“We can never live in a southern confederacy and be made hewers of wood and drawers of water for a set of aristocrats and overbearing tyrants,” asserted William G. “Parson” Brownlow, the publisher of the Knoxville Whig, as the debate over secession echoed through the hollows, coves, and mountains of East Tennessee. The itinerant Methodist minister and newspaper editor’s words reached a receptive audience. While Middle and West Tennessee embraced secession following Lincoln’s call for troops to quell the rebellion in the Deep South, the majority of East Tennesseans refused to abandon their allegiance to the old Union. This precipitated an internecine struggle within the unfolding national conflict. East Tennessee’s stance involved more than just state sectionalism; it also involved a rejection of the Confederate South and its values. Historians have long studied the story of how and why these “loyal mountaineers” resisted the Confederacy but have until recently ignored their secessionist neighbors. Fortunately, modern scholars are now examining all aspects of the Civil War in Appalachia.1
What follows is an analysis of East Tennessee’s struggle. Why was East Tennessee so different from the rest of the South? Why did some East Tennesseans support the Confederacy while most did not? How did the war and Reconstruction affect the people of this region—Rebels, loyalists, and slaves? The answers to these questions reveal a personal war waged not only by the Federal and Confederate armies but also by secessionist and Unionist guerrillas and brigands. Each of these groups had different agendas, and, as a result, East Tennessee fought a complex war on the economic, social, and intellectual levels as well as the traditional political and military ones.2
East Tennessee rejected the rest of the state and the South for three interrelated reasons: economics, politics, and, most important, geography. The state’s terrain provides a natural boundary between Tennessee’s three Grand Divisions. West Tennessee is generally flat, and Middle Tennessee is characterized by rolling hills. East Tennessee, however, is predominantly a land of steep and rugged mountains and narrow coves. Only the Great Valley running through East Tennessee contains large farm acreage. Consequently, East Tennessee’s geography has isolated it from the rest of the state and nation since early white settlement.3
This geographic isolation influenced the economic development of the region. East Tennessee, with its small subsistence farms and limited number of slaves, shared little in common with the slave-based plantation economy that dominated most of the South. Not until the construction in the 1850s of the East Tennessee and Virginia and the East Tennessee and Georgia railroads did the region have a cheap and reliable means to deliver agricultural products to market and, thus, join the national economy. Even with this new mode of transportation, only those farmers closest to the few shipping routes really profited from access to the market economy.4
The railroads also spawned new urban commercial classes in the towns now connected to the larger world. Almost at once, a growing economic disparity developed between the minority living near the rail lines of the Great Valley and the majority inhabiting the more isolated areas of the region. As the Civil War drew near, the townspeople and commercial farmers linked to the rest of the Southern and national economy enjoyed greater wealth and a higher standard of living than the subsistence farmers. This disparity cultivated resentment. Indeed, early accounts of the conflict between the region’s secessionists and loyalists pointed to economics as the key factor separating the two sides and creating, in essence, a class war. A comparison of the wealth of an East Tennessee Confederate regiment and an East Tennessee Union regiment supports this notion. The households of a sample of the Nineteenth Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, CSA, held 122 percent greater real and personal property than their Unionist counterparts in the Third Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, USA. Astonishingly, the Nineteenth held a combined wealth of more than $3 million, which was more than fifteen of East Tennessee’s thirty-one counties combined.5
The economic discord ties in with a final divisive factor: political affiliation. The isolated mountaineers of the region traditionally had supported the Whig Party and its remnant, the “Opposition” Party. This party supported economic expansion and development. At first glance, therefore, it may appear odd that the large-scale farmers and urban elite who constituted the region’s secessionists were more often Democrats than Whigs. Traditionally, such professions, residence patterns, and market orientation were associated with Whig ideology. However, antebellum party affiliation cannot always be explained in tidy generalizations. It had as much to do with intangibles such as community and family heritage, the persuasiveness and charisma of political leaders, the party preference of rivals, and the influence of elite families as it did with the ideological and political issues. Moreover, those linked to the new towns and Deep South trade joined the other regions of Tennessee and the greater South in supporting the Democratic Party, which had dominated Southern politics at least since the 1850s. Resentful of Middle Tennessee’s power, most East Tennesseans preferred to remain Whigs.6
Closely tied to political affiliation was the belief in republicanism prevalent during the antebellum period, a belief that, in part, warned the electorate to be ever vigilant for those who would attempt to destroy the Republic and establish a tyranny. The majority of East Tennesseans then rejected the Confederacy out of the belief that such a government, dominated by large slaveholding aristocrats, threatened republican liberty—the very soul of the great American democratic experiment. For the loyalists of East Tennessee, the protection of republicanism required a rebellion against the tyranny of Governor Isham Harris and Jefferson Davis. Conversely, the region’s secessionists, like most of their Southern brethren, came to view Abraham Lincoln’s administration as the threat to republican government.7
While geography, economics, and politics can explain much of the division between secessionists and loyalists in East Tennessee, they cannot explain support in every case. For example, only one-third of the men in the sample of the Nineteenth Tennessee were wealthy; the other twothirds owned little or no property. Factors such as the influence of local elites, community pressure, kinship, and patriotism cannot be overlooked as motiving factors for them, other Confederates, or their Unionist neighbors. Indeed, myriad factors spurred the people of the eastern counties to choose sides in the coming conflict. In essence, the region’s white inhabitants fought to determine the fate not only of two nations but also of their own homes, farms, families, and futures since the losers in this struggle could hardly expect to remain in the region they called home.8
