Tennessee in the American Civil War

• 1. Introduction

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  Tennessee's path into the American Civil War was shaped, in part, by a letter that arrived at the wrong address. The pro-Union Knoxville Whig published it on the 3rd of February 1861, exposing the secret organization behind the state's push toward secession. The document was the work of a group calling itself the States Central Southern Rights Anti-Coercion Committee. Its goal was to flood Tennessee counties with pro-secession newspapers and canvassers before voters could form their own views. The authors urged their agents to "work, work, work" without waiting for general meetings of citizens. Six days later, 54 percent of Tennesseans voted against sending delegates to a secession convention. The tally was 69,675 opposed to 57,798 in favor. That result looked decisive. Yet within four months, Tennessee had joined the Confederacy as its eleventh and last member. How a population could shift so far, so quickly, is the central question this story explores. Tennessee simultaneously provided the Confederacy its second largest troop contribution. It also furnished more southern Unionist soldiers to the Union Army than any other Confederate state. The divisions that made both possible ran along geography, economics, and the question of slavery. Every single county in the state witnessed combat before it was over.

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• 2. The Road to Secession

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  In 1860, Tennesseans voted by a slim margin for John Bell, a moderate. He had spent his final years searching for a way out of the sectional crisis. Governor Isham G. Harris took a sharply different view. On the 7th of January 1861, he addressed the General Assembly. He described the secession of Southern states as a crisis born of "long continued agitation of the slavery question." He blamed the Republican Party for inducing slaves to flee through the Underground Railroad and for John Brown's raids into the South. Harris proposed convening a state secession convention, but the legislature lacked authority to act without a popular vote.

  On the day of the February referendum, the Nashville Daily Gazette noted American flags flying in "every section of the city." Across from the newspaper office, a crowd had gathered around a bagpipe player performing Yankee Doodle. Former mayor John Hugh Smith gave a speech that was met with loud cheers. February's result left Governor Harris, in the words of one correspondent writing to Senator Andrew Johnson, "Check mated."

  The attack on Fort Sumter on the 12th of April 1861 transformed the situation. Three days later, Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for 75,000 state militia members to suppress the rebellion. Congressman Horace Maynard, an unconditional Unionist from East Tennessee, had spoken with Lincoln personally in March. He had left that conversation believing the administration would pursue a peaceful course. Maynard described what followed as "a tornado of excitement that seems likely to sweep us all away." Men who had been "cool, firm and Union loving" were, in Maynard's words, now "perfectly wild." In May, Governor Harris defied the federal government by beginning military mobilization. He made direct overtures to the Confederate government before Tennessee had officially seceded. The referendum held on the 8th of June completed the turn. In Middle Tennessee, support for secession rose from 51 percent against in February to 88 percent in favor. East Tennessee held firm, but the statewide result carried. The voting itself was contested on both sides. In some East Tennessee counties, Unionists threatened violence against those casting secession ballots. Elsewhere, soldiers stood at the polls and hissed at Unionist voters.

  The capture of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers would soon determine who controlled the western half of the Confederacy.

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• 3. The Unionist Stronghold

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  East Tennessee held only 9 percent of its population in slavery. That compared with 29 percent in Middle Tennessee and 34 percent in West Tennessee. The difference had an economic explanation: most East Tennessee slaves were house servants rather than the foundation of plantation agriculture. East Tennesseans feared they would become second-class citizens in a republic governed by a slave-owning aristocracy. The dominant mood in the region was firmly against secession.

  Delegates from twenty-six East Tennessee counties met twice, first in Greeneville and then in Knoxville, and voted to seek separation from Tennessee itself. They petitioned the legislature in Nashville, which refused the request. Confederate forces moved in to occupy the region and prevent its departure. East Tennesseans responded: guerrillas burned bridges, cut telegraph wires, and passed intelligence to Union forces in the North. Three successive Confederate commanders, Felix K. Zollicoffer, Edmund Kirby Smith, and Sam Jones, each tried to pacify the area. They shifted between mass arrests of Unionist leaders and conciliatory gestures. Neither approach gained lasting loyalty. The region remained under Confederate control from 1861 until Union forces finally captured it in 1863.

  General William Sherman's march through the South saw him personally escorted by the 1st Alabama Cavalry Regiment. The unit was made up entirely of southern Unionists and was composed largely of men from Tennessee. Within East Tennessee, Sullivan and Rhea Counties were the exceptions, standing as the most strongly pro-Confederate communities in an otherwise resistant region.

