The American Civil War significantly affected Tennessee, with every county witnessing combat. During the War, Tennessee was a Confederate state, and the last state to officially secede from the Union to join the Confederacy. Tennessee had been threatening to secede since before the Confederacy was even formed, but didn’t officially do so until after the fall of Fort Sumter when public opinion throughout the state drastically shifted. Tennessee seceded in protest to President Lincoln's April 15 Proclamation calling forth 75,000 members of state militias to suppress the rebellion.[4] Tennessee provided a large number of troops for the Confederacy, and would also provide more soldiers for the Union Army than any other state within the Confederacy.
In 1862, Lincoln chose to use his power as commander in chief to appoint Andrew Johnson as the military governor of Tennessee.[5] Two years later, Lincoln selected him as a Southerner to balance the ticket in the 1864 general election. On Lincoln's assassination, Johnson was sworn in as president.
Origins
Pro-Union and anti-Republican sentiment before the attack on Fort Sumter
Initially, most Tennesseans showed little enthusiasm for breaking away from a nation whose struggles it had shared for so long. In 1860, they had voted by a slim margin for the Constitutional UnionistJohn Bell, a native son and moderate who continued to search for a way out of the crisis.
A vocal minority of Tennesseans spoke critically of the Northern states and the Lincoln presidency. "The people of the South are preparing for their next highest duty– resistance to coercion or invasion," wrote the Nashville Daily Gazette on January 5, 1861. The newspaper expressed the view that Florida, Georgia, and Alabama were exercising the highest right of all by taking control of all forts and other military establishments within the area– the right to self-defense.[6] A pro-secessionist proposal was made in the Memphis Appeal to build a fort at Randolph, Tennessee, on the Mississippi River.[7]
Governor Isham G. Harris convened an emergency session of the Tennessee General Assembly in January 1861. During his speech before the legislative body on January 7, he described the secession of the Southern states as a crisis caused by "long continued agitation of the slavery question" and "actual and threatened aggressions of the Northern States... upon the well-defined constitutions rights of the Southern citizen." He also expressed alarm at the growth of the "purely sectional" Republican Party, which he stated was bound together by the "uncompromising hostility to the rights and institutions of the fifteen Southern states." He identified numerous grievances with the Republican Party, blaming them for inducing slaves to run off by means of the Underground Railroad, John Brown's raids, and high taxes on slave labor.[8]
Harris agreed with the idea of popular sovereignty, that only the people within a state can determine whether or not slavery could exist within the boundaries of that state. Furthermore, he regarded laws passed by Congress that made U.S. territories non-slave states as taking territories away from the American people and making them solely for the North, territories from which "Southern men unable to live under a government which may by law recognize the free negro as his equal" were excluded. Governor Harris proposed holding a State Convention. A series of resolutions were presented in the Tennessee House of Representatives by William H. Wisener against the proposal. He declared passing any law reorganizing and arming the state militia to be inexpedient.
The centrality of the question of slavery to the secession movement was not doubted by people at the time of the Civil War, nor was it ignored by the contemporary press. Especially in the case of the pro-slavery papers, this question of the possibility of the eventual granting of equal rights for people of color was not couched in diplomatic phraseology:
The election, be it remembered, takes place on the 9th, and the Delegates meet in Convention on the 25th instant. If you desire to wait until you are tied hand and foot then vote for the men who advocate the 'watch and wait' policy. If you think you have rights and are the superiors of the black man then vote for the men who will not sell you out, body and soul to the Yankee Republicans - for men who would rather see Tennessee independent out of the Union, then in the Union subjugated. [emphasis in original][9]
On February 3, 1861, the pro-Union Knoxville Whig published a "Secret Circular" that had mistakenly been sent by its authors to a pro-Union Tennessee U.S. Postmaster. In it was revealed a comprehensive plan by pro-slavery Tennesseans and others to launch a propaganda campaign to convince Tennesseans that the strength of the pro-secessionist movement was overwhelming:
Dear Sir — Our earnest solicitude for the success of the Great Southern Rights movement to secure an immediate release from the overwhelming dangers that imperil our political and social safety, will we trust, be a sufficient apology for the results which we beg to impose on you. The sentiment of the Southern heart is overwhelming in favor of the movement. Light only is wanted that men many see their way clearly and the prayer of every true patriot will eventually be realized. Tennessee will be a unit. Although the time be so very short, this object may yet be accomplished, if a few men only, (the more the better, however) in each county, will devote their entire energies to it during the canvass for Delegates. We earnestly beg your attention, therefore, to the following suggestions:
Be sure to have your best men in the field, WITHOUT REGARD TO PAST POLITICAL OPINIONS.