Following Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860, the Lower South left the Union. The secession crisis presented Tennesseans with a dilemma. While most whites abhorred abolitionism, they perceived disunion as a threat to the future of the republican experiment. A cautious wait-and-see attitude struck most East Tennesseans as the prudent course. Governor Harris, however, viewed the situation much differently. He saw little hope in a compromise to save the old Union and wanted to place Tennessee in the new Confederacy. The General Assembly, however, chose to let the people decide. It authorized a February 1861 referendum to decide whether to hold a state convention on secession and, if so, which delegates to send. When the votes were counted, Unionists across the state had won an overwhelming victory. The convention itself was narrowly defeated, but Union delegates accounted for more than four-fifths of the total. East Tennessee gave the strongest support to the loyalists, with 80 percent of the voters rejecting the convention and about 85 percent voting for Unionist delegates. The outcome proved that most citizens of the Volunteer State, especially East Tennesseans, wished to remain in the Union.9
The assault on Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s subsequent call for volunteers changed everything. Amid cheers at the state capitol on the evening of April 17, 1861, Governor Harris declared that, before he would fulfill the secretary of war’s request for two regiments to help conquer the South, he would sever his right arm. The telegram the governor sent in response to Lincoln’s call for troops defiantly asserted: “Tennessee will not furnish a Single Man for the purposes of Coercion but 50,000 if necessary for the defense of our rights and those of our Southern brothers.”10
Harris and the legislature hastily prepared to excise Tennessee from the Union and ally it with the Confederacy. In early May, Tennessee declared its independence from the United States. Cognizant of the need for popular support for such actions, the legislature authorized a second referendum on June 8 on the issue of independence. East Tennesseans responded immediately. In mid-May, a group of prominent Knoxvillians, including Brownlow and Oliver P. Temple, called for a Unionist convention. On May 30, four hundred delegates convened in Knoxville for two days, issuing proclamations condemning secession, and preparing to canvass the region to drum up support for the Unionist cause. Despite their efforts, the results of the referendum stunned East Tennessee Unionists. While 69 percent of East Tennessee rejected secession, 70 percent of the state’s voters approved of it. The Volunteer State had joined the Confederacy.11
Undeterred, nine days after the June vote, 285 loyalist delegates convened in Greeneville to plan a course of action. After much debate between moderates, who advocated negotiation with Nashville, and radicals, who demanded immediate action, the convention decided to petition the state legislature for separate statehood. The General Assembly listened politely and then quashed the request. East Tennessee would remain part of a state and of a nation that it had rejected. Confederate authorities at the state and national level now hoped that the loyalists of the eastern counties would align with the state in secession, but this was not to be the case. The region’s Unionists would never willingly submit to Confederate rule, and East Tennessee would soon be plunged into a state of violence and bloodshed that would not end until long after the final shots of the Civil War.12
The Confederacy needed East Tennessee’s railroads, which linked the resources of the Deep South to the battlefields in Virginia. As Confederate soldiers began patrolling the rail lines, Unionists began organizing and drilling militia companies. The proximity of these two opposing groups made armed conflict a real threat. Nonetheless, Governor Harris was confident that the region’s loyalists could be won over, and he initiated what would be the Confederacy’s first policy toward East Tennessee’s Unionists—that of conciliation. Anxious to calm the fears of military despotism, Harris advised President Jefferson Davis to limit the number of Confederate troops in the region and to employ only Tennessee troops. He also successfully urged Davis to appoint Brig. Gen. Felix K. Zollicoffer, a Tennessee native, as the head of the newly created Department of East Tennessee. Harris argued that Zollicoffer’s ties to the old Whig Party would allow him to influence the Unionists.13
Through the summer of 1861, Zollicoffer attempted to mollify loyalists by doing little to quell Unionist activities. This was partially because of the appeasement policy and partially because of his lack of manpower. With limited numbers of troops, all lacking proper equipment and training, the general could only garrison the major towns and mountain passes, guard the railroads, and conduct sporadic patrols into the hinterland. He certainly could not prevent determined Unionist meetings and drills.14
The state’s congressional and gubernatorial elections in early August revealed that, despite the best efforts of Harris and Zollicoifer, East Tennessee’s loyalists had not acquiesced to Confederate rule. The Unionists demonstrated their determination and disaffection by voting for Harris’s rival for the governor’s seat, William H. Polk, by a large margin. Moreover, they rejected the ratification of the Confederate Constitution and, worse still, elected four representatives to the U.S. Congress rather than the Confederate Congress. The election results embarrassed and angered both Harris and Zollicoifer. The defiance of the region’s loyalists in the face of leniency exacted a swift change in Confederate policy. Throughout East Tennessee, Confederate troops began to disperse loyalist groups and arrest their leaders.15
Harris’s change in attitude mirrored Richmond’s harsher policy against Unionist sympathizers. In August 1861, the Confederate Congress passed key legislation that profoundly affected East Tennessee. The first piece, an alien enemies act, stated that citizens of a hostile nation over fourteen years of age living within the Confederacy were liable for arrest and expulsion. President Davis applied the law to East Tennessee and demanded that all residents of the region swear an oath of allegiance by October. The Confederate Congress also passed the “sequestration law,” which provided for the seizure of real and personal property belonging to alien enemies. East Tennessee Unionists faced the loss not only of their livelihood but also of their liberty if they did not comply with the laws. Civil authorities in East Tennessee strictly enforced the new legislation, generating animosity that would haunt the region for years.16
East Tennessee was a powder keg of disaffected loyalists and frustrated secessionists. In the summer of 1861, the keg exploded. While Zollicoifer moved most of the region’s Confederate troops into eastern Kentucky as part of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston’s defensive line protecting the western Confederacy, Confederate fears of insurrection in East Tennessee mounted, and rightly so. The ardent Unionist and Presbyterian minister William B. Carter journeyed to Washington, D.C., where he presented a daring plan to Federal officials, including Abraham Lincoln, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, the general-in-chief, and Senator Andrew Johnson. Carter proposed that he organize a group of saboteurs that would destroy nine key railroad bridges stretching across East Tennessee from Alabama to Virginia while a Federal force under Maj. Gen. George Thomas invaded the region from Kentucky. A mass uprising of Unionists would then surface amid the chaos. Unable to receive reinforcements because of the destroyed bridges, and facing invasion and a revolt, Confederate resistance would disintegrate.17