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• 4. Rivers and Commanders

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  In February 1862, Ulysses S. Grant and the United States Navy seized control of both the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers. Union planners had recognized these rivers as the key military road into Confederate territory since at least the end of 1861. Gunboats had spent months surveying Confederate fort-construction along the riverbanks before any serious engagement. Grant then held off a Confederate counterattack at Shiloh in April of the same year.

  Grant had been little known before those campaigns. His success there, and in the fighting along the Mississippi, brought him to national prominence. His area commander, General Henry Halleck, was rewarded with a promotion to General-in-Chief. Nashville fell to Union forces and became the first Confederate state capital captured in the war. Lincoln appointed Andrew Johnson, an East Tennessean from Greeneville, as military governor of Tennessee. During that tenure, the military government abolished slavery in the state, though the legal basis for doing so was considered questionable.

  William Rosecrans led the Tullahoma campaign in the summer of 1863. He drove Confederate forces out of Middle Tennessee so rapidly that they suffered few casualties. That speed left them strong enough to defeat Rosecrans at Chickamauga in September 1863. The Confederate army then besieged Chattanooga. Grant drove them out in November. Historian Thomas Connelly concluded that General Braxton Bragg was a capable planner and organizer. Bragg had commanded the Army of Tennessee from Shiloh through the Chattanooga campaign. He repeatedly failed in operations, Connelly argued, because he could not collaborate effectively with his subordinates.

  General John Bell Hood led Confederate forces north in November 1864. He was checked at Franklin. George Thomas, commanding forces that far outnumbered Hood's, virtually destroyed the Confederate army at Nashville in December of that year. That was the last major battle fought in the state.

  The capture of Memphis, alongside Nashville's fall, had already handed the Union control of the Confederacy's two most vital western population centers.

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• 5. The War at Home

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  In West and Middle Tennessee, local Committees of Safety and Vigilance emerged as early as the 1860 presidential election to counter any sign of Unionist loyalty. As the war began, these bodies developed systematic programs to identify and suppress Unionists. They set up spy networks, intercepted mail, and inspected luggage at travel points. They forced reluctant men into Confederate service and confiscated private property. When committee members judged it necessary, they lynched perceived enemies of the Confederacy. The Union Army disbanded these committees in 1862 when it took control of the occupied areas.

  Nashville drew refugees from across the state. The city offered jobs in depots, warehouses, and hospitals, and it was far safer than the surrounding countryside. Unionists, Confederate sympathizers, free Black residents, escaped slaves, and Northern businessmen all poured in. Middle Tennessee was home to the Western Iron District, the largest iron-producing region in the entire Confederacy in 1861. The Cumberland Iron Works was its most significant installation, and the Confederate War Department tried and failed to protect it. Memphis and Nashville, with their large transient populations, developed extensive commercial sex districts. Union regulations required prostitutes in those cities to obtain licenses and pass medical examinations, primarily to limit the spread of disease among soldiers. Those requirements disappeared once military control ended.

  Andrew Johnson's wartime allies would soon convene to reshape Tennessee's constitution before the guns had fallen silent.

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• 6. After the War

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  In January 1865, a convention assembled in Tennessee to draft proposed constitutional amendments. Dominated by pro-Union forces allied with military governor Andrew Johnson, it put two measures before the voters. One abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, with the exception of punishment for a crime. The other repudiated the state's connection to the Confederacy. On the 22nd of February 1865, Tennessee voters ratified both amendments. They took effect in April and May, as the war came to a close.

  Tennessee moved through Reconstruction faster than any other former Confederate state. On the 18th of July 1866, the state legislature ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Six days later, Tennessee was readmitted to the Union. It was the only former Confederate state that did not require a military governor during Reconstruction. It was also not assigned to any of the Reconstruction military districts.

  When the state Supreme Court upheld African American suffrage in 1867, resistance to the Reconstruction order stiffened. On the 4th of January 1868, the Nashville Republican Banner published an editorial calling for what it described as a "revolutionary movement." White Southerners, the paper argued, should end Republican rule and restore what the editorial called the "legal inferiority" of the state's Black population. Governor Parson Brownlow imposed martial law from 1869 to 1870 in response to the growing threat of the Ku Klux Klan. According to the 1860 census, African Americans made up 25 percent of Tennessee's population. That proportion meant they could not control statewide elections on their own. Only a small number held seats in the state legislature or in city and county offices. In Nashville, African Americans held roughly one-third of the city council seats.

  Tennessee's collective memory of the war hardened around what became known as the Lost Cause. That framework recast the Confederate cause as a heroic defense of traditional liberties. A proposed amendment on Tennessee's 2022 ballot aimed to address one remaining legacy of that era. It would abolish slavery as punishment for crime, removing that provision from the state constitution.

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