Most in the auditorium on that May evening in 1862 were surely disappointed by the guest of honor’s appearance. From his reputation, they had expected the “celebrated exile” from the Confederacy to look more imposing, to embody physically the undaunted courage and unflinching resolve that all knew to be his defining traits. Instead, the “martyr” from East Tennessee looked thin and frail, his shoulders stooped, his face haggard and—to be candid—homely. (What else could you say about a man whom a sympathetic reporter characterized as “not quite as handsome as Mr. Lincoln”?) Yet, when the speaker was led on the stage by the president of the Young Men’s Republican Union, the packed assembly at New York City’s Academy of Music sprang to their feet as one. As a member of the audience described the scene: “The clapping of hands seemed almost to shake the very walls; gentlemen waved their hats and ladies their handkerchiefs; and all this was followed by cheer upon cheer, indicating the ‘irrepressible’ enthusiasm of the crowd.” The speaker did nothing to dampen their enthusiasm, for he proceeded to enrage and inspire his admirers with a graphic account of the “reign of terror” that gripped his native land and a moving tribute to its persecuted patriots “whose only offense was love of country.” Relating how his business had been shut down and his life threatened because of his faithfulness to the Constitution and the Union, he hastened to add that East Tennessee was teeming with suffering heroes just like him. The Union men of East Tennessee, he assured his listeners, were “uncompromising” in their loyalty. Indeed, they would readily imperil both life and property in defense of the Stars and Stripes. “We have thought that we loved our country,” the New York Times confessed, “[but] our patriotism, with its many flags and applause of men, ‘pales its ineffectual fires’ before the noontide glory of theirs.” In sum, if readers were searching for examples of truly selfless devotion to the Union in the most trying of circumstances, the Times advised them to look south to the loyalists of East Tennessee or, better yet, to their triumphant leader now in New York City, that “sturdy and much-suffering lover of the Union,” William G. Brownlow.1
It was good advice—up to a point. The Times was correct in two crucial particulars: whoever would understand Unionism within the Confederacy must surely pay attention to East Tennessee, and whoever would understand Unionism in East Tennessee must come to know that region’s most outspoken Unionist, the minister turned journalist whom both friends and enemies called “the Parson.” The name William Brownlow is rarely recognized today, but in 1862 its bearer was a celebrity across the warweary North. As the editor of the Knoxville Whig, the pugnacious parson had waged war against the cause of secession until Tennessee seceded in June 1861, at which point he aimed his acid pen at the “Satanic Confederacy” and its hellish agenda. After tolerating his defiance for nearly half a year, Confederate authorities in Knoxville finally arrested Brownlow for treason in November and, after holding him through the winter, ordered him beyond the lines of the Confederacy in March 1862. He headed for Cincinnati and soon began a triumphal speaking tour that took him to Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Washington, New York, Boston, and countless smaller venues along the way. At each stop, enraptured crowds hailed the “unflinching hero,” paid tribute to the patriot “unwavering and bold.” They snapped up more than 100,000 copies of his hastily written autobiography, purchased his likeness on “cartes de visite” and stationery, read dime novels about his exploits, danced to “The Parson Brownlow Quick Step,” and in numerous other ways so lionized the Tennessee journalist that at least one religious newspaper had to caution its readers about “idol worship.” The Parson, it would seem, had become the very personification of Southern Unionism.2
Yet, if our goal is to gain insight into East Tennesseans’ original response to the collapse of the Union, it is imperative to disregard much of what Parson Brownlow actually told Northern audiences after his banishment from the Confederacy. Although they could not have been aware of it at the time, the audience in the New York Academy of Music who came to learn about Southern Unionism heard, not an accurate characterization, but a caricature.3 The Brownlow who addressed Northern audiences during the war presented Southern Unionism as the product of a pure and “unconditional” patriotism that valued fidelity to the Union above all other attachments. The Brownlow who addressed other Tennesseans during the secession crisis took a decidedly different tack. A close reading of the Parson’s public pronouncements in 1860 and 1861 reveals that, although this quintessential Unionist categorically denounced secession, he never actually espoused a literally unconditional commitment to the Union.4 Furthermore, when he exhorted his readers to stand by the Union, he most often did so by appealing to a variety of more parochial commitments—to party, region, and class—which combined to make not so much a positive case for Union as a compelling negative case against disunion.
“East Tennessee is my horror,” Union general William T. Sherman once complained to Ulysses S. Grant. “That any military man should send a force into East Tennessee puzzles me.”5 On the whole, latter-day historians of the Civil War have seemed to share Sherman’s aversion to the region; most broad histories of the Confederacy are written as if it did not exist. To cite but a few examples, a recent work focused on “anti-Confederate Southerners” devotes all of two paragraphs to East Tennessee, a survey of Confederate politics allocates two sentences, and a major study of “the failure of Confederate nationalism” allots three sentences.6 Perhaps the region is just too much of an anomaly for works geared toward broad generalization. Certainly, East Tennessee was a world far removed from the land of cotton fields and white-columned mansions that has for so long fascinated both scholars and buffs interested in “the South.” Proud of the region’s uniqueness, East Tennesseans were prone to exaggerate it; they accepted the label mountaineers and referred to their homeland as the “Switzerland of America.” In reality, proportionally few East Tennesseans actually lived in the mountains per se—whether the Smokies to the east or the Cumberland Plateau to the west—most opting instead for the more fertile and accessible lands of the Great Valley of East Tennessee. A census official once dubbed the area the poor man’s rich land, a phrase that nicely captures the combination of opportunity and limitation that the land afforded. The soil and climate were well suited for the production of foodstuffs and livestock, and the plain folk who lived there could reasonably expect the land to yield a comfortable existence. They knew better than to expect handsome profits, however. The short growing season rendered cotton cultivation impractical (fewer than one in one hundred farmers tried to plant it), and most farmers would never be able to purchase slaves, a luxury restricted to less than one-tenth of households.7
In sum, East Tennessee was a mixed-farming region of small farms worked primarily by white labor, almost the antithesis of the Black Belt regions that led in the creation of the Confederacy. When the secession crisis erupted, this economically distinct area asserted its political distinctiveness as well. As Mark Neely has observed: “The mountains may have isolated East Tennesseans physically, but they did not do so politically.” The region was “in the vanguard” of the Jacksonian party system, “the scene of strenuous political campaigns, the home of enthusiastic voters, and the nursery of able politicians.”8 As was true in the Upper South generally, in East Tennessee the two-party system survived the national collapse of the Whig Party. The Whigs survived locally, albeit under a succession of different names. Lifelong Whigs like Parson Brownlow typically became Know Nothings in the mid-1850s, members of the “Opposition” Party toward the end of the decade, and finally backers of the Constitutional Union Party during the 1860 presidential election. Such name changes aside, the Democratic and Whig factions were impressively stable well into the secession crisis, and voter turnout regularly exceeded 80 percent.9
