Against the Stream

Reverend William G. Brownlow Against the Stream by JAMES BARNETT One day in January in 1862, the readers of the Columbus, Georgia, Times were treated to this bit of blood-thirsty journalism: "Now, this hoary-headed and persistent traitor is occupying too much of the time and attention of the country. HE DESERVES DEATH AND WE VOTE TO KILL HIM!" That such hatred should be directed toward one man, espe- cially a minister of the Methodist church, merits an examination of the man and his actions. Contrary to a modern concept, not everyone living south of the Mason-Dixon line was pro-Confederate at the time of the Civil War nor was everyone living north of this imaginary line necessarily pro-Union. However, less is known of the pro-Union sentiment in the South than is known of Copperhead sentiment in the North. A number of prominent pro-Unionists in the South have passed into obscurity. Such a figure is the man the unknown Georgia journalist wanted to kill in 1862. He was the Reverend William G. Brown- low, better known as the Fighting Parson, or simply as Parson Brownlow. He was the editor of the Knoxville, Tennessee, Whig, who fought secession in the columns of his newspaper and at one time stood alone as the only newspaper editor in the South who supported the Union. The men in the South who precipitated the rebellion con- stituted a small minority of the population. Of the eight million inhabitants of the South only three hundred thousand owned slaves, yet these slave owners were the ruling class. Though numerically a feeble minority, they possessed the capacity to govern the actions of a large, inarticulate mass of people and caused these people to make the major sacrifices in a war against the Union, a war from which the vast majority of the southern people could gain nothing. This in substance was the central fact that Brownlow con- stantly warned his fellow southerners about in his speeches and in the columns of his newspaper. And nowhere in the South was this fact more true than in Brownlow's home bailiwick of East Tennessee. Here the clash between the Confederate government 206 The Bulletin and the majority of the people was more sharply outlined than anywhere else in the South. East Tennessee was rich in natural resources and had for its economic base the family-type farm. Its mountains were abun- dantly covered with timber and in the earth lay rich deposits of iron ore, copper, zinc, lead, and coal. In the fertile valleys farmers performed their own labor and raised a wide variety of crops in excess of their needs. They placed their excess farm products on the market. At the apex of the economic pyramid stood the townspeople, the merchants and traders. Growing modern capitalism had already begun to exploit the natural resources of the region. Significantly enough, no cotton was raised in East Tennessee. The rulers of the Confederacy, the slave owners, had their economy based on a single crop, cotton. In East Ten- nessee slavery was almost unknown, and most of the population performed its own labor. The conditions were not present to support a single crop economy of cotton based on chattel slavery. From the military point of view East Tennessee was vital to the war plans of the Confederacy. Through Knoxville ran the East Tennessee-Virginia railroad, a vital link in the South's only east-west trunk line. This railroad was needed by the war-makers to feed troops and supplies from the cotton states to the Virginia battlefields. Brownlow became the articulate spokesman for the East Tennessee status quo, a free labor bridgehead pointed like a dagger at the cotton states, the heartland of the South. Ironically enough, Brownlow was not opposed to slavery at the outbreak of the Civil War. But even this fact did not mitigate the hatred heaped upon him by the secession-minded southerners, who sought to silence him. He preached from the pulpit of his Methodist church on Sundays, delivered temperance lectures and at least once and sometimes three times a week produced editions of his Knoxville Whig. As the war clouds of rebellion gathered on the horizon, he lacerated the proponents of secession with stinging words and incurred their undying hatred for his unqualified support of the Union. When Fort Sumter was fired upon, Brownlow was fifty-six years old, and he described himself in this manner: Against the Stream 207 I am about six feet tall and have weighed as much as one hundred and seventy-five pounds. I have very few gray hairs in my head and will pass for a man of forty years. I have as strong a voice as any man in East Tennessee. For the last twenty-five years I have edited the Knoxville Whig, the paper with the largest circulation in East Tennessee. I have never been arraigned in the church for any immorality. I never played a card. I never drank a dram of liquor, until within a few years — when it was taken as a medicine. I never was in attendance at a theater. I never attended a horse race, and never witnessed their running, save on the fair grounds of my own county. I never courted but one woman; and her I married. I have taken part in all the religious and political controversies of my day and have writ- ten several books. Secession sentiment rumbled louder and louder in the deep South as the election of 1860 approached. It was a foregone conclusion that Lincoln's election meant secession by a large number of southern states. But there was a chance that a number of border states such as Tennessee could be held. Brownlow was ready for the fight to keep Tennessee in the Union. Whether intended as a jest or not, one Jordan Clark of Camden, Arkansas, urged Brownlow to come over to the side of the Democratic party, which meant, of course, an anti-Union position. This infuriated Brownlow, who lashed back at Clark in this fashion: I join the Democrats! Never so long as there are sects in churches, weeds in gardens, fleas in hog pens, dirt in vict- uals, disputes in families, wars with nations, water in the ocean, bad men in America, or base women in France! No, Jordan Clark, you may hope, you may congratulate, you may reason, you may sneer, but that cannot be. The thrones of the Old World, the courts of the Universe, the govern- ments of the World may all fall and crumble into ruins — the New World may commit the national suicide of dis- solving this Union, — but all this and more must occur be- fore I join the Democracy! I join the Democracy! Jordan Clark, you know not what you say. When I join the Democracy, the Pope of Rome will join the Methodist church. When Jordan Clark, of Arkansas, is president of the Republic of Great Britain by the universal suffrage of a contented people; when Queen Victoria consents to be divorced from Prince Albert by a county court in Kansas; when Congress obliges by law James 208 The Bulletin Buchanan to marry a European princess; when the Pope leases the Capitol at Washington for his city residence; when Alexander of Russia and Napoleon of France are elected Senators in Congress from New Mexico; when good men cease to go to heaven or bad men to hell; when this world is turned upside down; when proof is afforded both clear and understandable, that there is no God; when men turn to ants, and ants to elephants, I will change my political faith and come out on the side of the Democrats! In protest against Brownlow's pro-Unionism, subscribers in the cotton states sometimes canceled their subscriptions. A can- cellation usually triggered a tirade against the secession-minded defector by Brownlow. When a subscriber from South Carolina canceled his subscription, Brownlow charged that South Caro- linians were hereditary traitors to their government. He charged that during the Revolutionary War South Carolina was a cesspool of Toryism. He stated that in South Carolina, more than in any other state, scores of the best families had changed their names, after the Revolutionary War, in order to escape the odium of having supported Great Britain against the Continental Army. He even published a list of names of these families and chided the South Carolinians for the treason of their forebears. Disloyalty during the Revolutionary War and secession were one and the same crime to Brownlow. To judge how severe Brownlow's words were at the time, one must know that the southern aristocracy put great store in tradition, and to insult their forebears was enough to cause the aristocratic blood pressure to leap above the boiling point. The mind of the southern aristocrat in those days was not receptive to mental innovations. It was a closed mind incapable of sus- taining the shock of a challenging idea. The frontiers of this mind had been reached, and it possessed neither the mood nor the capacity for intellectual controversy. It was the dangerously inflexible mind that has launched all the aggressive wars of history bringing down upon itself ruin and desolation. To this mind the bottom rung of the southern ladder of social acceptability was the ownership of one slave. The second rung was reached by the ownership of two slaves, and so on. To this southern mind Brownlow represented all that was base and evil. He had been left an orphan at an early age and had Against the Stream 209 worked as a carpenter as a young man and educated himself.

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