The plan appeared sound, and Carter left for home believing that he had secured the requisite support. He had not. On November 8, 1861, the saboteurs struck, burning only five bridges but disrupting Confederate communications and generating panic. Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman failed, however, to issue Thomas the order to move into East Tennessee, preferring instead to hold his forces for a strike into Middle Tennessee. Uninformed of any change in plan, bands of Unionists gathered for an uprising that did not occur.18
News of the bridge burnings and armed Unionists traveled quickly, and Confederate authorities moved to secure the railroads and crush the “revolt.” Zollicoffer, then in Kentucky, declared martial law, ordered the arrest of Unionist leaders, and directed the disarming of all Unionists. Ultimately, Confederate authorities in East Tennessee hanged five of the bridge burners and sent four to prison in a massive roundup of loyalists. All across the region, jails overflowed with those accused of complicity or disloyalty to the Confederacy. Frustrated with the situation, the Davis administration replaced Zollicoffer as commander of the Department of East Tennessee with Maj. Gen. George Crittenden. The subsequent rout of Confederate forces at Mill Springs in January 1862, however, coupled with an agonizing retreat into Middle Tennessee, left Zollicoffer dead and revealed Crittenden’s inadequacies as a general.19
The bridge burnings and the Confederate disaster at Mill Springs threw East Tennessee Confederates into a panic, and this panic ignited retaliation. Mass arrests and confiscations replaced conciliation as Rebel authorities initiated a new phase in their rule of East Tennessee, a phase that sought to terrorize the region’s loyalists into submission. Under this new onslaught, Unionists could submit, passively resist, or flee to Kentucky to join the Union army. Many chose the latter. Those crossing the mountains into Kentucky faced increased Confederate patrols. Guides called pilots led thousands into the Bluegrass State. Once there, most joined the Federal Army. Indeed, nearly all the thirty thousand or so white Tennesseans who joined up came from East Tennessee.20
Guerrillas who wished to fight augmented this massive number of volunteers. Unionist partisans began raiding into the region by the winter of 1861–1862. Because of their knowledge of the terrain and the local support they received, they proved impossible to eradicate. The partisans sought revenge for the harshness of Confederate rule by ambushing isolated Rebel troops or raiding secessionists’ homesteads. As this guerrilla war continued into 1862, Confederate soldiers grew increasingly frustrated and more brutal in their attempts to destroy the insurgents. Atrocities on both sides mounted.21
In March 1862, the Confederate War Department ordered Maj. Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith to the region to restore order and defuse the tense situation. His arrival initiated a third phase in the Confederate occupation of the region. During this phase, Smith and the Confederate authorities in Richmond vacillated between conciliation and coercion. From his arrival, Smith viewed the region as an “enemy’s country” and endeavored to convince the Davis administration to assume the same stance. He held local East Tennessee Confederate troops in contempt and petitioned Richmond to send them south, where they could be made loyal. He also wanted to arrest Unionist leaders in order to curb their influence on the population and eagerly enforced the new congressional act requiring loyalty oaths for all civil servants, under threat of arrest for noncompliance. Responding to Smith’s pleas for martial law, in April Davis suspended the writ of habeas corpus in East Tennessee and rewarded Smith with control of the courts. The families of prominent Unionists such as William G. Brownlow, Horace Maynard, and Andrew Johnson were expelled from the region, and Smith threatened to expel the families and seize the property of all Unionists fighting in the Union army as well. Worse still, on April 16, the Confederate Congress passed the first of three conscription laws making every white male between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five eligible for the draft. Most citizens across the South resented conscription, even in areas of strong Confederate support. In East Tennessee, the act generated a virtual exodus of Unionists heading for Kentucky. Not since the bridge burnings had there been a more polarizing event.22
Having wielded his authority and power, Smith hoped that he could now win over loyalists with benevolence. On April 18, he issued a proclamation offering amnesty to any East Tennessean taking an oath to the Confederacy, including those in the Union army, provided they returned within thirty days. He also suspended service in the state militia. On August 13, he sweetened the deal by offering to buy any arms brought in by East Tennesseans leaving Federal service. Smith even suspended Confederate conscription in the hope of mollifying the Unionists and stopping the flood of recruits into the Federal army. Despite this carrot-and-stick approach, the hearts and minds of the region’s loyalist population did not waver.23
When Smith left East Tennessee in the ill-fated invasion of Kentucky in the summer of 1862, the Confederate War Department insisted that his temporary successors—John P. McCown, a native East Tennessean, and Maj. Gen. Samuel Jones—enforce conscription. Endeavoring to win Unionist support, Jones persuaded Unionist leader T. A. R. Nelson to issue a public statement condemning the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, encouraging the acceptance of Confederate rule, and urging Richmond to suspend again the draft in East Tennessee. Nelson’s statement fell on deaf ears, as did Jones’s call to suspend conscription.24
Smith’s return in October 1862 did nothing to change Confederate policy in the region, and the general left East Tennessee for good in early 1863, to be replaced by Maj. Gen. Daniel Donelson, who subsequently would be replaced by Maj. Gen. Simon B. Buckner in May 1863. The administration of these two generals marked the last phase of Confederate occupation, in which Richmond accepted that East Tennessee was, indeed, an “enemy’s country.” Neither Donelson nor Buckner could woo the Unionist population. Confederate policies of conscription, sequestration, and taxation, as well as the increasingly antagonistic attitude of Confederate occupation forces, prevented any hope of a peaceful coexistence.25
Unionist guerrillas, with the open support of the local population, continued to raid the region, and, by late August 1863, as Buckner moved his forces out of upper East Tennessee to link up with Gen. Braxton Bragg’s army contesting Gen. William S. Rosecrans’s advance on Chattanooga, Confederate control began to dwindle. It collapsed outright when Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s twelve-thousand-man army advanced from Kentucky and occupied Knoxville on September 1, 1863. East Tennessee’s Unionists greeted Burnside’s men as liberators, showering them with food and cheers. A little more than a week later, Rosecrans’s occupation of lower East Tennessee effectively ended the Confederate occupation of the region.26