East Tennessee voters formally considered separation from the Union not once but twice. In mid-January 1861, as several Lower South states were in the process of seceding, Tennessee’s prosecession governor, Isham G. Harris, urged the General Assembly to call for a statewide referendum a mere three weeks later. As prescribed by the legislature, voters would cast two ballots, the first indicating whether they favored holding a special convention to consider the desirability of secession, the second choosing delegates to represent them in such a convention should it be held. When voters went to the polls on February 9, Middle Tennesseans were closely divided, and West Tennesseans strongly favored holding a convention, but fully 81 percent of East Tennessee voters were opposed, and the resulting twenty-five-thousand-vote margin against the convention was more than enough to offset the eighteen-thousand-vote margin in favor in the rest of the state.10 Four months later, Tennesseans returned to the polls, this time to approve or reject a “declaration of independence” passed by the General Assembly in the aftermath of the battle at Fort Sumter and President Lincoln’s call for troops to put down the rebellion. By then, nearly seven-eights of Middle and West Tennesseans favored disunion, yet East Tennesseans still opposed separation by more than two to one, making the region an island of Unionism within the Confederacy.11
Although East Tennessee has long been marginalized in the grand narrative histories of the South during the Civil War, historians of Southern Appalachia such as Charles F. Bryan Jr., Noel Fisher, John D. Fowler, W. Todd Groce, and John C. Inscoe have begun to pay close attention to the region, and in recent years they have done much to underscore its importance and to highlight the complex and engaging story that unfolded there. In particular, they have significantly complicated our understanding of the area’s predominant “Unionism” by showing the sheer number of variables—class, kinship, geography, religious ties, partisan affiliation, and regional self-image, among others—that helped shape patterns of loyalty in the region.12 Curiously, however, they have not given focused attention to Parson Brownlow, the man who by the time of Tennessee’s secession was indisputably the preeminent voice of East Tennessee Unionism.
They are not alone. To be sure, works that deal significantly with dissent within the Confederacy normally mention the Parson, and occasionally broader studies of the Civil War include cursory references as well. Only a handful of scholars, however, have written about him in any detail. You have to go back three-quarters of a century to find the only book-length scholarly biography of him. In the mid-1930s, E. Merton Coulter turned his attention toward Brownlow, holding his nose as he did so. Brownlow was a “deluded crusader,” Coulter averred, who whipped “up patriotism through singing his hymn of hate.” Writing unabashedly as a Southern partisan, Coulter condemned Brownlow for “treason” against the Confederacy, questioned his mental stability, assaulted his character, and attributed his large following among East Tennesseans to their “ignorance and prejudice.” So great was Coulter’s contempt for the Parson that, at times, his biography reads like a nineteenth-century melodrama. Regarding Brownlow’s decision in the 1830s to retire as a Methodist circuit rider and “locate” in the small village of Jonesborough (where he would live for about a decade before moving to Knoxville), Coulter observed sadly: “It was an evil day for this little mountain town when Brownlow came here to live.”13
Although somewhat more balanced, most subsequent scholarly assessments since Coulter’s evince the same basic dislike for the Parson. Probably, at least into the 1980s, much of this scholarly disdain reflected distaste for his postwar career. As the war was coming to a close, Brownlow embraced the Republican Party (which he had earlier denounced), won the governorship (thanks to the disfranchisement of white Confederates), claimed a second term (thanks to the enfranchisement of blacks, whom he had long proclaimed inferior), and then contrived to have himself elected to the U.S. Senate just before the state legislature was “redeemed” from Republican rule by a Democratic resurgence. At any rate, a 1981 survey of Tennessee historians ranked Brownlow dead last among the state’s governors to that point in terms of “ability, accomplishments, and statesmanship”—one slot below Ray Blanton, a convicted felon, and some thirty-two places behind Isham G. Harris, the prosecession governor who maneuvered to ally the state with the Confederacy even before a popular referendum could be held on secession.14
Even scholars with no obvious dislike for Brownlow have typically found it hard to take him seriously, and this, I am convinced, has more to do with his shocking prose than with any other single factor. And it is shocking to our modern ears, accustomed as we are to journalists who, most of the time anyway, make at least a pretense of professional objectivity. In the pages of the Whig, an antislavery opponent became “an unwashed, unmitigated, unregenerate, and God-forsaken Abolitionist.” Local secessionists were “imps of hell,” a rival newspaper editor a “low-down, ill-bred, lying, debauched, drunken scoundrel.” My favorite “Brownlowism” involves the Parson’s response to an invitation, shortly after Tennessee seceded, from the Confederate general Gideon Pillow to serve as a chaplain for a Tennessee brigade. Brownlow replied in print. Thanking Pillow for his invitation, he nevertheless declined. “Should I ever decide to go to Hell,” he explained, “I will simply cut my throat and go direct, and not by way of the Southern Confederacy.”15 Brownlow made no apology for such language. He gloried in it, bragging early in his career about his gift for “piling up epithets,” and boasting that, in its “wholesale abuse of individuals,” his newspaper was “without a parallel in the history of the American Press.” No wonder that one of Brownlow’s biographers dismissed the Whig as an “advertisement against the First Amendment.”16
Yet Brownlow’s world was not our own. Antebellum readers typically expected their newspaper of choice to be overtly, aggressively, even viciously partisan.17 Granted, the Parson elevated the ad hominem attack to an art form, but he hardly monopolized the tactic. (Indeed, he was often on the receiving end of it. To cite one example, a Democratic editor once blasted him in print as “monstrously corrupt, desperately wicked, a pest to society, a common tattler, a shameless blackguard, an unblushing hypocrite, a deliberate calumniator, and a convicted libeler.”)18 It would be a mistake, in other words, merely because of his salty vocabulary, to ignore the editor whose newspaper reached more readers than all other newspapers in East Tennessee combined, who indeed may have had the largest readership of any journalist in the Confederacy at the outbreak of the war.19 What is more, Brownlow’s political positions were identical with those of the majority of East Tennesseans throughout the secession crisis, and both his friends and his enemies testified that this was no coincidence. The Parson’s political allies pointed to his “phenomenal” personal magnetism and persuasiveness as well as his unerring grasp of the views of the common folk who constituted the bulk of his subscribers.20 Critics also acknowledged his influence, bitterly denouncing the Whig as “the great and deadly engine in deluding and poisoning the public mind” against secession. “The rabble,” one enemy condescendingly complained, “have it as their guide and textbook.”21 No, the editor of the Whig was not a sophisticated political theorist. He was, however, a masterful polemicist and political catechist, and a close reading of his columns can do much to further our understanding of the complicated phenomenon of Appalachian Unionism.