Be sure that no submissionist, under whatever pretext of compromising our rights, or of waiting beyond the 4th of March for new guarantees, impose himself on you. Our only hope of peace and safety consists in decided action before the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln.
Do not wait for general meetings of citizens, but get together immediately a few active, intelligent, discreet but thoroughgoing, uncompromising, true-hearted, "Southern-Rights Anti-Coercion" friends and appoint Committees and Canvassers, who are willing to devote themselves entirely and unceasingly to the great and perilous work, from this hour up to the close of the election.
Appoint Committees, also, for each Civil District, of men known to coincide with you and ourselves in sentiment.
Organize, forthwith, Southern Rights Anti-Coercion Societies.
We will send during the canvass, the UNION AND AMERICAN and GAZETTE, to supply your County. These we confidently trust you will send immediately to the District Committees, who on the hour of delivery, start out on the work of distribution, and this though there be but half a dozen copies for each district. Do not, we beg of you, wait for persons to call for documents, of papers to read and CIRCULATE.
Write as many letters to your friends [as] possible, and urge them by every consideration of patriotism, to work, work, work.
[...] We can, we must, carry our State. Our hearts would link within us, at the bare thought of the degradations and infamy of abandoning our more Southern brethren united to us by all the views so sympathy and interest, and of being chained to the car of Black Republican States, who would themselves despise us for our submission; and worse than all, by moral influences alone, if not by force of legal enactment destroy our entire social fabric, and all real independence of thought and action. Your own good judgment will suggest many things we can not now allude to. [emphasis added] Very Respectfully, [Signed]Wm. Williams, Chm'n./S. C. Goethall [?], Sec'y,/Andrew Cheatham/J. R. Baus [?]/R. H. Williamson/G. W. Cunningham/H. M. Cheatham, W. S. Peppin States Central Southern Rights Anti-Coercion Committee[10]
In Memphis, Unionists held two torchlight processions to honor their cause. The secessionists replied with their own demonstrations and a celebratory ball.[11][12] That week, on February 9, the state of Tennessee was to vote on whether or not to send delegates to a State Convention that would decide on secession.[13] The General Assembly convened by Governor Isham Harris did not believe it had the authority to call a State Convention without a vote of the people.[14]
In February 1861, 54 percent of the state's voters voted against sending delegates to a secession convention, defeating the proposal for a State Convention by a vote of 69,675 to 57,798. If a State Convention had been held, it would have been very heavily pro-Union. 88,803 votes were cast for Unionist candidates and 22,749 votes were cast for Secession candidates.[15] That day the American flag was displayed in "every section of the city," with zeal equal to that which existed during the late 1860 presidential campaign, wrote the Nashville Daily Gazette. The proponents of the slavocracy were embarrassed, demoralized and politically disoriented but not willing to admit defeat: "Whatever may be the result of the difficulties which at present agitate our country - whether we are to be united in our common destiny or whether two Republics shall take the place of that which has stood for nearly a century, the admired of all nations we will still bow with reverence to the sight of the stars and stripes, and recognize it as the standard around which the sons of liberty can rally [...]. And if the remonstrances of the people of the South-pleading and begging for redress for years-does not in this critical moment, arouse her brethren of the North to a sense of justice and right, and honor demands a separation, we would still have the same claims upon the 'colors of Washington, great son of the South, and of Virginia, mother of the States.' Let us not abandon the stars and stripes under which Southern men have so often been led to victory."[16] "On the corner across from the newspaper office, a crowd had gathered around a bagpipe player playing Yankee Doodle, after which ex-mayor John Hugh Smith gave a speech that was received with loud cheers.[17]
In a letter to Democratic senator Andrew Johnson, the publisher of the Clarksville (TN) Jeffersonian, C.O. Faxon,[18] surmised that the margin by which the "No Convention" vote won would have been even greater, had Union men not been afraid that if a State Convention were not called then, then Isham Harris would have again called for a State Convention when more state legislators were "infected with the secession epidemic" [...] " Gov Harris is Check mated [sic]. The Union maj[ority] in the State will almost defy computation [.] So far as heard from the disunionist have carried by a single precinct. The Union and American [Nashville, TN pro-secessionist paper[19]] Stands rebuked and damned before the people of the State"[20]
On March 7, the Memphis Daily Appeal wrote that the abolitionists were attempting to deprive the South of territories won during the U.S.-Mexican War. It pointed out that the slave states had furnished twice as many volunteers as the free states and territories, though it did not note that slave states were the ones who most supported the war.[21]
On March 19, the editors of the Clarksville Chronicle endorsed a pro-Union candidate for state senator in Robertson, Montgomery, and Stewart counties.[22]
On April 2, the Memphis Daily Appeal ran a satirical obituary for Uncle Sam, proclaiming him to have died of "irrepressible conflict disease," after having met Abraham Lincoln.[23] One Robertson County slave owner complained that she could not rent her slaves out for "half [of what] they were worth" because "the negros think when Lincoln takes his last, they will all be free."[24]
Reaction to the attack on Fort Sumter
With the attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, followed by Lincoln's April 15 call for 75,000 volunteers to put the seceded states back into line, public sentiment turned dramatically against the Union.