The years of Confederate rule had taken a heavy toll on the Unionists of the region, both male and female. While many men fled East Tennessee to join the Union army or avoid conscription, the women, children, and elderly men stayed to fend for themselves. Subsistence farming was never as precarious for the region’s Unionist sympathizers as during the Civil War. With the men gone, Unionist women and their children labored in the fields and worked to keep self-supporting farms operating in the face of harassment from secessionist neighbors, confiscations by Confederate soldiers, and raids by Rebel guerrillas. Undoubtedly, self-preservation was difficult enough, yet many Unionist women also served as couriers, safe-house operators, and spies for Unionist guerrillas and Federal soldiers. As early as the start of the war, women supported the Underground Railroad for Unionists escaping into Kentucky. By providing food, shelter, and information to Unionists and escaped Federal soldiers, these abettors forced thousands of Confederate soldiers, needed elsewhere, to guard the mountain passes, patrol isolated trails, and search homesteads. Largely at the mercy of Confederates, East Tennessee women risked much to help the cause of the Union.27
Like Unionist women, the region’s slaves were also at the mercy of others during the years of Confederate occupation. While the loyalistsecessionist conflict in East Tennessee was unique to most of the South, the wartime experiences of the region’s black population were similar to those of their brethren elsewhere in the Confederacy. Due to its geography, East Tennessee had few slaves and masters, yet the region’s whites, whether loyalist or secessionist, united in their racism. Slaveholders were found on both sides, and many Unionist masters believed that the institution would be better protected in the Union than in what they viewed as a doomed Confederacy. Blacks had in East Tennessee, as they did elsewhere in the South, few, if any, white allies. Seeking a better life for themselves and their families, many followed white Unionists over the Cumberland Mountains into Kentucky in a search for freedom. This exodus increased after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Although the proclamation did not apply to Tennessee, blacks still fled to Federal lines in hopes of securing their freedom.28
In retrospect, given the continued resistance of white Unionists of both sexes and slaves, it is clear that the Confederate government never had full control of East Tennessee. It simply lacked the resources to garrison the region adequately, and it always faced an active and armed resistance from loyalist guerrillas. Moreover, Richmond’s inconsistent policies of conciliation and suppression only alienated and emboldened a population determined to resist the Confederacy. In effect, the Confederacy could have done nothing politically or militarily to secure the acceptance or loyalty of the region’s inhabitants.29
In the fall of 1863, large-scale conventional warfare ushered in new horrors to the area. The first and last major battles fought in East Tennessee occurred at this time as the Confederates strove to retain control of this strategic region. Following his pyrrhic victory at Chickamauga in September, Bragg followed the retreating Federals back to their defenses at Chattanooga. Unable and unwilling to mount an attack or maneuver past the city, Bragg chose instead to besiege Rosecrans’s army in the hope of capturing the town and the Federals without a fight. Lincoln responded swiftly by dispatching Gen. Ulysses S. Grant to take command of the situation. Grant immediately broke the tentative siege and brought in supplies and reinforcements. At the very moment he needed every man, Bragg sent a large force under the command of Gen. James Longstreet to defeat Burnside, capture Knoxville, and theoretically siphon forces away from Grant as he attempted to protect upper East Tennessee. In reality, all Bragg did was weaken his army prior to Grant’s advance. Union forces would eventually rout Bragg’s Army of Tennessee at the Battle of Missionary Ridge, sending them into headlong retreat into Georgia. Meanwhile, Longstreet failed to storm the defenses of Knoxville and, subsequently, retreated into upper East Tennessee. With the defeat and retreat of Bragg and Longstreet, all but the extreme northwest corner of the region fell permanently under Union occupation, and a new chapter in the region’s war began.30
With the capture of Chattanooga, the Federal War Department planned massive offensives for Georgia and Virginia in 1864. East Tennessee became a secondary theater, and its northeast counties were abandoned to Longstreet’s forces around Bull’s Gap. The Rebels would remain there until the spring of 1864, foraging liberally off the land and generating widespread shortages of food and fodder. Even after Longstreet left to rejoin the Army of Northern Virginia, Union forces failed to oust Confederate cavalry under Brig. Gen. John Hunt Morgan, and loyalist farmers could only watch while Rebel raiders plundered their farms.31
As Union forces endeavored to evict the last remaining Rebel troops, secessionist guerrillas operating out of western North Carolina and north Georgia entered the region during the winter of 1863. Sweeping through areas of East Tennessee, the guerrillas looted and burned Unionists’ homes and barns and ambushed Federal garrisons. Militia, loyalist guerrillas, and Federal troops responded against both the insurgents and the local secessionists, which intensified the guerrilla war. Moreover, an increasing number of deserters from both armies and brigands with no real allegiance to either side prowled the region in search of the unwary and undefended. Federal attempts at counterinsurgency failed, as had earlier Confederate efforts. The violence simply could not be contained with the current resources.32
The new Federal district commander, Ambrose Burnside, faced a daunting challenge. Not only did he have to continue to wage war against Rebel forces both regular and irregular, but he also had to formulate and implement reconstruction policies for the devastated region. Burnside, however, had a well of experience from which to draw—both his own as commander of the Department of the Ohio, which had included a sizable majority sympathetic to the Confederacy, and that of other Union commanders across the South. Burnside believed that he first had to crush immediately any and all opposition to Federal authority. He chose Brig. Gen. Samuel P. Carter, a cousin of Rev. William B. Carter’s, as provost marshal general for the District of East Tennessee and empowered him to execute martial law throughout the region. Carter, lacking adequate troop strength, employed the members of the local loyalist population as deputy provost marshals for each county. Burnside also established a “secret police” force of loyalists under Robert A. Crawford to be his eyes and ears, and he organized home guard units called the “National Guard of Tennessee” to suppress guerrillas.