“I am an unconditional, straight-out Union man,” Parson Brownlow told cheering Northern audiences after his banishment from the Confederacy. He had left behind a legion of like-minded patriots in his beloved East Tennessee, common folk characterized by an “uncompromising devotion” to the Union and an “unmitigated hostility” to those who would rend it asunder.22 Other Unionist refugees from the region quickly picked up the refrain. “The Union is with the Union men of East Tennessee the paramount question,” Hermann Bokum proclaimed in a book published in Philadelphia during the war. “Every other is secondary.” A group of prominent East Tennesseans appealing to Congress for financial relief in the fall of 1863 expanded on the theme. As the secession crisis unfolded, they explained, East Tennesseans “did not stop to consider their local or pecuniary interests. Their innate love of country rose above the narrow and selfish considerations that controlled the people and dictated the policy of other states.” In sum, East Tennesseans’ “deep and strong love for their whole country” was a near mystical attachment. It trumped all other loyalties, all other bonds, all other interests.23
We need to take such post-1861 pronouncements with more than a grain of salt. Ulterior motives lurk everywhere. In Brownlow’s case, there was his undeniable love of public acclaim, the desire to place East Tennessee in the most favorable light, the hope of drumming up support for a military campaign that would redeem his homeland from Rebel rule. Of all the different forms of expression, behavior is the one that most rarely lies, however, and the course that the Parson actually pursued during the secession crisis indicates that he doubted that a simple appeal to patriotism could succeed. For some East Tennesseans, such a straightforward approach might have been sufficient, but it is telling that by far the most influential Unionist newspaper in the region adopted a much more complicated editorial strategy.
It is not that Brownlow eschewed appeals to patriotism. In fact, they were fairly common in the pages of the Whig. As early as the spring of 1860, the editor began to warn his readers that the perpetuity of the Union could be at stake in the forthcoming presidential campaign. Once the Democratic Party had split into Southern and Northern wings, with Southern Democrats nominating the current vice president, John C. Breckinridge, Brownlow announced that the “controlling spirits” behind the Breckinridge candidacy “are for disunion.” To underscore the connection, he took to labeling the Southern Democratic Party “the Disunion Party,” their ticket the “disunion ticket.” The Breckinridge Democrats were engaged in a “conspiracy to break up the Union,” he insisted, and “deserve the scorn, contempt, and hatred of every patriot in the land.”24 As summer gave way to autumn and the election of the Republican Abraham Lincoln seemed more and more likely, the Parson boldly declared that the mere election of a Republican as president would not constitute grounds for secession. The editor professed no love for the Illinois rail splitter. Should Lincoln gain the White House, it would be “the greatest calamity that ever befell our country.” Yet Lincoln’s election alone, “under the forms of law and the Constitution, will by no means be a sufficient reason to dissolve this Union.” The “Disunionists” would have no cause to act, Brownlow maintained, and, what is more, they would have no right to act. “I even deny the right of secession,” the Parson proclaimed.25
These are strong words, but not as unequivocal as they might at first appear. As Brownlow defined the matter, the “calamity” of a Republican victory in November would present white Southerners with three options, not two. They could “stand by the Union,” they could secede, or they could revolt. Although the latter two alternatives would both sever the Union, technically they were far from equivalent. Secession was the expression of an alleged constitutional right of states, revolution the expression of a natural right of citizens. The legitimacy of the former was hotly contested, that of the latter not only accepted but venerated in both North and South as a sacred principle enshrined in the American founding. Indeed, the Tennessee constitution opened with the avowal that the people possess, “at all times, an inalienable and indefeasible right to alter, reform, or abolish the government in such manner as they may think proper.”26
If any public figure in East Tennessee dared to question this right, I have not discovered it. Certainly, Parson Brownlow did not. “The right of Revolution I admit,” he acknowledged early in 1861, “but I deny that such remedy is called for in the present crisis of our affairs.” The qualification was crucial. Although revolution was a natural right, it was not a moral act unless undertaken as a last resort against a government that had forfeited its legitimate authority by ceasing to protect the constitutional rights of its citizens.27 This was exactly the situation that existed after the election of Abraham Lincoln, early advocates of disunion insisted. Although in East Tennessee proponents of separation rarely spoke in terms of revolution per se, they nevertheless argued that, with the election of a Republican president, all the necessary criteria for a legitimate revolution were in place. They maintained that, by endorsing a “higher law” than the law of the land, ridiculing the Dred Scott decision, supporting the Underground Railroad, and lionizing the abolitionist murderer John Brown, the Northern Republican majority had repeatedly shown its contempt for the Constitution and its willingness to pervert the federal compact in pursuit of its sectional agenda. If justice was the true end of government, as Madison had argued in the Federalist essays, then a Republican-dominated federal government was, by definition, illegitimate. “Can we hope for justice from Abolitionism and its rulers?” a prominent East Tennessee secessionist asked. The answer, this speaker avowed, was obvious. “There is no hope but under the banner and shield of our own State, co-operating with the South.”28
Not so, Brownlow countered. “What the people of the Southern States should do,” the editor recommended shortly after the votes were in, “may be summed up in a single word: PAUSE!” No Southern right had yet been violated. No Southern interest had yet been thwarted. Lincoln had been elected constitutionally, and the men of the South had no right to judge him except by his actions, “and these can only be appreciated after his inauguration.” As repugnant as Lincoln’s election might be, the South should “stand by the Union and the Constitution with him, as long as he stands by them himself.” If the future president should dare to initiate “unfriendly legislation” against the South (e.g., attempting to abolish the interstate slave trade), Brownlow would wait to see whether Congress sustained him. Should it fail to do so, he would look to the Supreme Court, and, if that body also ignored its constitutional obligations, then—and only then—the time for revolution would be at hand. With right on their side, the Southern states would rise up in revolt. “AND I WILL GO WITH THEM,” the Parson proclaimed, “AND FIGHT THE ENEMY TO THE DEATH!”29 In context, Brownlow was rebuking those who demanded immediate secession in response to a Lincoln victory, but he was hardly proclaiming the “unconditional” Unionism that he so often boasted of after his exile to the North.30
In sum, disunion per se was morally indeterminate. If “Fire Eating” secessionists dissolved the Union without cause, their course would be “treasonable” and “diabolical.” If, on the other hand, “Black Republicans” co-opted the government and waged war on Southern rights, revolution would be both justified and honorable. Both scenarios were real possibilities, furthermore, because border-state moderates were plagued by threats from both extremes of the political continuum, from the “hell-deserving Abolitionists of the North, and the God-forsaken Disunionists of the South.” Because Parson Brownlow perpetually attacked both groups, he found it necessary both to condemn disunion as currently unwarranted and to threaten disunion should circumstances change. Given his unabashedly polemical temperament, he made both kinds of declarations as dogmatically as possible.31
As framed in the pages of the Whig, then, the real issue before East Tennessee voters was the question of whether circumstances currently warranted that they exercise their indisputable natural right of revolution. This was a question much less of constitutional philosophy than of political judgment, and, sooner or later, questions of political judgment always came down to perceptions of competence and character. Which side of the debate did voters find more trustworthy? To win such a contest in the court of public opinion, Brownlow pursued a twofold strategy. First, he set out to prove that East Tennessee Unionists were utterly loyal to the institution of slavery and the pattern of white supremacy it undergirded. Second, he relentlessly impugned the motives of the secessionists, in the process reminding his readers of all they had to fear from a Southern Confederacy.