Historian Daniel Crofts thus reports:
Unionists of all descriptions, both those who became Confederates and those who did not, considered the proclamation calling for seventy-five thousand troops "disastrous." Having consulted personally with Lincoln in March, Congressman Horace Maynard, the unconditional Unionist and future Republican from East Tennessee, felt assured that the administration would pursue a peaceful policy. Soon after April 15, a dismayed Maynard reported that "the President's extraordinary proclamation" had unleashed "a tornado of excitement that seems likely to sweep us all away." Men who had "heretofore been cool, firm and Union loving" had become "perfectly wild" and were "aroused to a frenzy of passion." For what purpose, they asked, could such an army be wanted "but to invade, overrun and subjugate the Southern states." The growing war spirit in the North further convinced southerners that they would have to "fight for our hearthstones and the security of home."[25]
In May 1861, the governor of Tennessee Isham G. Harris defied the United States Government by beginning military mobilization, submitting a ordinance of secession to the General Assembly, and made direct overtures to the Confederate government all before the state officially seceded.[26]
Tennessee secedes
Results of the June 8, 1861, referendum by county. Redder counties voted more for secession, and bluer counties voted more against secession. Counties in black have no data.
In the June 8, 1861, referendum, East Tennessee held firm against separation, while West Tennessee returned an equally heavy majority in favor. The deciding vote came in Middle Tennessee, which went from 51 percent against secession in February to 88 percent in favor in June. The voting was accused of being fraudulent; in some counties in East Tennessee Unionists threatened violence against those voting for secession, while in other places soldiers remained at the polls to hiss at those with a Unionist ballot.[27]
Having ratified by popular vote its connection with the fledgling Confederacy, Tennessee became the last state to declare formally its withdrawal from the Union.
Major campaigns
1862
Control of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers was important in gaining control of Tennessee during the age of steamboats. Tennessee relied on northbound riverboats to receive staple commodities from the Cumberland and Tennessee valleys.[28] The idea of using the rivers to breach the Confederate defense line in the West was well known by the end of 1861; Union gunboats had been scanning Confederate fort-building on the twin rivers for months before the campaign.[29]Ulysses S. Grant and the United States Navy captured control of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers in February 1862 and held off the Confederate counterattack at Shiloh in April of the same year.
Capture of Memphis and Nashville gave the Union control of the Western and Middle sections. Control was confirmed at the battle of Murfreesboro in early January 1863. After Nashville was captured (the first Confederate state capitol to fall) Andrew Johnson, an East Tennessean from Greeneville, was appointed military governor of the state by Lincoln. During this time, the military government abolished slavery (but with questionable legality). The Confederates continued to hold East Tennessee despite the strength of Unionist sentiment there, with the exception of strongly pro-Confederate Sullivan and Rhea Counties.
1863
After winning a victory at Chickamauga in September 1863, the Confederates besieged Chattanooga but were finally driven off by Grant in November. Many of the Confederate defeats can be attributed to the poor leadership of General Braxton Bragg, who led the Army of Tennessee from Shiloh to the Confederate defeat in the Chattanooga campaign. Historian Thomas Connelly concludes that although Bragg was an able planner and a skillful organizer, he failed repeatedly in operations, in part because he was unable to collaborate effectively with his subordinates.[30]
1864
The last major battles came when General John Bell Hood led the Confederates north in November 1864. He was checked at Franklin, and his army was virtually destroyed by George Thomas's greatly superior forces at Nashville in December.