Although determined to establish Federal control, Burnside’s occupation policy followed Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty of December 1863, which, among other things, offered a pardon to all Rebels except high-ranking officials provided that they took an oath of loyalty and agreed to accept the abolition of slavery. While hopeful of conciliation, Burnside was, nevertheless, prepared to imprison or banish secessionists who continued to resist Federal authority. By early 1864, Burnside ordered Confederate prisoners in East Tennessee north to Federal camps, and he deported to the Deep South numerous outspoken civilian secessionists, including some women and ministers. Both groups had advocated secession and continued to resist Federal authority. This was something neither Burnside nor the region’s loyalists would tolerate.33
Burnside’s policies won over the region’s moderate Unionists such as T. A. R. Nelson, who hoped to see an end to the bloodshed and suffering. They did not, however, appease the most influential Unionist in East Tennessee—William Brownlow. Arriving on the heels of the Union army, Brownlow returned from exile to Knoxville with both official and unofficial powers. Officially, he served as a special treasury agent for East Tennessee, a post that gave him the authority to issue or withhold licenses to trade, seize goods traded without a license, and confiscate and dispose of property abandoned by traitors. Brownlow energetically used his office to reward his friends, punish his enemies, and increase his influence. Unofficially, Brownlow became a demagogue for the Unionists of the region. Through his newspaper, now christened the Knoxville Whig and Rebel Ventilator, he spewed forth a torrent of anti-Confederate propaganda and near obscene calls for retribution against the Rebel population of East Tennessee. Referring to secessionists as “Imps from Hell,” he declared that Union men who had suffered at their hands would be “justified in shooting them down on sight.” He challenged the manhood of Unionists who did not do so, declaring: “We shall regard hundreds of them [Unionists] as wanting in courage and in resentment if they do not dispatch them [secessionists] whenever they meet their rotten carcasses.”34
Brownlow’s rhetoric fell on receptive ears, and many of his followers joined him in demanding retribution for real and perceived wrongs committed during the Confederate occupation. Burnside was in the awkward position of trying to control the violence against former secessionists who accepted Federal rule without alienating the loyalists on whom he greatly depended. Tensions between the region’s Unionists and their liberators were exacerbated further by the behavior of Federal troops that foraged indiscriminately from loyalists and secessionists alike.35
As the war dragged on into 1864, East Tennessee faced economic disaster. Guerrillas and brigands continued to destroy homes and barns, steal food and livestock, and murder the farmers. Worse still, the region had not recovered from Confederate confiscations before Federal authorities arrived to continue the practice. Many poor East Tennesseans now moved north in search of opportunity to cities such as Cairo, Louisville, and Cincinnati, where they received mixed receptions by Northern citizens.36
Not all East Tennesseans wanted to leave, nor could they. Those who remained faced starvation and homelessness. Thousands moved to Federal garrison cities such as Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga, where Union commanders provided temporary shelters and provisions. As Federal offensives in Georgia and Virginia demanded more provisions, however, this aid evaporated. One newspaper correspondent with the Louisville Journal recalled the pitiful refugees of Chattanooga arriving daily to beg for food that the military would no longer supply. The situation for blacks was even worse. Crowded into contraband camps in Knoxville and Chattanooga, black families subsisted solely off military aid in the form of tents, foodstuffs, and other supplies. The lack of sanitary camp conditions led to outbreaks of smallpox that ravaged the refugees. Although black men in the camps often performed manual labor for the government, in many cases they were not paid and, thus, could not afford better conditions for themselves or their families. Moreover, while some blacks voluntarily joined the U.S. Colored Troops for money and freedom, others were coerced by white Federal officers eager to fill the ranks by any means available.37
So grave were the economic conditions in East Tennessee that leading citizens of Knoxville formed the East Tennessee Relief Association. Unable to receive substantive Federal aid, agents traveled to the Midwest and Northeast to secure funds. Ultimately, the association would purchase, transport, and distribute $250,000 in aid to East Tennesseans. Preference was given to Unionist families, especially those that had suffered for their loyalty. Ironically, poor Rebel families could secure aid, but none would be given to black families, even those with members in the Union army. Despite its best efforts, the poverty of the region was so widespread that the association did not disband until 1868, well after the war was over.38
In fact, poverty was not the only carryover after the war. While the spring of 1865 brought the surrender of all major Confederate armies and an end to violence in most places, the “official peace” did not extend to East Tennessee. The Unionist-secessionist conflict continued unabated in the coves, mountains, and villages of eastern Tennessee. The great issues of the war concerning secession and slavery had been decided, but the local issue of who would now control the region had not. Moreover, as Unionist guerrillas and those who had joined the Union army returned to the region for good, they were determined to shape the peace. Revenge was on the minds of many Unionists who wanted satisfaction for the wrongs they and their families had suffered at the hands of the secessionists. These veterans, like their loyalist neighbors who had remained, were determined to control the politics and economics of postwar East Tennessee, and they initiated a systematic campaign of terror to drive the Rebels from the region. All across East Tennessee, ex-Confederates endured intimidation, beatings, arson, and murder as they struggled to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of the Civil War.39
Less dramatic but no less serious were the legal actions brought against the Confederates. Unionists used the courts to obtain compensation for losses or level treason charges against the Rebels. President Johnson’s executive pardons, coupled with the actions of moderate Unionist jurors and judges throughout East Tennessee, meant that, while many ex-Confederates were temporarily jailed or fined, treason cases generally ended in acquittal.40
The violence and legal actions leveled against the region’s secessionists convinced many to flee East Tennessee. Indeed, most of East Tennessee’s secessionist leaders, as well as a great number of their followers, left the area for good. Although some of the exiled Confederates returned after 1870 when conditions improved, most never did. The magnitude of this forced exodus is astonishing. An examination of veterans from the Nineteenth Tennessee regiment reveals that few of the men were present for the 1870 census and that those who were lived in counties that had strongly supported secession in 1861. Sullivan County, in particular, became something of a haven for ex-Confederates during the violence of the immediate postwar period. It appears that those who fled East Tennessee permanently migrated mainly to the pro-Confederate areas of the Volunteer State or to other parts of the former Confederacy, especially the Deep South.41
