Brownlow’s War

ECW welcomes back guest author Riley Sullivan.

With the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865, and subsequent Confederate capitulations, there was hope across the nation that the post-war years would be marked by a lasting peace. However, in many ways, hostilities continued. This conflict took on a new phase as white Southerners looked to disrupt what they called “black republican rule” in the South. Editor Edward Pollard wrote in his 1866 work The Lost Cause that “the war did not decide negro equality; it did not decide negro suffrage” therefore, “these things which the war did not decide, the Southerner will still cling too [sic].”^[1] And cling to those beliefs the Southern population did. Using political violence through such infamous secret organizations as the Ku Klux Klan, many white Southerners looked to terrorize both African Americans and white Republicans to “win the peace.” However, to discuss the chaos and violence of Reconstruction in broad terms would do injustice to this period. Rather, as recent historians like Drew Swanson have done, the violence of this period needs to be studied in localized terms.^[2] While localized conflicts such as the Kirk-Holden War have been well documented, other conflicts have not. Therefore, this article will look to analyze the so-called “Brownlow’s War” of Reconstruction Tennessee and see how violence dictated the politics of that state.

While there is little historiographical record relating to the localized conflict called “Brownlow’s War,” to contemporaries of the time, this was a well-documented event. For former Confederate Nathaniel Edwin Harris, when he returned home from the war, “Brownlow’s War came on.”^[3] Given Brownlow’s universal unpopularity within Tennessee, both during Reconstruction and since, it is not surprising that there has been little discussion of this conflict. When considering this veteran’s commentary, it therefore provides an opportunity to analyze the violence occurring in Tennessee during the time Governor William “Parson” Brownlow resided in office.

Brownlow was a former Whig and staunch Unionist prior to the Civil War. Having been an avid supporter of Unionism and political compromise before secession, when his native state of Tennessee chose to secede, he continued to speak out against disunion. Eventually, this led him to flee to the North. However, his hiatus proved short-lived, as in 1863 he returned to his home in East Tennessee. Brownlow reinvigorated his newspaper Brownlow’s Knoxville Whig (renamed the Brownlow’s Knoxville Whig and Rebel Ventilator), which he used as his main vehicle to promote his political ideals. Through his rhetoric, he made it clear that he had no sympathy for secessionists in his state. In a July 26 rendition of the Whig, speaking on the reestablishment of civil government in Union Tennessee, Brownlow wrote “that an open and avowed rebel has no right to vote in Tennessee” and “a traitor has ceased to be a citizen, and in joining the rebellion has become a public enemy.”^[4]

Through such statements, Brownlow–as well as radical Unionists in Tennessee–made it clear that they were looking to establish a “harsh peace” against ex-Confederates. While serving as a United States Treasury agent at the time, he established a short-lived political alliance with Andrew Johnson and Radical unionists that eventually propelled him to the governorship where he would make his ideals in the Whig reality.^[5]

Beginning with his inauguration, Brownlow made it clear that he sought to disarm and disenfranchise ex-Confederates. By June 1865, the Arnell Bill–named after its author, Samuel Arnell–passed both the Tennessee House and Senate, thus, denying all former Confederates the right to vote in elections from anywhere between five to fifteen years. Brownlow largely supported such policies to control Tennessee politics – where he and the Republicans were undoubtedly outnumbered otherwise – and the course of Reconstruction.

Additionally, Brownlow and the Radical Republicans supported further disenfranchisement laws, and the following year pushed for Tennessee to ratify the 14th Amendment. All of this angered many disenfranchised whites within the state—and many conservative Republicans as well—ultimately leading to political violence. By 1866, Tennessee witnessed the first Ku Klux Klan dens emerge that consistently targeted African Americans and Republicans alike. Even Governor Brownlow was threatened by this organization when a Klansman wrote the governor that if he did not stop his policies, he would “wake up…with a rope around [his] neck.”^[6] With such threats and political chaos seen throughout the state, Brownlow pressed the legislature to pass a “militia act” that would enable him to use the state militia to combat the rising violence in the state, particularly in fighting the Ku Klux Klan. Thus begins what would be described by onlookers as “Brownlow’s War”.