Battles in Tennessee
Bombardment and Capture of Fort Henry, Tenn. by Currier & Ives
Fear of subversion was widespread throughout the state. In West and Middle Tennessee it was fear of pro-Union activism, which was countered proactively by numerous local Committees of Safety and Vigilance from 1860 to 1862. They emerged as early as the 1860 Presidential election, and when the war began activists developed an aggressive program to detect and suppress Unionists. The committees set up a spy system, intercepted mail, inspected luggage, forced the enlistment of men into the Confederate Army, confiscated private property, and whenever it seemed necessary lynched enemies of the Confederacy. The committees were disbanded by the Union Army when it took control in 1862.[31]
Unionism and East Tennessee
Area of Tennessee
Slave percentage of total population
East Tennessee
9%
Middle Tennessee
29%
West Tennessee
34%
East Tennessee was a stronghold of Unionism; most slaves were house servants—luxuries—rather than the base of plantation operations. East Tennesseans feared that they would become second-class citizens in a country with a slave-owning aristocracy.[32] The dominant mood strongly opposed secession.[33] Tennesseans representing twenty-six East Tennessee counties met twice in Greeneville and Knoxville and agreed to secede from Tennessee (see East Tennessee Convention of 1861.) They petitioned the state legislature in Nashville, which denied their request to secede and sent Confederate troops under Felix Zollicoffer to occupy East Tennessee and prevent secession. The region thus came under Confederate control from 1861 to 1863. Nevertheless, East Tennessee supplied significant numbers of troops to the Federal army. (See also Nickajack.) Many East Tennesseans engaged in guerrilla warfare against state authorities by burning bridges, cutting telegraph wires, and spying for the North.[34] East Tennessee became an early base for the Republican Party in the South. Strong support for the Union challenged the Confederate commanders who controlled East Tennessee for most of the war. Generals Felix K. Zollicoffer, Edmund Kirby Smith, and Sam Jones oscillated between harsh measures and conciliatory gestures to gain support but had little success whether they arrested hundreds of Unionist leaders or allowed men to escape the Confederate draft. Union forces finally captured the region in 1863.[35] General William Sherman's famous March to the Sea saw him personally escorted by the 1st Alabama Cavalry Regiment, which consisted entirely of Unionist southerners. Despite its name, the regiment consisted largely of men from Tennessee.
Economy
Refugees poured into Nashville during the war, because jobs were plentiful in the depots, warehouses, and hospitals serving the war effort, and furthermore, the city was a much safer place than the countryside. Unionists and Confederate sympathizers both flooded in, as did free blacks and escaped slaves, and businessmen from the North.[36] There was little heavy industry in the South but the Western Iron District in Middle Tennessee was the largest iron producer in the Confederacy in 1861. One of the largest operations was the Cumberland Iron Works, which the Confederate War Department tried and failed to protect.[37] Memphis and Nashville, with very large transient populations, had flourishing red light districts. Union wartime regulations forced prostitutes to purchase licenses and pass medical exams, primarily to protect soldiers from venereal disease. Their trade was deregulated once military control ended.[38]
Aftermath
In January 1865, a convention tasked with choosing delegates for a proposed constitutional convention decided it had the power to propose amendments to the Tennessee state constitution and present them for ratification in an election. Dominated by pro-Union forces allied with Military Governor Andrew Johnson, the convention proposed two constitutional amendments, one abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude unless imposed as punishment for a crime, and one repudiating the state's allegiance with the Confederate States of America. Both amendments were passed by voters on February 22, 1865, and subsequently went into effect in April of the same year as the war was coming to a close.[39][40][41] (A new proposed constitutional amendment that will go before the voters in 2022 will abolish slavery as a punishment for crime and remove it from the state constitution.)[42]
After the war, the state legislature ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution on July 18, 1866, and was the first state readmitted to the Union on July 24, 1866. Because it ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, Tennessee was the only state that seceded from the Union that did not have a military governor during Reconstruction, nor was it part of any of the Reconstruction military districts, even though this did not placate those unhappy with the Confederate defeat. However, Tennessee was put under martial law during Reconstruction in 1869 to 1870 by then Governor Parson Brownlow through the Enforcement Acts mostly due to the growing threat of the Ku Klux Klan through out the state. Many white Tennesseans resisted efforts to expand suffrage and other civil rights to the freedmen.