In March 1865, William Brownlow came into office as the governor of Tennessee with the vindictive intention of driving ex-secessionists from the state—or at the very least stripping them of political influence. Through a series of legislative acts, the governor and his radical followers barred ex-Confederates from voting or holding political office. Nonetheless, when Brownlow left Nashville to become one of the state’s senators in Washington, the radical regime he built began to crumble, and some Rebels not only regained the franchise but also quickly assumed power in the state. Reconstruction in Tennessee was over by 1870.42
The end of radical politics meant that some secessionists eventually did return to East Tennessee. Yet this small number of ex-Rebels, surrounded by Unionists, lived quietly among their old enemies. They made only feeble attempts to join the South’s celebration of the “Lost Cause,” and few United Confederate Veterans camps or United Daughters of the Confederacy chapters existed in East Tennessee. In a sense, Brownlow had achieved his dream of driving the region’s Rebels into obscurity, as future generations and historians remembered only the region’s Unionist majority.43
While white East Tennesseans fought to determine the region’s future, blacks struggled to find their own way. With the passage after the war of the Thirteenth Amendment, the fate of the region’s African American population became another concern of the Unionists who sought to control the region they had fought so hard to win. As long as the freedmen remained in rural areas and functioned as sharecroppers, the white population was content. However, the blacks in the towns who received aid from the Freedmen’s Bureau and Northern benevolent societies became objects of resentment. Moreover, when Governor Brownlow and the radical government in Nashville granted blacks the franchise and civil rights, a wedge between former Unionists developed. White East Tennesseans increasingly spurned black attempts at improvement, including attending schools, voting, and holding political office. Once the radicals fell from power, many former Unionists and ex-Confederates could unite to limit the political and economic aspirations of blacks. For most East Tennessee Unionists, emancipation was a necessary by-product of the struggle to defeat the rebellion and was always more about destroying the wealth and power of the planter elite than about caring for the plight of blacks. The century of virtual apartheid that existed across the South, including East Tennessee, following Reconstruction demonstrates this point.44
In looking back over East Tennessee’s experience during the Civil War and Reconstruction, it is clear that the war devastated victor and vanquished alike. The region’s secessionist population had been permanently reduced as hundreds, if not thousands, fled to other parts of Tennessee or the South. Never again would they challenge their Unionist neighbors. Indeed, the region’s Confederates faded into obscurity, partly because of their limited numbers, and partly because of their desire to reacclimate themselves—a defeated people living in a hostile land.
For East Tennessee’s blacks, the war and its immediate aftermath brought the cherished dream of emancipation but also the reality of economic dependence through sharecropping and debt peonage. Unionists were no more likely than secessionists to accept African Americans as political or economic equals. Like blacks throughout the South, those and their descendants in the towns and on the farms of East Tennessee would have to endure discrimination and poverty until a century later when the civil rights movement sparked a second Reconstruction.
Finally, although the region’s Unionists had triumphed over their secessionist enemies and managed to maintain their racial hierarchy over blacks, they could boast of little else. Radical Unionists controlled the state only for a brief time before a coalition of moderate Unionists and ex-Confederates regained power and reestablished Democratic rule. Indeed, as East Tennessee’s Unionism transformed into Republicanism, the region remained out of step with the rest of the Volunteer State and the South. Additionally, the ravages of the war had destroyed the economy. Subsistence farmers had always lived on the edge of ruin, and no greater disaster ever swept the region than the Civil War. A population increase exacerbated endemic postwar poverty and put even more pressure on overworked and shrinking farmlands. In fact, not until the New Deal would the region begin to emerge from the poverty of the post–Civil War period. Sadly, the region’s Unionists had won their war only to be forgotten by the rest of the Union. In this they had company. No two groups, East Tennessee secessionists or Unionists, sacrificed so much for their respective causes only to be abandoned by a rapidly modernizing world. They, like others in Appalachia, became “yesterday’s people.”45
1. Knoxville Whig, January 12, 1861. The most important works covering the Civil War in southern Appalachia include Durwood Dunn, Cades Cove: The Life and Death of a Southern Appalachian Community, 1818–1937 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988); Kenneth W. Noe, Southwest Virginia’s Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); 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); Kenneth W. Noe and Shannon H. Wilson, eds., The Civil War in Appalachia: Collected Essays (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997); David Williams, Rich Man’s War: Class, Caste, and Confederate Defeat in the Lower Chattahoochie Valley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998); W. Todd Groce, Mountain Rebels: East Tennessee Confederates and the Civil War, 1860–1870 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999); John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney, The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Martin Crawford, Ashe County’s Civil War: Community and Society in the Appalachian South (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001); John W. Shaffer, Clash of Loyalties: A Border County in the Civil War (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2003); John Fowler, Mountaineers in Gray: The Story of the Nineteenth Tennessee Volunteer Infantry Regiment, C.S.A. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004); and Robert Tracy McKenzie, Lincolnites and Rebels: A Divided Town in the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
2. Fisher, War at Every Door, 62–63.
3. Fowler, Mountaineers in Gray, 1–2; Stanley John Folmsbee, Robert E. Corlew, and Enoch L. Mitchell, Tennessee: A Short History (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976), 5–11; Paul H. Bergeron, Stephen V. Ash, and Jeanette Keith, Tennesseans and Their History (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 1–2; Harry L. Law, Tennessee Geography (Norman, Okla.: Harlow, 1964), 15–18; Charles Faulkner Bryan Jr., “The Civil War in East Tennessee: A Social, Political, and Economic Study” (Ph.D. diss., University of Tennessee, 1978), 8; Donald L. Winters, Tennessee Farming, Tennessee Farmers: Antebellum Agriculture in the Upper South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 1–2, 4.