If the Unionist position was to stand a chance with the electorate, it was imperative, Brownlow understood, to rebut the secessionist claim that opposition to disunion was equivalent to support of abolition. Even before the presidential election, Breckinridge supporters had libeled the Constitutional Union Party as engaged in an insidious coalition with “Abolitionists” and “Douglasites” to ensure the defeat of the only candidate truly committed to preserving slavery. Before election day, they even damned the Parson himself for “going over to the Abolitionists.” After Lincoln’s victory, they relentlessly hammered on the purported connection, calling all opponents of disunion “Lincolnites” and “submissionists” who would spinelessly acquiesce in the “Black Republican agenda.” Representative of this view was the public advertisement posted by six Knoxville voters who later cast their ballots in favor of secession in the February 1861 referendum. “By our votes for the ‘Secession Ticket,’” they explained, “we intended to express . . . our abhorrence of Abolition aggression.”32
There had been a time, more than a generation earlier, when white East Tennesseans could publicly disagree about slavery. During the 1820s, there were perhaps as many as sixteen chapters of the Tennessee Manumission Society in the eastern part of the state. When a convention was held in 1834 to revise the state constitution, eleven East Tennessee counties sent in petitions, signed by perhaps 5 percent of their adult white male populations, advocating some form of gradual abolition. Some of these denounced human bondage as “morally wrong” and “contrary to the law of God.” Others shifted the focus away from the slaves themselves and lamented slavery’s effects on the region’s economy and society. Significantly, even William Brownlow—at the time still riding the Methodist circuit—endorsed a petition that condemned slavery for saddling Southern whites “with some of the most odious features of aristocracy.” The constitutional convention tabled the petitions, however, and it was not long before such public condemnations of slavery had totally vanished, silenced by the “omnipotent despotism of public opinion,” as one East Tennessean remembered. With the emergence of radical abolitionism in the North during the early 1830s, any expression of doubt about the South’s defining institution became “unsouthern” and unsafe.33
Nearly thirty years later, the Unionist cause would be doomed in East Tennessee if secessionists succeeded in portraying themselves as the only true champions of slavery. Parson Brownlow contested the secessionist strategy early and often. During the course of the presidential campaign, the editor published an ongoing exchange with Abram Pryne, a Pennsylvania abolitionist whom he had debated in 1858 concerning the question, “Ought American slavery to be perpetuated?” The Parson denounced his fellow clergyman as “a heartless, unfeeling, unprincipled knave” who proposed to “turn the brutal negro upon unsuspecting white men and the defenseless white woman, and see them gloat on murder and rapine.” As a defender of John Brown—that “murderous old Imp of Hell”—Pryne deserved the gallows every bit as much as Brown. He was pathetically typical “of that class of God forsaken fanatics, who lie, and rant, against slavery, and the cruelties of slavery in the South, without knowing anything about the institution.” In fact, Brownlow lectured, Southern slaves were healthy and happy in the position that God had ordained for them. Abuses might occur elsewhere, the editor conceded, but, “so far as America is concerned, slavery is a blessing to the slave.”34
Thus, the “Republican North” was deluded, the Parson proclaimed early in 1861, if it thought for a moment that white Southerners were less than unified in their commitment to slavery. Unionists and secessionists “differed” only “as to the time and mode of resistance” to the threat of Republican aggression. Should convincing evidence emerge that the new administration “contemplated the subjugation of the South or the abolishing of slavery,” the editor assured a New York correspondent later in the spring, “there would not be a Union man among us in twenty-four hours.” Turning his sights on Southern secessionists, Brownlow argued that—for the present, at least—slavery was perfectly safe within the Union. Taking the offensive, he contended that secession would actually jeopardize slavery. By precipitating civil war and presenting the North with a rationale for invading the slave states, the fanatic Fire-Eaters would “actually bring about the overthrow of Slavery, one hundred years sooner than the Republican Party could have done it.” Far from being “soft” on slavery, Southern Unionists were its only reliable defenders, Brownlow insisted. Rightly understood, the secessionist scheme was “a more consummate Abolition contrivance than ever was devised at the North, by the most ultra anti-slavery men.”35
While proving to his satisfaction that slavery was safe within the Union and that secession would actually endanger it, the Parson simultaneously asked his readers why so many Southerners were clamoring for secession when it was such an obviously unwise course. The rank and file of secessionists might be dismissed as simply “deluded,” he acknowledged, but their leaders were clever and cunning men who must be “seeking their own and not their country’s good.”36 What motivated them? In answering his own query, the editor repeatedly stressed partisan, geographic, and class loyalties designed to render the secessionist leadership suspect in the eyes of his audience.
