The Meek correspondence consists mostly of letters written by the East Tennessee Unionist James Monroe Meek (1821-after 1899) and by his wife, Elizabeth Walker Meek (1839-1921), during the Civil War. The 27 letters in the Meek correspondence fall into three distinct groups. Seventeen letters date from the months between October 1861 and June 1862: eight of these were occasioned by Monroe Meek's absence in Nashville, where he was serving in the state legislature, and nine were occasioned by his April arrest and subsequent imprisonment. The earlier, Nashville letters were written between Monroe and Lizzie Meek, each having authored four. The letters relating to the arrest are more various. There are two copies of a letter written by Lizzie Meek to William G. Swan of Knoxville (1821-1869), then a member of the Confederate House of Representatives, seeking Swan's influence in securing her husband's release. These letters date from the apparent day of the arrest, 28 April 1862. Another letter seeking political intervention was written five days later over the joint signatures of Lizzie Meek and Eliza Galbraith, and was sent directly to Jefferson Davis. On 23 May Lizzie received a letter from M. J. Parrott of Knoxville, assuring her of Swan's (and the President's) interest, and begging her patience. There follows a sequence of five letters (5 to 28 June 1862) written between Monroe and Lizzie while the former was being held at Macon. None of these describes the particulars of the affair's resolution. We next hear from Meek in the summer of 1864, inaugurating a sequence of seven letters directed by him to Lizzie. Most of these date from the period December 1864 to February 1865, when Meek was at Nashville helping to establish a new state government. Finally, there are two letters written by Monroe Meek to Lizzie in March 1869, describing the presidential inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant. The letters between Monroe and Lizzie Meek are personal in content, written, first and foremost, as assurances of well-being in uncertain times. Political references are largely incidental, and indeed, the letters shed little light on the particulars of Meek's Unionism: what he believed, how his beliefs altered over time, how he acted on those beliefs. From the beginning East Tennessee Unionism incorporated a broad spectrum of political ideologies, conservative to radical, and Meek's position within that spectrum is unknown. Much loyalist activity was of course clandestine, and would have been communicated only with the greatest discretion. There can be little doubt, however, that Meek was a figure of some weight within Unionist circles, certainly on the county level, and perhaps beyond (he was chosen assistant secretary at the second, Greeneville, meeting of the Unionist Convention, in June 1861). His subsequent election to the Tennessee legislature—which would have obliged him to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederate government—would scarcely have precluded the maintenance of his Unionist ideals; many East Tennessee Unionists were voted into the legislature, since the Confederate authorities chose not to interfere with the August 1861 elections, and many more Unionists took Confederate loyalty oaths, for expediency's sake. Nor do Meek's arrests—what we know of them—tell us anything conclusive about his involvement in the Unionist cause, as will be discussed below. The letters of October 1861 to February 1862 do, however, communicate the extraordinary tension of the times, and the delicacy of Monroe and Lizzie Meek's situation. Monroe's hurried note of 18 November, for example, was written in the wake of the first great Unionist uprising of the war. In the aforementioned letter to Jefferson Davis Lizzie and Eliza Galbraith assert that their husbands were never formally charged, but that "outside rumor" has it that the two were arrested because they "aided and encouraged" loyalists to leave East Tennessee for Kentucky. The establishment of networks to move potential Federal recruits out of the state was in fact a fundamental goal of the Unionists, and one that was successfully realized, but Meek's culpability in this regard cannot be proved or disproved, and must remain an open question. In any case, his arrest need not have been predicated on the government's knowledge or suspicion of specific treasonous acts; it was, very possibly, purely political, part of Kirby Smith's concerted effort to deprive the Unionists of their county leadership. Nor do the letters dating from Meek's time at Macon shed much light on the arrest—not least because they were read by the Confederate military. In his letter to Lizzie of 20 June, Meek writes that "as this letter has to under go an inspection my elocution and rhetoric are somewhat circumscribed Some of the rhetoric of your letter has been eliminated before it reached me. But only a few sentences. No political topics are to be touched and as I know you are no politician it will not require any effort on your part to avoid it." Meek thus reminds his wife to avoid making comments that might be incriminating, or revealing. Lizzie's censored letter, dated 5 June, has survived, and does in fact show several "eliminated" passages. In a subsequent letter, of 28 June, Lizzie refrains from communicating all she knows of efforts to secure the prisoners' release: "I know a great deal if I could see you . . . to tell you that I can not write, but trust we will meet soon and then reveal all." Despite her best efforts at reassurance, her highly anxious state of mind is quite evident in this letter. Meek, for his part, sometimes seeks to allay his wife's fears by describing his predicament with humor: I am not quite old enough to have been at the building of Bable; but I can conceive of nothing nearer the confusion, hurry, running to and fro with every body's proboscis in your face than this. If Bable was as bad as this I dont wonder it tottered to its Fall. I have written thus far and I have counted one dozen men who have approached me and said "who are you writting to Meek". I tell them my wife and write on. And now every thing and every body is around me. An infamous fool is now looking over my shoulder. I guess he will quit if he can read. (27 June 1862) The lines quoted toward the beginning of this letter are from William Cowper's "The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk"—Selkirk being the model for Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. The seven letters written by Meek after his return south in 1864 suggest how unsettled East Tennessee remained, even after Union occupation. Sometime in late July Meek and seven other Unionists—including such stalwarts as T. A. R. Nelson and John Netherland— traveled to Nashville to meet with military governor Andrew Johnson: the Rebels were "running off" East Tennessee's livestock and forage to Virginia, and troops were needed to stop the depredations. Johnson regretted that he could send no troops, but gave each man an English rifle and 40 rounds of ammunition, to defend his home (Graf and Haskins, vol. 7, pp. 52-3). Given its strategic location, Jefferson County had been the scene of much fighting in the winter of 1863-64, and continued to change hands until late the following year, when remaining Confederate troops withdrew to Virginia. Also in late 1864, Middle Tennessee was invaded by the Confederate army of John Bell Hood, though Union victories at Franklin and at Nashville (described by Meek in his letters of 5 and 22 December) effectively drove the Rebels from the state. In early January Meek returned to Nashville for a Unionist gathering held to initiate the process of creating a new, loyal government. As he writes to Lizzie, in his letter of 11 January 1865: The convention has done nothing of importance yet. It will make a general ticket of delegates and order an election is my best impression. A portion of the delegates want to make amendments to the constitution now and submit them to the people. This is too radical and I cannot support it. Meek is saying that he believes the gathering will simply organize elections for delegates to a constitutional convention, which would then possess the authority to reorganize the state government. But in fact the radicals carried the day, assuming constitutional powers for which the delegation lacked a mandate. Tennessee's ordinance of secession was repealed, an amendment ending slavery was passed, and elections were scheduled for 4 March. The radical William G. Brownlow won the governor's seat unopposed, and the majority of the newly elected legislators sympathized with his views. Meek himself did not run for the General Assembly; as he states in his letter of 2 February, "I have my commission as Attorney Gen. for our Judicial Circuit," and he also had his eye on becoming U. S. District Attorney—an ambition not to be realized until 1883.