4. Groce, Mountain Rebels, 9–20; Donald W. Buckwalter, “Effects of Early Nineteenth Century Transportation Disadvantage on the Agriculture of Eastern Tennessee,” Southeastern Geographer 27 (1987): 21–23, 33; Winters, Tennessee Farming, 31–36, 48, 84–87, 191; J. B. Killebrew, Introduction to the Resources of Tennessee (Nashville: Tavel, Eastman & Howell, 1874; reprint, Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Co., 1974), 6–25, 277–78, 432–33; Folmsbee, Corlew, and Mitchell, Tennessee, 244, 249; Bergeron, Ash, and Keith, Tennesseans and Their History, 113, 115–17; James W. Holland, “The East Tennessee and Georgia Railroad, 1836–1860,” East Tennessee Historical Society’s Publications 3 (1931): 89–107, and “The Building of the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad,” East Tennessee Historical Society’s Publications 4 (1932): 83–101; Philip M. Hamer, ed., Tennessee: A History, 1673–1932, 4 vols. (New York: American Historical Society, 1933), 1:262–63, 399–420, 448–54; Fowler, Mountaineers in Gray, 2–5.
5. Robert Tracy McKenzie, “Wealth and Income: The Preindustrial Structure of East Tennessee in 1860,” Appalachian Journal 21 (1994): 271–74, and One South or Many? Plantation Belt and Upcountry in Civil War–Era Tennessee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 53–54; David C. Hsiung, Two Worlds in the Tennessee Mountains: Exploring the Origins of Appalachian Stereotypes (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 128, 162–63; Walter Lynn Bates, “Southern Unionists: A Socio-Economic Examination of the Third East Tennessee Volunteer Infantry Regiment, U.S.A., 1862–1865,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 50 (1991): 226–39; Fowler, Mountaineers in Gray, 4–5, 20–29.
6. Jonathan Atkins, Parties, Politics, and the Sectional Conflict in Tennessee, 1832–1861 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 15, 87–88; Paul H. Bergeron, Antebellum Politics in Tennessee (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 9–34, 64–102, 152, 156; Fisher, War at Every Door, 15; Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 12; Folmsbee, Corlew, and Mitchell, Tennessee, 178–94; Hamer, ed., Tennessee, 1:277–94; Daniel W. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 47.
7. Hamer, ed., Tennessee, 1:265; Atkins, Parties, Politics, 2–3; Crofts, Reluctant Confederates, 47, 49.
8. Fowler, Mountaineers in Gray, 29–38.
9. Ibid., 7–9; Folmsbee, Corlew, and Mitchell, Tennessee, 317; Mary Emily Robertson Campbell, The Attitude of Tennesseans toward the Union, 1847–1861 (New York: Vantage, 1961), 159, 175–76, 288–90; Robert H. White and Stephen V. Ash, eds., Messages of the Governors of Tennessee, 11 vols. to date (Nashville: Tennessee Historical Commission, 1952–), 5:265; Hamer, ed., Tennessee, 1:522–33; Atkins, Parties, Politics, 241.
10. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates, 289–352, 358; Hamer, ed., Tennessee, 2:537–39; James Welch Patton, Unionism and Reconstruction in Tennessee, 1860–1869 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934; reprint, Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1966), 14; Fowler, Mountaineers in Gray, 10–11.
11. For the situation in East Tennessee following the attack on Fort Sumter, see Fowler, Mountaineers in Gray, 11–14; Atkins, Parties, Politics, 247, 252; Hamer, ed., Tennessee, 2:542, 545–46, 549–51; Fisher, War at Every Door, 29–30, 33–35; Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 37–51, 53–55; Oliver P. Temple, East Tennessee and the Civil War (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1899), 184–86, 192–94, 340–43, 588; Knoxville Whig, April 2, 1861; Thomas William Humes, The Loyal Mountaineers of Tennessee (Knoxville: Ogden Bros., 1888), 100, 105–15, 120–21, 347; Patton, Unionism and Reconstruction, 14; and Campbell, Attitude of Tennesseans, 291–94.
12. Fisher, War at Every Door, 37–40; Temple, East Tennessee, 343–65, 565–73; Patton, Unionism and Reconstruction, 24–25; Humes, Loyal Mountaineers, 115–19; Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 55–63.
13. Fowler, Mountaineers in Gray, 43–44; Fisher, War at Every Door, 41–45, 102; 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. 4, p. 374; James C. Stamper, “Felix K. Zollicoffer: Tennessee Editor, Politician, and Soldier” (M.A. thesis, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1967), 1–68; Isham Harris to Jefferson Davis, July 13, 1861, Harris Papers, Tennessee State Library and Archives.
14. OR, ser. 1, vol. 4, pp. 201, 374, 377; Circulars, Letters, Orders Issued by Various Commands, Brigadier General Felix K. Zollicoffer, East Tennessee Brigade, 1861, and General Order No. 5, August 23, 1861, Orders and Letters Sent, Brigadier General Felix K. Zollicoffer, August 1861–January 1862, Record Group 109, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Fisher, War at Every Door, 44–48.
15. Fowler, Mountaineers in Gray, 45–46; Fisher, War at Every Door, 47–50; Folmsbee, Corlew, and Mitchell, Tennessee, 325–26; Atkins, Parties, Politics, 253–58; Temple, East Tennessee, 224–44; OR, ser. 1, vol. 4, pp. 379, 389, 393.
16. OR, ser. 4, vol. 1, pp. 586–93; Knoxville Register, October 17, 1861; OR, ser. 2, vol. 2, pp. 1368–70; Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 75–76.
17. Fowler, Mountaineers in Gray, 49; Fisher, War at Every Door, 51–54; Temple, East Tennessee, 370–72, 375–77; David Madden, “Unionist Resistance to Confederate Occupation: The Bridge Burners of East Tennessee,” East Tennessee Historical Society’s Publications 52–53 (1980–1981): 22–39; Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 85–86.
18. Humes, Loyal Mountaineers, 133–35; Temple, East Tennessee, 381–83; Madden, “Bridge Burners,” 30–34; Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 87–88.
19. Fisher, War at Every Door, 59–61; Madden, “Bridge Burners,” 35–37; Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 88–89; Fowler, Mountaineers in Gray, 51–59.
20. Tennesseans in the Civil War: A Military History of Confederate and Union Units with Available Rosters of Personnel, 2 vols. (Nashville: Civil War Centennial Commission, 1964–1965), 1:1; Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 90–95; Fisher, War at Every Door, 65–68, 102.
