaders. In an attack upon a camp of Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio troops, under Colonel Garrard, at the Rock Castle Hills, a picturesque region of the Cumberland Mountains, Zollicoffer was repulsed, on the 21st of October. Further eastward, near Piketon, the capital of Pike county, a Confederate force under John S. Williams was dispersed by some Union troops under General William Nelson, early in November. These successes inspirited the loyalists of East Tennessee with hopes of a speedy deliverance from their oppressors; but they were compelled to wait long for relief, for toward the close of 1861 the Confederates had established a firm military foothold in Tennessee, and occupied a considerable portion of Southern Kentucky from the Cumberland
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