Brownlow began by reminding his readers that the secessionist movement was spearheaded by Democrats. Although both secessionists and Unionists frequently claimed that old party ties had been rendered moot by the sectional crisis, it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of partisan themes in the Parson’s case against disunion. The editor had been warring against the devil and the Democratic Party for decades, and, even as the Union was collapsing, there was an eerie continuity to his rhetoric. Part of his role was simply to remind his readers of the moral bankruptcy of the Democratic leadership. At the national level, there were Northern opportunists such as that “wicked liar” James Buchanan, who had spawned an administration remarkable for its “thieving, lying, allpervading corruption, and wasteful extravagance.” Farther South were Fire-Eaters such as the Alabama senator William L. Yancey, a convicted murderer who perfectly embodied the “political charlatanism, truculence, imprudence, unsoundness, and unfaithfulness of the Southern extremists.” Democratic leaders closer to home also received their fair share of scorn. The former Tennessee congressman John H. Crozier, the Parson announced, was “one of the most unmitigated scoundrels, cold-blooded hypocrites, insincere and selfish villains” to walk the streets of Knoxville. The local Democratic editor Jacob Sperry was “a contemptible puke” and “the tool of scoundrels,” an “unscrupulous liar,” “revolting drunkard,” and “contemptible coward.”37
More generically, the editor assaulted the Democratic Party as “a bundle of corrupt factions” led by “corrupt, designing, and unprincipled demagogues.” The Breckinridge faction was especially “hypocritical” and “insincere,” given that for years they had cynically agitated the slavery question in search of political advantage. Through their hysterical ranting, they had persistently provided the Republican Party with priceless political ammunition, so much so that it was but small exaggeration to say that Southern Democrats were primarily to blame for Republican popularity. Even before Lincoln’s election, the Parson had proclaimed: “If the Union is dissolved, and the institutions of the country are overthrown, this vile, designing, corrupt and abominable Democracy are responsible for it.” When Lincoln subsequently won the White House, Southern Democratic leaders realized that they would lose out on the patronage and plunder to which they had grown accustomed under the corrupt Buchanan. They then discovered their “principles” and conspired to create a Southern Confederacy, a new vehicle for patronage that promised to be nothing more than “a revival of corrupt Southern Democracy.”38
This was not entirely bombast. In point of fact, almost every prominent Democrat in East Tennessee did ultimately support secession, with Andrew Johnson being the one glaring exception. Conversely, although not all prominent former Whigs remained Unionists, in East Tennessee almost every prominent Unionist had been a former Whig. It is no surprise, then, that a large part of Parson Brownlow’s case for loyalty to the Union was, in fact, a plea for continued loyalty to the old Whig Party. After the Whig Party formally collapsed in the mid-1850s, most East Tennessee Whigs had followed Brownlow into its subsequent incarnations, including the nativist Know-Nothing (or American) Party and the borderstate Constitutional Union Party. Echoes of both abounded in the pages of the Whig. In early 1861, for example, the editor exhorted his readers in a column titled “Put None on Guard but Union Men!”—a phrase all would have recognized as but one word removed from the old masthead slogan of the Whig during its Know-Nothing days: “Put None on Guard but Americans.” The editorial went on to exhort readers to support no politician who could not give the countersign “the Union, the Constitution, and the enforcement of the Laws”—the motto of the Constitutional Union Party during the recent presidential campaign. Brownlow assured his readers that four years of Republican rule under Lincoln could be no worse than another four years of Democratic corruption under Buchanan or Breckinridge. The only time that he wavered in that view was when word reached him that the new Republican president planned to take his cues on patronage appointments in East Tennessee from the Democrat Johnson. The Parson’s disgust was unreserved. “Whilst I am a Union man, in every sense of the word,” he observed bitterly, “I am not to be used in the name of UNION to help re-construct the Democratic Party, whose corruptions, insincerity, demagoguism, and general policy, have brought the country to the verge of ruin.”39
Complementing the Parson’s partisan rhetoric was his castigation of disunion as a plot of the Lower South to serve its own interests. From the moment of South Carolina’s secession in December, East Tennessee secessionists maintained that all other issues were superseded by the imperative that the South remain united. Anticipating the argument that Tennessee must stand shoulder to shoulder with its “Sister Southern States,” even before Lincoln’s election the editor was warning East Tennesseans that, if disunionists should succeed in forming a Southern Confederacy, the wealth and power of the cotton states would inevitably control it, to the detriment of the border states. “We have no interest in common with these Cotton States,” he lectured his readers the following January. “We are a grain-growing and stock-raising people, and we can conduct a cheap Government, and live independent, inhabiting the Switzerland of America.” As the secession of the Lower South became a reality, and, even more troubling, as support for separation in Middle and West Tennessee became strong, Brownlow even proclaimed that East Tennessee should be prepared to secede from the rest of the state. “We can never live in a Southern Confederacy,” he declared, “and be made hewers of wood and drawers of water for a set of aristocrats.”40
This was not the first time that Brownlow had recommended independent statehood for East Tennessee. Two decades earlier, angry and impatient with the state legislature for ignoring East Tennessee’s dire need for transportation improvements, the region’s politicians had introduced multiple resolutions calling for an independent mountain state, and the Parson had endorsed them with almost identical language. “We have long enough been ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water,’ in the hands of Middle Tennesseans,” Brownlow had written in 1841. Denouncing Nashville as the “seat of Dictation,” he applauded independent statehood as the only way for East Tennesseans to end their subservience to the “lordly inhabitants” of the “Nashville Temple.” The proposal actually came close to fruition early in 1842, when both houses of the Tennessee General Assembly passed differing versions of an enabling bill but could not agree on how to reconcile the particulars.41
The internal improvements controversy was only the most pronounced episode in a pattern of intrastate rivalry that had long characterized Tennessee politics. In truth, by 1861 East Tennesseans had been suffering from a regional inferiority complex for decades. Knoxville had been the first capital of Tennessee, and the East Tennessee Valley had been the first center of population and wealth in the state. The area had soon been eclipsed by Middle and West Tennessee, however, as migrants from North Carolina and Virginia began bypassing East Tennessee for the more fertile and accessible lands west of the Cumberland Plateau. For the rest of the antebellum period, East Tennessee would remain decidedly the poorest section of the state; on the eve of the Civil War, the average wealth per free family was 60 percent lower there than in the rest of Tennessee. Acknowledging this economic reality, in 1812 the state legislature had voted to move the capital to Nashville. Thereafter, East Tennessee politicians were wont to portray their section of the state as an outlying “province,” a political backwater now “passed over and left behind.” In warning his readers during the secession crisis that it might be unwise to follow Nashville’s lead, the Parson was merely renewing a hoary theme in East Tennessee politics.42
