In a Sea of Seccessionism.....

A couple of years back, there was a great article in the Metro Pulse by Knoxville historian Jack Neely. The article centered around a situation at one of the local high schools that had gained momentum and had suddenly, it seemed, become newsworthy. Apparently the African-American students at Maryville High School in Blount County had taken issue with the school's tradition of flying the "Stars and Bars" during local football games in keeping with the theme of the school's athletic program and mascot, the "Rebels". Black students described the display of the rebel flag as tantamount to the flying of a swastika, to which many white students responded by decrying the "Heritage not Hate" slogan. To them, they explained, the display of the rebel colors was simply a celebration of the heritage passed down by their forefathers. The problem, Mr. Neely noted in a wryly presented argument, was that during the American Civil War, the citizens of Blount County were overwhelmingly Unionist; by some accounts as much as 80% so.

So what made East Tennessee different? The answer is probably more topographical than ideological, at least at its root.

On June 8, 1861, just months after the fall of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, the state of Tennessee, first by executive order of the pro-South governor and then subsequently by popular vote, followed many of its southern neighbors by officially declaring its independence from the United States. Mountainous eastern Tennessee, having little in common with the agrarian regions to the west and south, remained staunchly Republican and pro-Union. As the high ridges and rocky soil of the region were not conducive to the development of plantation society, the majority of the white population of eastern Tennessee (or East Tennessee, as it was officially referred to following secession) had little use for slavery. Whatever lofty ideals were assigned to the region later on by revisionist historians, the fact of the matter remains that the politics of East Tennessee, much like those of what was to become West Virginia, were forged first and foremost by the general topography of the land on which its people had settled. Following the example of western Virginia (or the State of West Virginia, as it would later be known), East Tennessee quickly moved to secede from its secessionist parent state. However, the subsequent occupation of the area by nearly 55,000 confederate troops precluded any attempt by pro-Union groups to organize.

The Unionist sentiments of the people of East Tennessee continued to flourish in the face of secessionist oppression, and Knoxville rapidly became, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, the seat of a “unionist island in a sea of secessionism”.

As the conflict gained momentum, many of the men of East Tennessee were, regardless of conviction, pressed into service among the ranks of the Confederate Army. Others escaped under cover of night and made their way across the occupied Cumberland Mountains to join the Union Army in Kentucky. Edward Best, one of Blount County’s leading historians, tells of one young man from Morganton who, despite the fact that his family was pro-slavery, absconded in the middle of the night and crossed into Kentucky. His venture was funded in part by money secretly donated from among the family’s slaves.

While Knoxville and the highlands to the East were overwhelmingly Republican, the counties to the West became increasingly Democratic the farther one traveled from the mountainous regions. Some counties, such as Blount, Loudon, Monroe and McMinn spanned the topographical extremes and encompassed both jagged ridge and rolling farmland. As expected, the politics of these counties changed with the contours of the land, and to this day, though the principal ideologies of the parties have long since reversed themselves, the highland sections of the counties remain steadfastly Republican while the lowlands remain, with few exceptions, Democratic.

Our family in East Tennessee gave its fair share of young men to the conflict, the majority of whom mustered into the Union Army early in the war. The Andersons, Cryes, Simpsons, Moores, Flennikens, Edingtons and Pickens all produced soldiers for the Union, while the Kerrs, Wimberlys and a few of the McCammon line tended to support Secession. This war pitted brother against brother and father against son, and our family, like most others, broke down along lines of ideological conviction.