For generations, white Tennesseans had been raised to believe that slavery was justified. Some could not accept that their former slaves were now equal under the law. When the state Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of African American suffrage in 1867, the reaction became stronger. The Nashville Republican Banner on January 4, 1868, published an editorial calling for a revolutionary movement of white Southerners to unseat the one-party state rule imposed by the Republican Party and restore the legal inferiority of the region's black population.
"In this State, reconstruction has perfected itself and done its worst. It has organized a government which is as complete a closed corporation as may be found; it has placed the black man over the white as the agent and prime-move of domination; it has constructed a system of machinery by which all free guarantees, privileges and opportunities are removed from the people.... The impossibility of casting a free vote in Tennessee short of a revolutionary movement... is an undoubted fact."
The Banner urged its readers to ignore the presidential election and direct their energy into building "a local movement here at home" to end Republican rule.[43]
According to the 1860 census, African Americans made up only 25% of Tennessee's population, which meant they could not dominate politics. Only a few African Americans served in the Tennessee legislature during Reconstruction, and not many more as state and city officers. However, the Nashville Banner may have been reacting to increased participation by African Americans on that city's council, where they held about one-third of the seats.[44] Tennessee has strong Confederate memories, which focused on the Lost Cause theme of heroic defense of traditional liberties.[45]
The American Civil War was a civil war in the United States between the Union and the Confederacy, which was formed in 1861 by states that had seceded from the Union. The central conflict leading to war was a dispute over whether slavery should be permitted to expand into the western territories, leading to more slave states, or be prohibited from doing so, which many believed would place slavery on a course of ultimate extinction.
In the American Civil War (1861–65), the border states or the Border South were four, later five, slave states in the Upper South that primarily supported the Union. They were Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, and after 1863, the new state of West Virginia. To their north they bordered free states of the Union, and all but Delaware bordered slave states of the Confederacy to their south.
During the lead-up to the American Civil War, the proposed secession of Missouri from the Union was controversial because of the state's disputed status. The Missouri state convention voted in March 1861, by 98-1, against secession, and was a border state until abolishing slavery in January 1865. Missouri was claimed by both the Union and the Confederacy, had two rival state governments,, and sent representatives to both the United States Congress and the Confederate Congress.
The U.S. state of West Virginia was formed out of western Virginia and added to the Union as a direct result of the American Civil War, in which it became the only modern state to have declared its independence from the Confederacy. In the summer of 1861, Union troops, which included a number of newly formed Western Virginia regiments, under General George McClellan drove off Confederate troops under General Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Philippi in Barbour County. This essentially freed Unionists in the northwestern counties of Virginia to form a functioning government of their own as a result of the Wheeling Convention. Before the admission of West Virginia as a state, the government in Wheeling formally claimed jurisdiction over all of Virginia, although from its creation it was firmly committed to the formation of a separate state.
Henry Emerson Etheridge was an American politician and a member of the United States House of Representatives for Tennessee's 9th congressional district from 1853 to 1857, and again from 1859 to 1861. He also served one term in the Tennessee House of Representatives (1845–1847) and one term in the Tennessee Senate (1869–1871). After Tennessee seceded in 1861, he was elected Clerk of the United States House of Representatives, serving until 1863.
Florida participated in the American Civil War as a member of the Confederate States of America. It had been admitted to the United States as a slave state in 1845. In January 1861, Florida became the third Southern state to secede from the Union after the November 1860 presidential election victory of Abraham Lincoln. It was one of the initial seven slave states which formed the Confederacy on February 8, 1861, in advance of the American Civil War.
Alabama was central to the Civil War, with the secession convention at Montgomery, the birthplace of the Confederacy, inviting other slaveholding states to form a southern republic, during January–March 1861, and to develop new state constitutions. The 1861 Alabaman constitution granted citizenship to current U.S. residents, but prohibited import duties (tariffs) on foreign goods, limited a standing military, and as a final issue, opposed emancipation by any nation, but urged protection of African-American slaves with trials by jury, and reserved the power to regulate or prohibit the African slave trade. The secession convention invited all slaveholding states to secede, but only 7 Cotton States of the Lower South formed the Confederacy with Alabama, while the majority of slave states were in the Union at the time of the founding of the Confederacy. Congress had voted to protect the institution of slavery by passing the Corwin Amendment on March 4, 1861, but it was never ratified.