Significantly, running throughout Brownlow’s condemnation of the Lower South or of Middle and West Tennessee was a thread of populist, class-based rhetoric. Subservience to the Southern Confederacy would be subservience to a “set of aristocrats,” the editor stressed. This, too, was but a variation on a tried and true theme. Over the years, the Parson had frequently condemned demagogic politicians who attempted to “array the poor against the rich,” but the context of such denunciation was usually an editorial in which he was arraying the poor against the rich. Brownlow regularly stressed that he was a poor man, alluded to his background as a carpenter prior to becoming a Methodist preacher, and identified himself as in sympathy with the “Mechanics, Farmers, and laboring classes.” As long as Brownlow was part of a national political party that sought to appeal to all sections of the country—the Whigs or Know Nothings, for example—he confined his assault on “aristocrats” to the members of the “scrub aristocracy” that allegedly dominated his hometown. The Constitutional Union Party garnered almost no support south of Tennessee, however, and, by the presidential campaign of 1860, Brownlow felt little compunction about populist attacks on the Lower South; after the beginning of the secession crisis, he felt none at all.43
A new Southern Confederacy would be ruled by a “Slave Oligarchy,” Brownlow announced toward the end of the presidential campaign. Only slaveholders would be accorded the franchise, which would eliminate not only the Irish and German vote but also “the native poor of our own country.” When the Alabama senator William Yancey stopped off in Knoxville to speak on behalf of John Breckinridge, he played right into the Parson’s hands. Seeking to underscore the importance of slavery to nonslaveholding whites, the Fire-Eater reminded his audience that slavery preserved for them a privileged position by sparing them from “menial service.” Yancey contrasted this with the degradation of white workers in the North, where “white women stand over the tub and cook” and white men “black boots and drive carriages.” Brownlow seized on the comment, and the next several issues of the Whig featured a crude drawing of a white woman standing at a washtub, accompanied by the editor’s explanation that she was “degrading” herself by “menial service.” “That sort of slur upon honest labor may do in South Alabama, among purse-proud aristocratic Democrats,” Brownlow observed caustically, but not in East Tennessee, where only a tenth of white men actually owned slaves and their wives and daughters often “wash, cook, and milk cows, without ever suspecting that they were performing menial services!”44
In truth, Brownlow’s audience was likely quite sensitive to a perceived “slur upon honest labor.” As the editor suggested, most East Tennesseans were no strangers to hard work. What is more, many were undoubtedly dependent on others for their daily bread. In the Parson’s hometown, for example, nearly three-quarters of adult white males in 1860 held “bluecollar” jobs, and nearly half of these were unskilled or semiskilled workers, laboring as gardeners, cooks, waiters, woodcutters, teamsters, or generic “day laborers.” In the countryside, a similar pattern could be found. Perhaps as many as one-fourth of agricultural households were headed by men who hired out as farm laborers, while almost as large a proportion rented the farms that they worked. In four counties of upper East Tennessee that have been systematically studied, fully 43 percent of farm families owned no land of their own. By comparison, studies of landholding patterns in the Lower South place the proportion of free agricultural households without land at 19 percent in southern Alabama, 25 percent in the Mississippi Delta, 24 percent in southern Georgia, and 26 percent in east Texas. Clearly, landlessness was much greater in East Tennessee than in the Black Belt of the Lower South, which also suggests that whites were much more likely to engage in the kind of “menial labor” that Yancey derided.45
As the states of the Lower South began to secede, then, it is small wonder that Parson Brownlow increased his populist assault against disunion. The Southern Confederacy would make the ownership of land and slaves a qualification for voting, he again insisted. “The border States can never live in peace with such men.” Their goal was to establish a “Slavery Aristocracy” which would “overshadow and dishonor poor white men.” Although they decried the “Black Republican” quest for racial equality, they were secretly just as opposed to equality among whites. “We never thought it a disgrace to labor, or to eat bread and meat ‘by the sweat of the brow,’” the editor boasted. In contrast, the “nabobs of Cottonocracy” had nothing but contempt for laboring men; indeed, they welcomed the collapse of the Union as an opportunity to roll back the democratic advances of the past two generations. In the war that was bound to ensue, however, they would force the “honest yeomanry” of the border states to leave their wives and children and “fight for the purse-proud aristocrats of the Cotton States, whose pecuniary abilities [would] enable them to hire substitutes!” In sum, secession would be devastating for the common folk, who had little to gain and much to lose in the slaveholders’ irresponsible and reckless “revolution.”46
That revolution proceeded, of course, and, notwithstanding all the Parson’s efforts, Tennessee formally joined in it during those furious and frenzied first weeks after the attack on Fort Sumter. Once the majority had spoken, however, most East Tennessee Unionists remained opposed to the Confederacy and supported it begrudgingly. They actually petitioned the state legislature (yet again) for permission to form a separate state, and, when their request was predictably denied, most opted for what amounted to a course of neutrality, staying home, keeping their mouths shut, and hoping to be left alone. Although the vast majority rejected outright resistance to the Confederacy as suicidal, from the beginning there were those who believed otherwise. Small bands participated in sensational acts of sabotage in the fall of 1861, while hundreds more made the dangerous trek through the mountains into Kentucky in order to enlist in the Union Army. When the Confederate Congress passed its first Conscription Act in April 1862, furthermore, the trickle of refugees to Kentucky became a flood, as East Tennesseans concluded that Parson Brownlow had been right in his prediction: the Confederate government was going to force the “honest yeomanry” to finish a war that wealthy slaveholders had begun. The Confederate commander in East Tennessee estimated that as many as seven thousand East Tennesseans crossed the border into Kentucky during the first ten days after the measure was passed. Before all was said and done, the region would send more than thirty thousand men into the Union army, a total greater than from such officially loyal states as Rhode Island, Delaware, and Minnesota. Consequently, when Brownlow addressed the New York Academy of Music in May 1862, it was not difficult to convince his admiring audience of the “uncompromising” and “unconditional” Unionism of his homeland.47
The evidence presented here has pointed to a different understanding, however. During the secession crisis, William Brownlow never encouraged voters simply to choose between their commitment to the Union and all other loyalties. Rather, he understood that for East Tennesseans—as for Americans generally—allegiance to the Union coexisted with numerous other forms of group loyalty, which either weakened or reinforced it. When Fire-Eaters began to clamor for secession, he countered their arguments, not primarily by appealing to patriotism, but by stressing a combination of other, more parochial attachments—to slavery, to the Whig Party, to East Tennessee, and to the working class. While the New York Times might marvel at how East Tennesseans’ patriotism overwhelmed every other commitment, it seems more likely that their opposition to secession was so persistent because they could view Unionism as entirely compatible with a number of other forms of allegiance they held dear.
1. New York Daily Tribune, May 14, 1862; New York Times, April 1, May 22, 1862; National Anti-Slavery Standard (New York), May 24, 1862; W. G. Brownlow, Sketches of the Rise, Progress, and Decline of Secession (Philadelphia: George W. Childs, 1862), 7.
