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THE STRANGE CAREER OF A PERSISTENT WHIG: A RECONSIDERATION OF THE LIFE OF WILLIAM GANNAWAY BROWNLOW by Gary Steven Kilgore A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIRmENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in the Department 0 f History @ GARY STEVEN KILGORE SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY May 1974 All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without permission of the author. APPROVAL Name : Gary Steven Kilgore Degree : Master of Arts Title of Thesis: The Strange Career of a Persistent Whig: A Reconsideration of the Life of William Gannaway Brownlow Examining Committee: Chairman: Dr. J.P. Spagnolo Dr. Michael D. Fellman Senior Supervisor Dr. Don S. Kirschner Dr. R.B. Horsfall External Examiner Date Approved : ,&/~t, 2y,,'77y / J (ii) PARTIAL COPYRIGHT LICENSE I I hereby grant to Simon Fraser University the right to lend my thesis or dissertation (the title of which is shown below) to users of the Simon Fraser University Librayy, and to make partial or single copies only for such users or in response to a request from the library of any other university, or other educational institution, on its 'own behalf or for one of its users.' I further agree that permission for multiple copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by me or the Dean of Graduate Studies. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Title of Thesis /~issertation: "The Strange Career of a Persistent Whig: A Reconsideration of the Life of William Gannaway Brown low" Author: (signature) Gary Steven Kilgore (name ) 7 June, 1974 (date) ABSTRACT William Brownlow is best known to historians as the Radical Republican governor of Tennessee during Reconstruction. In his own day, his reputation rested more on his career as a Whig (and Methodist) pro- pagandist, on the editorials in his newspaper, the Knoxville Whig. Brownlow's only scholarly biographer, E. Merton Coulter, treated Brown- low's forty-year career as a Methodist minister, Whig propagandist and Unionist agitator as an extended prelude to his four-year tenure as a I' scalawag" governor. This thesis will attempt to redress what I see as a historical imbalance. A major, if implicit, theme of this work will be the argument that Brownlow's gubernatorial career was in many ways the acting-out of the values, assumptions and committments forged in forty years of religious, political and economic controversy. Brownlow was many things. He was a Southerner, a Tennesseean. More importantly, he was an East Tennesseean. In this thesis I explore some of the implications of his specific regional origins and loyalties. In religion, he was a militant and committed Methodist. In politics, he was a Whig, later a fervent Unionist, who finally converted to Repub- licanism. He was a businessman, with interests in iron manufacturing and railroads as well as in the newspaper business. He was an early, urban bourgeois living in what the historian Eugene Genovese has called a "pre-bourgeois" culture--the Slave South. For forty years, Brownlow attempted to defend commercial, middle-class, nationalist Whig virtues while remaining loyal to a stubbornly agrarian, quasi-aristrocratic, and increasingly Secessionist South. His entire career was an attempt to develop a moral, political and economic ideology appropriate to his East Tennessee constituency, one which might aid in the integration of his region into the State, the State into the South, and the South into the Nation. The War for Southern Independence provided dramatic proof of the failure of Brownlow's Whiggish project. It also provided Brown- low and his fellow Southern Unionists with an ultimate test of princi- ple. While other Tennessee Whigs capitulated to the planters out of a narrow self-interest and a self-destructive sense of Southern loyalty, Brownlow recognized that his principles and interests demanded allegiance to the Union, to the North. He reached the height of his propagandistic fame during the War, touring the North in support of the Union effort. His career as Reconstruction governor was essentially an attempt to act on his final recognition of the irreconcilably revolutionary and anti- bourgeois nature of the old planter regime, and to lay the foundation for a truly "new" South. If he failed in this, the failure was due more to the strength of the resistance to his attempt than to his lack of capacity for growth, effort and vision. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This is an academic word for "thanks." They go to a variety of people. To Cindy, for helping sanity reign during three years of frustrated research. To Mike Fellman, for gambling on the personal (and academic) meaningfulness of this project. To Dr. Don Kirschner, for providing a wise voice and interested ears in his forced capacity as second advisor. Belated thanks to the advisor for my first major project, Dr. William Hamilton--after two years of guiding me through the intricacies of ~urope'sintellectual life, through William Blake and dialectical logic, he encouraged me to take on something more concrete this time, to get my historical feet back on the ground before setting out once more into the murk of intellectual history. And very special thanks to the administrative and research staff of the Archives and Manuscripts divisions of the Tennessee State Library and Archives. In terms both of efficiency and sensitivity to research needs, they must be among the very best in their trade. CONTENTS Title............................................................ i Approval ......................................................... ii Abstract .........................................................iii Acknowledgements ................................................. v Introduction.................................................... 1 Notes.................................................. 12 Chapter I--William G. Brownlow: The Making of an Agitator ......................................... 13 Notes................................................. 26 Chapter 11--The Nation's Faiths: Brownlow's Religious and Political Ideology ...................... 29 Notes .................................................59 Chapter 111--Circuit-Riding for the Union: Brownlow's National Campaign ........................... 65 Notes................................................. 78 Chapter IV--Brownlow and the Era of Reconstruction............... 81 Notes .................................................~Ol Conclusion: Brownlow, Tennessee, the South and the Nation........ 104 Notes.................................................. 108 Bibliography .....................................................109 1 INTRODUCTION Tennessee is a fascinating and paradoxical place, a state in which the historian can watch the "drama of American nation-building" played out in full and in miniature. As Thomas P. Abernethy pointed out, Tennessee took less than 100 years to develop almost all the economic and political themes found in over 250 years of Virginia or Massachusetts history. Its frontier period coincided with the establishing of the Union; and by 1876, its integration into the Nation fairly complete, it ceased to be the rebellious backwoods producer of strong-willed Presi- dents. The period of this thesis is the final stage of the "dramatic" phase of Tennessee history, from the Age of Jackson to the Era of Re- construction. One of the more important and most interesting Tennesseeans of this period was William G. "Parsontt Brownlow. His entry into a public career coincided with the beginnings of Whiggism, and he died, with his era, .in 1877. During that period, he established a national reputation, from his various bases in the Methodist ministry, the iron business, the emerging railroads and the partisan politics and polemical newspapering of his day, which led to a short and violent experience with the wielding of political power during ~econstruction. This was a period of growth, and the Parson grew within it. His career coincided with the age of settlement--with the period in which Tennessee (and the Nation) became something Tore than a geographical expression. This was particularly difficult in a state which contained within it almost -all the major divisions of the Nation itself. When the War came, agricultural West Tennessee went Rebel, mineral-rich East Tennessee went Yankee--although parts of the northeast (Andy Johnson country) followed the Southern lead. Tennessee, made up of at least three distinct types of geography, was also the home of three competing types of capital, and, some have claimed, three distinct types of people. The agricultural West and the resource- laden East have always competed for the alliance of the large region of Middle Tennessee. Brownlow's public career as a Whig may be seen in large part as one East Tennesseean's forty-year attempt to build that alliance and to give it a Unionist (nationalist) direction. In the end, with the momentous Secession vote, Brownlow's project failed. Most of the Middle Tennessee Whigs, and many of their East Tennessee counterparts, sided with the South, with their immediate economic interests. Brownlow, however, was less a man of "interestsff than a man of principle. That is, he was an ideologue--and a sincere, passionate one. Ideologues, to the extent that they are successful, often see social realities more clearly for seeing them more explicitly and at longer range. Brownlow, like Alexander Hamilton before

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