When Tennessee Turned South

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

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Isham Harris, secession, Slavery, Tennessee, the civil war

Two weeks after South Carolina declared its secession from the United States, Governor Isham G. Harris called Tennessee’s legislature into special session. Harris, a native son of Tennessee, was a popular-two term governor who had campaigned vigorously for John C. Breckinridge, the candidate of the Southern faction of the Democratic Party, during the presidential election of 1860.

Harris wasted no time in presenting his reasons for calling the General Assembly into session: “The attempt of the Northern people,” to confine slavery “within the limits of the present Southern States,” to appropriate the whole of the western territory to themselves, and to put slavery on the path of “ultimate extinction” was regarded by the “people of the Southern states as a gross and palpable violation of the spirit and obvious meaning of the compact of Union.”

Library of CongressTennessee Gov. Isham Harris

Harris knew the choice was clear: “Abandon it [slavery], we cannot, interwoven as it is with our wealth, prosperity and domestic happiness.” Tennessee had to leave the Union. But it would be another five months before a majority of his fellow Tennesseans would agree. What took so long?

Tennessee was a complicated state. Like its neighbor Virginia, it was profoundly divided over the issue of secession, with its mountainous eastern section deeply opposed to the idea. They weren’t alone: A special election on Feb. 9 revealed the political gulf between Governor Harris and the people of the state: On the same day that Mississippi left the Union, the voters of Tennessee voted 80 percent against secession.

In fact, Harris himself was hardly a fire-eater. While he saw a clear threat to slavery from the incoming Republican administration, he also believed there were ways short of secession, like a constitutional amendment, to remedy the problem. In his address to the General Assembly, Harris proposed a five-part amendment that would, in his mind, “deprive the fanatical majorities of the North of the power to invade our rights or impair the security or value of our property.” Four of Harris’s articles protected slavery in various ways throughout the nation, while the fifth provided that the preceding four would “never be changed, except by the consent of all the slave States.”

Two weeks after Harris’s submitted his proposal, the General Assembly responded with its own amendment protecting slavery, which it quickly submitted to Washington. Secession’s siren call, however, had become too strong for any compromise based on amending the United States Constitution. By the time of Lincoln’s inauguration in March, nothing short of a repudiation of the 1860 Republican platform would satisfy the state’s fire-eaters.

The two sides, Unionist and secessionist, stood at a stalemate until the bombardment of Ft. Sumter in early April. While some favored immediate secession, others held that secession was unconstitutional. A larger number futilely hoped for some sort of settlement based on a constitutional compromise regarding the “question of negro slavery.” Even after the outbreak of war, Tennessee, like Missouri and Kentucky to its north, hoped that it could remain neutral.

That changed with Lincoln’s April 15 call for the states to send 75,000 troops to fight the Confederacy. If the federal government was going to “coerce” the seceded states into returning, Tennessee had no choice but to join its Southern neighbors. “Tennessee will not furnish a single man for purposes of coercion but 50,000 if necessary for the defense of our rights and those of our Southern brothers,” wrote Harris in response to Lincoln’s request. The legislature (with 32 percent of the House and 16 percent of the Senate dissenting) voted on May 6 to join her “Southern brothers.”

Unlike every other state to join the Confederacy with the exception of Texas and Virginia, however, the legislators insisted that the public ratify their decision. While the state government prepared for secession and war following the vote for secession, Tennessee was technically not yet a member of the separatist government. But on June 8, by a two-to-one majority, Tennessee’s electorate confirmed the General Assembly’s verdict. The Volunteer State thus became the last to secede.

Still, Tennessee remained divided throughout the war. About a quarter of all the men who went off to fight did so for the North. Unionism remained especially strong in the mountains, but also in pockets throughout the state. Bedford County, south of Nashville in Middle Tennessee, supplied an equal number of troops to the North and the South. Its county seat, Shelbyville, became such a pro-Northern hotbed that it became known as “Little Boston.” One of the ironies of the war was that Nathan Bedford Forrest, the much revered Confederate general, took his middle name from his Unionist birthplace. More significantly, following Tennessee’s departure from the Union, Andrew Johnson retained his seat in the United States Senate, becoming the only representative from a seceded state to remain in Congress.

Ironies in Tennessee continued. Because it was largely occupied by Union troops in early 1863, it was unaffected by the Emancipation Proclamation. As the war was drawing to a close, Tennessee voters approved a constitutional amendment that abolished slavery in the state, and in 1866, with Andrew Johnson then occupying the White House, the state approved the 14th Amendment over Johnson’s objections. With ratification a congressional requirement, Tennessee thus became the first former Confederate state to be readmitted to the Union.

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Dwight Pitcaithley, a former chief historian of the National Park Service, teaches at New Mexico State University. He is writing a book on the secession crisis.