2. I discuss Brownlow’s Northern tour in some detail in Lincolnites and Rebels: A Divided Town in the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 111–15.
3. Richard B. Drake correctly notes that Brownlow was a primary architect of one of the first popular stereotypes of the Southern mountaineer: the image of the “hard-pressed lover of freedom who held strongly to the Union” (Drake quoted in Steve Humphrey, “That D—d Brownlow” [Boone, N.C.: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1978], viii). Brownlow fleshed out the stereotype in a series of public lectures across the North in the spring and summer of 1862. For coverage of those speeches, see Chicago Tribune, April 11, 1862; New York Times, April 1, 3, May 14, 22, 1862; New York Daily Tribune, May 16, 20, 1862; National Anti-Slavery Standard, May 24, 1862; Public Ledger (Philadelphia), April 19, June 14, 1862; Boston Daily Evening Transcript, May 24, 1862; Christian Recorder, May 31, June 21, 1862; Saturday Evening Post, April 26, 1862; and Ladies Repository 22, no. 7 (July 1862): 388. After the war, other East Tennessee writers enthusiastically perpetuated the stereotype. See Thomas W. Humes, The Loyal Mountaineers of Tennessee (Knoxville: Ogden Bros., 1888); Will A. McTeer, Among Loyal Mountaineers (Maryville, Tenn.: n.p., n.d.); William Rule, The Loyalists of Tennessee in the Late War (Cincinnati: H. C. Sherick, 1887); Oliver P. Temple, East Tennessee and the Civil War (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1899); and William R. Carter, History of the First Regiment of Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry in the Great War of the Rebellion (Knoxville: Gaut-Ogden, 1902).
4. Because opposition to separation could reflect a variety of motives other than an ideological commitment to the Union per se, there is an argument for dispensing altogether with the label Unionist. In his recent study of the Civil War in the north Georgia mountains, e.g., Jonathan Sarris labels opponents of secession anti-Confederates, rightly noting that, while Unionism could mean many things in North Georgia, “rarely did it mean a philosophical commitment to the ideals of national unity.” The label anti-Confederate is technically more applicable in East Tennessee as well, but I prefer the traditional term Unionist as less cumbersome and truer to the terminology employed at the time. See Jonathan Dean Sarris, A Separate Civil War: Communities in Conflict in the Mountain South (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 79.
5. William T. Sherman to Ulysses S. Grant, December 1, 1863, in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 1861–1865 (hereafter cited as OR), 70 vols. in 128 pts. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), ser. 1, vol. 31, pt. 3, p. 297.
6. William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); George C. Rable, The Confederate Republic: A Revolution against Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Paul Escott, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978).
7. Hermann Bokum, The Tennessee Handbook and Immigrants’ Guide (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1868), 8; Humes, Loyal Mountaineers of Tennessee, 19–35; J. B. Killebrew, Introduction to the Resources of Tennessee (Nashville: Tavel, Eastman & Howell, 1874), 423–47; Eugene W. Hilgard, Report on Cotton Production in the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1884), 409–11; Robert Tracy McKenzie, “Wealth and Income: The Preindustrial Structure of East Tennessee in 1860,” Appalachian Journal 21 (1994): 260–79.
8. Mark E. Neely Jr., Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 104.
9. For overviews of the second-party system in Tennessee, see Paul H. Bergeron, Antebellum Politics in Tennessee (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982); and Jonathan M. Atkins, Parties, Politics, and the Sectional Conflict in Tennessee, 1832–1861 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997).
10. The statewide tally was 69,387 against secession and 57,798 in favor. See Paul H. Bergeron, Stephen V. Ash, and Jeanette Keith, Tennesseans and Their History (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 134–35; and Mary E. R. Campbell, The Attitudes of Tennesseans toward the Union, 1847–1861 (New York: Vantage, 1961), and “The Significance of the Unionist Victory in the Election of February 9, 1861 in Tennessee,” East Tennessee Historical Society’s Papers 14 (1942): 25–27.
11. Statewide, the vote was 108,418–46, 996 in favor of the declaration. In East Tennessee, the count was 32,753–14, 617 against it. Campbell, Attitudes of Tennesseans, 291–94.
12. Charles Faulkner Bryan, “The Civil War in East Tennessee: A Social, Political, and Economic Study” (Ph.D. diss., University of Tennessee, 1978); Noel C. Fisher, War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerilla Violence in East Tennessee, 1860–1869 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); John Derrick Fowler, Mountaineers in Gray: The Story of the Nineteenth Tennessee Volunteer Infantry Regiment, C.S.A. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004); W. Todd Groce, Mountain Rebels: East Tennessee Confederates and the Civil War, 1860–1870 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999); John C. Inscoe, “Mountain Unionism, Secession, and Regional Self-image: The Contrasting Cases of Western North Carolina and East Tennessee,” in Looking South: Chapters in the Story of an American Region, ed. Winfred B. Moore Jr. and Joseph F. Tripp (New York: Greenwood, 1989), 115–29.
13. E. Merton Coulter, William G. Brownlow: Fighting Parson of the Southern Highlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937), 36, 61, 225. For a brief discussion of Coulter’s aggressive defense of the South, see Thomas J. Pressly, Americans Interpret Their Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1955), 286–87. There have been two other extended treatments of Brownlow, but both are narrowly focused. See Royal Forrest Conklin, “The Public Speaking Career of William Gannaway (Parson) Brownlow” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio University, 1967); and Humphrey, “That D—d Brownlow.” Conklin’s work was a School of Communications dissertation that focused on the effectiveness of Brownlow’s public speaking. Humphrey was a retired newspaper reporter who concentrated primarily on Brownlow’s success at generating a wide readership.
14. William Gillespie McBride, “Blacks and the Race Issue in Tennessee Politics, 1865–1876” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1989); Tennessee Historical Quarterly 41 (1982): 100. For assessments of Brownlow since Coulter’s, see esp. Thomas B. Alexander, “Strange Bedfellows: The Interlocking Careers of T. A. R. Nelson, Andrew Johnson, and W. G. (Parson) Brownlow,” East Tennessee Historical Society’s Publications 24 (1952): 68–91; Ralph W. Haskins, “Internecine Strife in Tennessee: Andrew Johnson versus Parson Brownlow,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 24 (1965): 321–40; Conklin, “Public Speaking Career of Brownlow”; Humphrey, “That D—d Brownlow”; and James C. Kelly, “William Gannaway Brownlow,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 43 (1984): 25–43, 155–72.
