SERVICE WITH THE THIRD
said that he had never known what a United States flag looked like until he had seen one carried by our soldiers in this war.
Reorganizing Lincoln County
Lincoln County was one of the richest, as well as the most violent of Secession counties in Tennessee. Its people boasted that it had cast 2,500 votes for Secession, and not one for the Union; the few Union men in the county had not dared to go to the polls. A few months previous to our coming a small detachment of Northern troops had been captured there by guerrillas. The prisoners had been taken to the bank of the Elk River and three of them deliberately murdered. A fourth had only escaped by leaping into the river and swimming off in the confusion. When he had reported the matter to headquarters, Colonel Ketcham of the One Hundred Fiftieth New York had been sent to collect an assessment of $30,000 from the citizens of the county for the benefit of the families of the murdered soldiers.
Our mission in Lincoln County was to hunt down the guerrillas who infested it, and to care for
[106]