Newspapers from all across the nation quickly began to run stories of this conflict that seemed to demonstrate that even with the collapse of the Confederacy, the fighting continued in Tennessee. The Wheeling Daily Register reported that “the state of Tennessee is not pacified,” thus “the era of peace and goodwill has not absolutely returned.”^[7]

While Brownlow’s own Knoxville Whig wrote that the recent militia act was a “most necessary and righteous measure,” very few other papers did. In York, Pennsylvania, the York Democratic Press published under the headline “Brownlow Declares War” that Brownlow sought to “kill and slaughter” all former rebels.^[8] The editors at the National Intelligencer reported on this violence by condemning Brownlow’s policies, stating that “many poor farmers…have been compelled to leave their crops by Brownlow’s militia.”^[9]

When examining the recollections of Tennessee Confederate veterans’ years after the war, this appears to hold true. Abraham Gredig, who served in a Tennessee battery in the Cumberland Gap, stated that “Brownlow’s militia and some stay at home renegades at Gov. Brownlow’s suggestion wanted all Johnies to leave East Tenn.”^[10] Similarly, John H. O’Neal of the 29th Tennessee Infantry wrote that “the Confederate Soldier had a hard time [in East Tennessee] during the reconstruction period…being considered traitors” as they were constantly harassed by Union men of the region.^[11]

However, Brownlow’s militia were not just engaging against defenseless farmers; the militia were meant to combat the surging Ku Klux Klan as some ex-Confederate soldiers traded their gray uniforms for robes of white. Initially founded as a fraternal organization for disenchanted Confederate veterans, it quickly turned into an organization in which one Klansmen from Tennessee wrote “redeem [Tennessee] from the blight of Brownlowism.”^[12] Using political and racial violence as their primary method to combat “Brownlowism” the situation within the state bordered on civil war.

Increasingly, Brownlow also used his militia to push political violence. The Warrensburg Journal accused Brownlow of targeting conservative meetings and inciting riots within Tennessee.^[13] Murders, riots, and other forms of violence continued between the two factions well into 1869. In a last effort to curb the Klan, Brownlow placed several counties under martial law in February 1869.

However, these policies proved to be short lived as Brownlow soon resigned as governor to serve as a senator, while a more lenient governor would be elected that year. With ex-Confederates and “redeemer” Democrats regaining office by 1870, for all purposes, Brownlow’s War drew to a close. While little has been written of this event, contemporaries of Brownlow’s War were well aware of its political significance. For many white Southerners in Tennessee, this conflict symbolized the continuation of hostilities. What was at stake for them were the basic tenets of what became Jim Crow and white domination in the state. For Brownlow and Republicans, his conflict demonstrated how they resorted to controversial policies and themselves engaged in political violence to pursue political Reconstruction when outnumbered in the South.

 

Riley Sullivan earned his MA in History at Sam Houston State University and is a Professor of History at San Jacinto College in Pasadena, TX. He has published works on Civil War Memory that have appeared in the Tennessee Historical Quarterly.

 

Endnotes:

[1] Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates,

(New York, NY: E. B. Treat & Co., Publishers, 1867), 752.

[2] Drew Swanson, A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2024).

[3] Dyer, Gustavus W., and John Trotwood Moore, Tennessee Civil War Veterans Questionnaires,

Edited by Colleen Morse Elliott and Louise Armstrong Moxley, (Easley, SC: Southern Historical Press,

1985), 3:1023.

[4] “No Right to Vote,” Knoxville Tri-Weekly Whig and Rebel Ventilator, Knoxville, TN, July 26, 1864, 1.

[5] Wilson D. Miscamble makes the argument that through Johnson’s political maneuvering, he supported the “harsh peace” toward ex-Confederates that Brownlow would come to champion. Wilson D. Miscamble, “Andrew Johnson and the Election of William G. (“Parson”) Brownlow As Governor of Tennessee,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 37 no. 3 (Fall 1978): 308-320.

[6] Letter from Stella Mortem to Honorable William G. Brownlow, July 4th, 1868, Tennessee State Library and Archives.

[7] The Wheeling Daily Register, Wheeling, WV, March 4th, 1867, 1.

[8] “Brownlow Declares War!,”York Democratic Press, York, Pennsylvania, September 21st, 1866, 2.

[9] “Brownlow’s War,” National Intelligencer, Washington D.C., July 25th 1867.

[10] Dyer and Moore, Tennessee Civil War Veterans Questionnaires, 3:949.

[11] Ibid, 4:1656.

[12] Ibid, 1:330.

[13] “Brownlow’s War in Tennessee,” The Warrensburg Journal, Warrensburg, MO, July 31st, 1867, 2.