15. Knoxville Whig, May 12, 1860, April 27, May 25, October 12, 1861; Brownlow’s Knoxville Whig and Rebel Ventilator, January 9, 1864.
16. Jonesborough Whig, May 14, 1840; Kelly, “William Gannaway Brownlow,” 169.
17. On this point, see esp. Kelly, “William Gannaway Brownlow,” 31.
18. Tennessee Sentinel (Jonesborough), quoted in Humphrey, “ That D—d Brownlow,” 63.
19. Kelly, “William Gannaway Brownlow,” 31; R. N. Price, “William G. Brownlow and His Times,” in Holston Methodism: From Its Origin to the Present Time, 5 vols. (Nashville: Methodist Episcopal Church, 1906–1913), 3:320.
20. See, e.g., Oliver P. Temple, Notable Men of Tennessee from 1833 to 1875: Their Times and Their Contemporaries (New York: Cosmopolitan, 1912), 29; and Samuel Mayes Arnell, “The Southern Unionist,” 57, unpublished manuscript, Special Collections Division, University of Tennessee Libraries.
21. Knoxville Daily Register, October 23, 1861; Bird G. Manard to Thomas A. R. Nelson, June 28, 1865, in Thomas A. R. Nelson Papers, McClung Historical Collection, Knox County Public Library. See also Knoxville Daily Register, Februarys 1862.
22. Portrait and Biography of Parson Brownlow, the Tennessee Patriot (Indianapolis: Asher, 1862), 30; Brownlow, Sketches of Secession, 5; Chicago Tribune, April 11, 1862. See also Public Ledger, April 19, 1862; New York Daily Tribune, May 14, 1862.
23. Hermann Bokum, Wanderings North and South (Philadelphia: King & Baird, 1864), 13, 18; “Message of the President of the United States Transmitting an Address of the ‘East Tennessee Relief Association,”‘ 38th Cong., 1st Sess., Senate Executive Document 40 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1864), 2; Humes, Loyal Mountaineers of Tennessee, 11.
24. Knoxville Whig, April 28, July 21, 28, August 25, September 8, 1860.
25. Knoxville Whig, October 13, 1860. See also Knoxville Whig, February 9, 1861.
26. The Official and Political Manual of the State of Tennessee (Nashville: Marshall & Bruce, 1890), 81.
27. Knoxville Whig, February 9, 1861.
28. William H. Sneed, “To the Voters of Knox County,” Knoxville Whig, February 2, 1861. Significantly, even the Tennessee General Assembly eventually defined the question of disunion in terms of revolution. Alone among the states that joined the Confederacy, Tennessee never formally seceded. When the state legislature voted in May 1861 to sunder its tie with the Union, it explicitly “waiv[ed] any expression of opinion as to the abstract doctrine of secession,” passing instead a “declaration of independence.” See Official and Political Manual of the State of Tennessee, 84.
29. Knoxville Whig, October 6, 20, November 24, 1860.
30. See, e.g., Portrait and Biography of Parson Brownlow, 30.
31. Knoxville Whig, March 30, April 27, 1861.
32. Knoxville Register, September 27, 1860; Knoxville Whig, October 27, 1860, February 23, 1861.
33. Temple, East Tennessee and the Civil War, 85–105, 111–20; Richard B. Drake, “Slavery and Antislavery in Appalachia,” Appalachian Heritage 14 (1986): 29–30; Durwood Dunn, An Abolitionist in the Appalachian South: Ezekiel Birds-eye on Slavery, Capitalism, and Separate Statehood in East Tennessee, 1841–1846 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997); Petitions 25-1834, 40-1834, Legislative Petitions, Tennessee State Library and Archives.
34. Knoxville Whig, February 25, May 12, June 23, November 10, 1860. On Brownlow’s earlier debate with Pryne, see Ought American Slavery to Be Perpetuated? A Debate between Rev. W. G. Brownlow and Rev. A. Pryne (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1858).
35. Knoxville Whig, December 15, 1860, January 19, May 18, 1861. For similar arguments from other East Tennessee Unionists, see Temple, East Tennessee and the Civil War, 119–20; Horace Maynard, “How, by Whom, and for What Was the War Begun? Speech of Hon. Horace Maynard Delivered in the City of Nashville, March 20, 1862” (n.p., n.d.), Special Collections, University of Tennessee Libraries.
36. Knoxville Whig, May 4, 1861.
37. Knoxville Whig, April 28, June 16, October 27, 1860, May 25, June 1, 1861.
38. Knoxville Whig, March 10, May 5, 1860, March 23, May 4, 1861.
39. Knoxville Whig, February 23, March 9, April 6, 1861.
40. Knoxville Whig, September 29, 1860, January 26, 1861.
41. Eric Russell Lacy, Vanquished Volunteers: East Tennessee Sectionalism from Statehood to Secession (Johnson City: East Tennessee State University Press, 1965), 111–27; Stanley J. Folmsbee, “Sectionalism and Internal Improvements in Tennessee, 1796–1845” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1939), 177–215; Jonesborough Whig and Independent Journal, December 8, 15, 1841. Even had the General Assembly been able to agree on an enabling measure, it is far from certain that the U.S. Congress would have given its consent as well. Northern congressmen, in particular, may have been loath to approve the creation of a new slave state from within an existing one.
42. Inscoe, “Mountain Unionism,” 125; Lacy, Vanquished Volunteers, 47–50.
43. Knoxville Whig, June 2, July 29, 1849, January 12, 1850.
44. Knoxville Whig, September 22, 29, October 13, 1860.
45. For occupational data and landownership patterns in Knoxville and East Tennessee, see McKenzie, Lincolnites and Rebels, 40–41, and “Wealth and Income,” 265–69. For statistics on the Lower South, see Frederick A. Bode and Donald L. Ginter, Farm Tenancy and the Census in Antebellum Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), app. D; and Randolph B. Campbell and Richard G. Lowe, Wealth and Power in Antebellum Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1977), 108–11.
46. Knoxville Whig, January 26, March 2, 30, 1861, December 22, 1860.
47. OR, ser. 1, vol. 10, pt. 2, pp. 453–54, 521; Richard Nelson Current, Lincoln’s Loyalists: Union Soldiers from the Confederacy (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 215. There are no precise figures relating to Federal enlistments specifically from East Tennessee, but Current conservatively estimates the number of white Union volunteers from the state as a whole at about forty-two thousand. Because nearly three-quarters of the ballots against secession in the state referendum were cast in East Tennessee, it seems reasonable that at least three-quarters of Union enlistments originated from there as well.