21. Fisher, War at Every Door, 68–78.
22. OR, ser. 1, vol. 10, pt. 1, pp. 20–21, and pt. 2, pp. 14, 369, 385–86, 397–402, 429–30; Albert B. Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 148–49; Georgia Lee Tatum, Disloyalty in the Confederacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 13–17, 150–51; Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 99–103; Groce, Mountain Rebels, 83–85; Fisher, War at Every Door, 103–8.
23. OR, ser. 1, vol. 16, pt. 2, p. 756; Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 103–6; Groce, Mountain Rebels, 85–87; Fisher, War at Every Door, 108–10.
24. OR, ser. 1, vol. 16, pt. 2, pp. 790, 797–98, 841, 851, 866, 884–85, 890; Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 107–11; Fisher, War at Every Door, 110–18.
25. OR, ser. 1, vol. 23, pt. 2, pp. 621, 631, 651–52; Fisher, War at Every Door, 102, 118–21; Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 111–12.
26. Fisher, War at Every Door, 126; Temple, East Tennessee, 480; Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 113–14; Humes, Loyal Mountaineers, 211–12.
27. William A. Strasser, ‘“A terrible calamity has befallen us’: Unionist Women in Civil War East Tennessee,” Journal of East Tennessee History 71 (1999): 73–75; W. B. Hesseltine, “The Underground Railroad from Confederate Prisons to East Tennessee,” East Tennessee Historical Society’s Publications 2 (1930): 63.
28. Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 300–304, 307–13, 318–19.
29. Ibid., 115–17; Fisher, War at Every Door, 119–21.
30. Among the best sources for the struggle for East Tennessee in 1863 are Thomas Lawrence Connelly, Autumn of Glory: The Army of Tennessee, 1862–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), chaps. 7–10; Steven E. Woodworth, Six Armies in Tennessee: The Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); Peter Cozzens, This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), and The Shipwreck of Their Hope: The Battles for Chattanooga (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); and Harold S. Fink, “The East Tennessee Campaign and the Battle of Knoxville in 1863,” East Tennessee Historical Society’s Publications 29 (1957): 79–117.
31. Fisher, War at Every Door, 129–30.
32. Ibid., 79–95; Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 147–58.
33. Fisher, War at Every Door, 130–37; Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 123–25.
34. James B. Campbell, “East Tennessee during the Federal Occupation, 1863–1865,” East Tennessee Historical Society’s Publications 19 (1947): 66–67; Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 121–23; Fisher, War at Every Door, 135, 144; Knoxville Whig and Rebel Ventilator, January 9, 1864.
35. Fisher, War at Every Door, 143–47.
36. William C. Harris, “The East Tennessee Relief Movement of 1864–1865,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 48, no. 2 (1989): 88, and “East Tennessee’s Civil War Refugees and the Impact of the War on Civilians,” Journal of East Tennessee History 64 (1992): 3–19.
37. Harris, “Relief Movement,” 88; Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 138–40, 325–27.
38. Strasser, “Unionist Women,” 82; Campbell, “Federal Occupation,” 71–75; Harris, “Relief Movement,” 89–95; Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 140–44.
39. Fowler, Mountaineers in Gray, 188–89. For a general overview of conditions in postwar East Tennessee, see Groce, Mountain Rebels, 127–51; Fisher, War at Every Door, 154–77; Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 160–86; and Thomas B. Alexander, “Neither Peace nor War: Conditions in Tennessee in 1865,” East Tennessee Historical Society’s Publications 21 (1949): 41–42, and Political Reconstruction in Tennessee (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1950), 58–68.
40. Fowler, Mountaineers in Gray, 193–94; Fisher, War at Every Door, 159–63; Groce, Mountain Rebels, 135–40; Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 166–73.
41. Fowler, Mountaineers in Gray, 194–95; Groce, Mountain Rebels, 145–49; Fisher, War at Every Door, 163–64; Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 182–84.
42. Fisher, War at Every Door, 167–71.
43. Fowler, Mountaineers in Gray, 198–99; Confederate Veteran (Nashville) 1 (1893): 343; “Confederates in East Tennessee,” Confederate Veteran 1 (1895): 277; J. W. Lillard, “Confederates in East Tennessee,” Confederate Veteran 5 (1897): 593–94; George Moorman, “Reorganization of Georgia Division,” Confederate Veteran 8 (1900): 17–18; J. C. Hodges, “Model Camp at Morristown, Tenn.,” Confederate Veteran 15 (1907): 28–29; James L. Douthat, Roster of Upper East Tennessee Confederate Veterans (Signal Mountain, Tenn.: Mountain, n.d.); Groce, Mountain Rebels, 156–57; Anne Cody, History of the Tennessee Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (Nashville: n.p., n.d.), 259–336; Minutes of the One Hundred and Ninth Annual General Convention of the United Daughters of the Confederacy Incorporated Held at Richmond, Virginia, October 31–November 5, 2002, United Daughters of the Confederacy (Nashville: n.p., n.d.), 27–28; Web page of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, http://www.scv.org. (accessed December 14, 2007); “Distinguished Surviving Confederates,” Confederate Veteran 19 (1911): 420–21. For a discussion of how the South attempted to come to grips with the Confederacy’s defeat, see Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Charles Regan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980).
44. Bryan, “Civil War in East Tennessee,” 331–42.
45. For a detailed examination of East Tennessee’s economic problems following the Civil War, see Robert Tracy McKenzie, “Oh! ours is a deplorable condition’: The Economic Impact of the Civil War in Upper East Tennessee,” in Noe and Wilson, eds., Civil War in Appalachia, 199–226. “Yesterday’s people” is a reference to Jack E. Weller, Yesterday’s People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1966). For a broad overview of Appalachia’s economic problems and its struggle with modernization, see Richard B. Drake, A History of Appalachia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003); John Alexander Williams, Appalachia: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and John D. Fowler, “Appalachia’s Agony: An Historiographical Essay on Modernization and Development in the Southern Appalachians,” Filson Club Quarterly 72, no. 3 (July 1998): 305–28.