Chapter XXVI: Appendix: NOTE D: Page 88

This Bible Colporteur was Rev. Herman Bokum, a Minister of the German Reformed Church and a Pennsylvanian, who had resided for five years on a farm near Knoxville. His education was superior in kind, and he had the Germanic conscientiousness with which Martin Luther was so magnificently gifted. Under his eccentric, decidedly brusque manners, there lay hidden a tender heart and a deep vein of piety. Whatever disturbances his mind had once suffered from outward troubles, it certainly had emerged from them (as is sometimes the outcome in such cases,) with a sharpness of discernment, of which minds are blameless that have never been moved from their even tenor and plodding ways. His mental astuteness was of little or no use to him in the conduct of his own affairs,--his poverty always keeping in front along with his sincerity. But he early saw the fatal drift of the Secession movement and the magnitude of the proportions to which it would grow. Dr. Hill, then President of Harvard University, told a Tennesseean after the war had closed, that his eyes had been first opened by Mr. Bokum, to the reality of the Rebellion, early in its progress, as _a great and portentous fact_. Being an ardent Union man and of a fearless nature, he soon became obnoxious to the Confederate authorities. Eventually they detailed a file of soldiers to arrest him at his home. But he heard of their coming and made his escape over the mountains through Kentucky to Philadelphia. There he was appointed a Hospital Chaplain and in 1863 published in pamphlet, “A Refugee’s Testimony,”--being a narrative of his personal experiences in Tennessee.