Of all the prominent characters developed by our fraternal conflict that of Parson William G. Brownlow is altogether the most unique. It would be accepted as thrillingly romantic but for the barbarism that was provoked by the intensely bitter fraternal conflict, and that was accepted by both sides and employed to the uttermost. Brownlow was one of the sturdy mountaineers of Eastern Tennessee, where there were few slaves, where school houses and churches were rarely cultivated, and where hostility to the aristocratic slaveholder was about the only inspiration that could call out the ruggedly heroic qualities of the people. Andrew Johnson was another of the same type, and played his part in harmony with the lines of Brownlow. It was only natural that such people would have little sympathy with a war avowedly precipitated and prosecuted for the maintenance of slavery, and the keenest thorn of the South in the side of the Confederacy came from the aggressive loyal mountaineers of Eastern Tennessee, where Johnson was worshiped as the ideal statesman, and Parson Brownlow as the ideal pulpit orator. Johnson started as a tailor and unable even to write his name, and Brownlow started as a carpenter, and after acquiring a smattering of an English education he entered the Methodist ministry when he had reached his majority, and was an itinerant minister of that church for ten years. He mingled his piety very freely with politics, and was often heard on the stump in the political conflicts of those days. He actively opposed the election of Jackson in 1828 and again in 1832, and he established the Jonesboro Whig in 1838, and thereafter devoted his labors chiefly to politics and the primitive journalism of that day and region, but always maintained his position as a local Methodist preacher. His editorials were always caustic and forceful, and many of them could be very justly criticised as vulgar; but he wrote just what his readers wanted, and he maintained a profitable reputation for himself and his newspaper by gaining the title of the "Fighting Parson." He was seldom without a serious broil of some kind on hand, and was always armed for the fray. It was only natural that a man of such tastes and environment would be hostile to the Southern leaders when rebellion was inaugurated. At that time he had removed from Jonesboro to the larger village of Knoxville, where he had re-established The Whig, and his criticisms of the secessionists exhausted the vocabulary of Billingsgate.

When the secession tide had swept over the South he was the only man in Knoxville who had the courage to display the Union flag from his home, but he was finally compelled to give up his almost single-handed battle, as his newspaper had been suppressed by the Southern authorities, and in the last issue that he was permitted to publish, on the 24th of October, 1861, he gave a farewell address to his readers, declaring that imprisonment was preferable to submission. He refused to accept the oath of allegiance to the Confederacy and absented himself from Knoxville, but he was soon thereafter accused of destroying the railroad bridges, and a squad of soldiers was sent out to search for him, with orders to shoot him whenever found. He was subsequently induced to return to Knoxville on the assurance that he would be permitted to go to Kentucky, but upon arriving at his home he was immediately arrested for treason, and confined in jail for some weeks, where he suffered every possible indignity from his persecutors. While a prisoner he was permitted to address a note to Mr. Benjamin, the Confederate Secretary of State, in which he asked for permission to go North in these characteristic words: "Just give me my passport and I will do more for the Confederacy than the devil has ever done. I will leave the country." He was taken at his word, and in March, 1862, he was sent inside the Union lines at Nashville.

Brownlow immediately made a tour of the North, where he was welcomed with boundless enthusiasm, and his speeches were among the most original and pungent I have ever heard. The bitterness of internecine strife was exhibited in tempestuous waves as intelligent, cultivated people of the North listened to the thrilling stories Parson Brownlow told in his own inimitable way. His story when truthfully presented would have been thrilling enough to arouse the keenest interest of the inflamed people of the North, but Brownlow's vivid imagery and ribald arraignment of all the Southern leaders, divesting them of every virtue and charging them with every attribute of fiendishness, made his vulgarisms household words in very many homes. He had a keen eye to business, and his life, written by himself and published by the late George W. Childs, reached a sale of hundreds of thousands, and gave Brownlow a handsome competence. He remained in the North, where his family joined him, until the occupation of Tennessee by the Union troops made it safe for him to return to his State under conditions which made it possible for him to take up the political lines and adopt and enforce the most violent reconstruction policy, by which he made himself Governor and finally a United States Senator.

I saw much of Parson Brownlow during his stay in the North, and heard him deliver several addresses. I had had an editorial spat with him some ten or a dozen years before when editor of a little village newspaper. I had obtained an exchange with the Fighting Parson and read his Jonesboro Whig with interest because of the always aggressive and generally violent, abusive editorials which came from his pen. The conviction and execution of Professor Webster, of Harvard, called out one of his vehement broadsides against the hypocrisy of the Abolitionists of the North. I criticised his sweeping and coarsely unjust reflections upon the Northern people, which brought out a oen oicture of myself from the mountain parson that was quite original. Instead of answering the arguments I had presented in rather a courteous manner he declared that I must be a "renegade from the land of steady habits, a filthy Abolitionist and a lousy neighbor of David Wilmot's, who had made the money to establish his newspaper by selling cow heel flints and wooden nutmegs to the Pennsylvania Dutch." Although it was the period of my editorial career when I knew so little about journalism that I supposed I could vanquish any foe in controversy, I threw up the sponge to Brownlow, as I could not approach him on his own lines, and any other would have been an utter waste of time and space.



Brownlow's appearance was anything but prepossessing. He was tall, lank, hatchet-faced, ungraceful in manner, never gentle in speech and was himself only when indulging in some tirade against real or imaginary foes that gave him an opportunity to open the sluices of the blackguard. The single virtue that the man possessed was his courage, and that was a universal virtue among the sturdy sons of the Tennessee forests and mountains. He was fiendish in his vindictiveness, and gave it the most terrible practical illustration when he came to the reconstruction of his State. There have been many records of reconstruction in the South which stand out as a terrible reproach upon the history of our free Government, but in no other State in the South was there such pitiless persecution, such relentless despotism and such a floodtide of political debauchery as were displayed by the rule of Parson Brownlow. Tennessee had more Union people than any other Southern State, and it was not only a battle between friends and foes of the Union, but it was largely a battle of caste. It was the uncouth, vigorous and aggressive mountaineers, whose hard lives and humble homes fostered the keenest hatred for culture and wealth, and especially of those who held slaves to do their bidding. A war that had been in progress for several years, intensified by the breaking of fraternal ties, and by the inflamed hatred of the poor for the rich, brought Tennessee to a condition of anarchy save where the bayonet gave its despotic and often hard protection.

The reconstruction policy was conceived, framed and executed by Brownlow, and be assured his political mastery by disfranchising not only those who were in open antagonism to the Government, but all who were suspected of opposition to his purposes. He thus established a government that wrote the most fearful chapters in the annals of Tennessee. It was a rule of ignorance, of hate and of spoliation, and it was maintained until Brownlow re-elected himself as Governor, and then, in violation of his faith to those who had aided him, elected himself to the Senate by orders to an obedient Legislature. I saw him after he had taken his seat in the Senate, and found him broken in health and friendless at home and in Washington among those whose friendship he most coveted. In the various conversations I had with him I never saw a smile on his face, and found him always unwilling to speak of his own political achievements. Later I saw him when slow paralysis had given him trembling hands and broken voice. He lingered in loneliness until the close of his term, when he returned to his home in Knoxville, where he waited for the lengthening shadows which in a few months gave him the peace of the grave that he had never given to others in life.

From Colonel Alexander H. McClure's Recollections of Half a Century.