Texas declared its secession from the Union on February 1, 1861, and joined the Confederate States on March 2, 1861, after it had replaced its governor, Sam Houston, who had refused to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy. As with those of other states, the Declaration of Secession was not recognized by the US government at Washington, DC. Some Texan military units fought in the Civil War east of the Mississippi River, but Texas was more useful for supplying soldiers and horses for the Confederate Army. Texas' supply role lasted until mid-1863, when Union gunboats started to control the Mississippi River, which prevented large transfers of men, horses, or cattle. Some cotton was sold in Mexico, but most of the crop became useless because of the Union's naval blockade of Galveston, Houston, and other ports.
During the American Civil War, North Carolina joined the Confederacy with some reluctance, mainly due to the presence of Unionist sentiment within the state. A popular vote in February, 1861 on the issue of secession was won by the unionists but not by a wide margin. This slight lean in favor of staying in the Union would shift towards the Confederacy in response to Abraham Lincoln's April 15 proclamation that requested 75,000 troops from all Union states, leading to North Carolina's secession. Similar to Arkansas, Tennessee, and Virginia, North Carolina wished to remain uninvolved in the likely war but felt forced to pick a side by the proclamation. Throughout the war, North Carolina widely remained a divided state. The population within the Appalachian Mountains in the western part of the state contained large pockets of Unionism. Even so, North Carolina would help contribute a significant amount of troops to the Confederacy, and channel many vital supplies through the major port of Wilmington, in defiance of the Union blockade.
The American state of Virginia became a prominent part of the Confederacy when it joined during the American Civil War. As a Southern slave-holding state, Virginia held the state convention to deal with the secession crisis and voted against secession on April 4, 1861. Opinion shifted after the Battle of Fort Sumter on April 12, and April 15, when U.S. President Abraham Lincoln called for troops from all states still in the Union to put down the rebellion. For all practical purposes, Virginia joined the Confederacy on April 17, though secession was not officially ratified until May 23. A Unionist government was established in Wheeling and the new state of West Virginia was created by an act of Congress from 50 counties of western Virginia, making it the only state to lose territory as a consequence of the war. Unionism was indeed strong also in other parts of the State, and during the war the Restored Government of Virginia was created as rival to the Confederate Government of Virginia, making it one of the states to have 2 governments during the Civil War.
During the American Civil War, Arkansas was a Confederate state, though it had initially voted to remain in the Union. Following the capture of Fort Sumter in April 1861, Abraham Lincoln called for troops from every Union state to put down the rebellion, and Arkansas along with several other southern states seceded. For the rest of the civil war, Arkansas played a major role in controlling the Mississippi River, a major waterway.
Louisiana was a dominant population center in the southwest of the Confederate States of America, controlling the wealthy trade center of New Orleans, and contributing the French Creole and Cajun populations to the demographic composition of a predominantly Anglo-American country. In the antebellum period, Louisiana was a slave state, where enslaved African Americans had comprised the majority of the population during the eighteenth-century French and Spanish dominations. By the time the United States acquired the territory (1803) and Louisiana became a state (1812), the institution of slavery was entrenched. By 1860, 47% of the state's population were enslaved, though the state also had one of the largest free black populations in the United States. Much of the white population, particularly in the cities, supported slavery, while pockets of support for the U.S. and its government existed in the more rural areas.
The East Tennessee Convention was an assembly of Southern Unionist delegates primarily from East Tennessee that met on three occasions during the Civil War. The convention most notably declared the secessionist actions taken by the Tennessee state government on the eve of the war unconstitutional, and requested that East Tennessee, where Union support remained strong, be allowed to form a separate state that would remain part of the United States split from the rest of Confederate Tennessee. The state legislature denied this request, and the Confederate Army occupied the region in late 1861.
Events from the year 1861 in the United States. This year marked the beginning of the American Civil War.
The U.S. state of Louisiana declared that it had seceded from the United States on January 26, 1861. It then announced that it had joined the Confederate States (C.S.); Louisiana was the sixth slave state to declare that it had seceded from the U.S. and joined the C.S.
William H. Wisener was an American politician, active primarily at the state level in Tennessee during the mid-19th century. He served four terms in the Tennessee House of Representatives, including one term as Speaker (1853–1855). A Southern Unionist, he led the opposition to secession in the House on the eve of the Civil War. After the war, he served in the Tennessee Senate, where he introduced the 13th Amendment for ratification in April 1865.
Daniel Coffee Trewhitt was an American attorney, judge, and politician. He served one term (1859–1861) in the Tennessee House of Representatives, where he was one of the few state legislators to oppose secession on the eve of the Civil War. He represented Hamilton County at the pro-Union East Tennessee Convention, and afterward fought for the Union Army. He served as judge of the state's second chancery division from 1864 to 1870, and judge of the state's fourth circuit court from 1878 to 1891.
The Virginia Secession Convention of 1861 was called in the state capital of Richmond to determine whether Virginia would secede from the United States, govern the state during a state of emergency, and write a new Constitution for Virginia, which was subsequently voted down in a referendum under the Confederate Government.
The 1861 Tennessee gubernatorial (Confederate) election was held on August 1, 1861, to elect the governor of Tennessee. Incumbent Democratic governor Isham G. Harris won re-election, defeating Independent Democrat William Hawkins Polk, brother of former president James K. Polk, with 63.37% of the vote.
References
Footnotes
↑ "Despite . . . inaction of the Tennessee legislature, the flag recommended by Senator [Tazewell B.] Newman did see some limited use" (Cannon 2005, pp. 46-47).
↑ Thomas Connelly, Autumn of Glory: The Army of Tennessee, 1862–1865 (1971)
↑ James B. Jones, Jr., "'The Reign of Terror of the Safety Committee Has Passed Away Forever': A History of Committees of Safety and Vigilance in West and Middle Tennessee, 1860–1862," West Tennessee Historical Society Papers, 2009, Vol. 63, pp 1-28
↑ Thomas B. Alexander, "Whiggery and Reconstruction in Tennessee," The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 16, No. 3 (August, 1950), pp. 291-305 in JSTOR
↑ Carroll Van West, ed., Tennessee History: the Land, the People, and the Culture. James McDonough "Tennessee in the Civil War" 1998. p 155
↑ Noel Fisher, "'The leniency shown them has been unavailing': The Confederate occupation of East Tennessee," Civil War History, Dec 1994, Vol. 40 Issue 4, pp 275-91
↑ Michael Thomas Gavin, "War Comes to Iron Country: Middle Tennessee's Defense Industry during the Civil War," West Tennessee Historical Society Papers, 2009, Vol. 63, pp 82-108
↑ Jeannine Cole, "'Upon the Stage of Disorder:' Legalized Prostitution in Memphis and Nashville, 1863–1865," Tennessee Historical Quarterly, Spring 2009, Vol. 68 Issue 1, pp 40-65
↑ W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880, New York: Oxford University Press, 1935; reprint New York: Free Press,1998, p.575.
↑ James B. Williams, "The Tennessee Civil War Centennial Commission: Looking to the Past as Tennessee Plans for the Future," Tennessee Historical Quarterly, Winter 2008, Vol. 67 Issue 4, pp 270-345
Groom, Winston. Shiloh, 1862: The First Great and Terrible Battle of the Civil War (2011)
Jones, James B., ed. Tennessee in the Civil War: Selected Contemporary Accounts (2011) 286 pp
Lepa, Jack H. The Civil War in Tennessee, 1862–1863 (2007)
McCaslin, Richard B., ed. Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Tennessee in the Civil War (2006)
McKenzie, Robert Tracy. Lincolnites and Rebels: A Divided Town in the American Civil War (2009) on Knoxville excerpt and text search
McKenzie, Robert Tracy. One South or Many? Plantation Belt and Upcountry in Civil War-Era Tennessee (1994) uses longitudinal census data to demonstrate similar economic and social trends among Tennessee's three regions excerpt and text search
Maslowski Peter. Treason Must Be Made Odious: Military Occupation and Wartime Reconstruction in Nashville, Tennessee, 1862–65 (1978).
Sheeler, J. Reuben. "Secession and The Unionist Revolt," Journal of Negro History, 29#2 (1944), pp.175–185 in JSTOR, covers east Tennessee
Woodworth, Stephen E.Jefferson Davis and His Generals: The Failure of Confederate Command in the West (1990)
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