East Tennessee's Civil War: Pro-Union with divided loyalties

It was June 1861 and Tennessee was about to leave the United States to join the Confederacy. East Tennesseans didn’t want to go, and they put up a fight.

Tennessee voted to join the Confederate States of America on June 8,1861, becoming the Confederacy’s 11th and last state. Some 105,000 Tennesseans voted for secession; 47,000 voted against, according to the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. Most against secession lived in the state’s east. 

Unlike most West Tennessee and many Middle Tennessee residents, East Tennesseans were mostly pro-Union. Most of the region's mountain farms were small, not large plantations. Cotton — a driving factor in the deep South — wasn’t king here, Maryville College Associate Professor of History Aaron Astor explained.

Slavery was present but not prominent in comparison to other areas of the South. About one-fourth of African-Americans living in Civil War Knoxville were free men or women, according to Joan Markel, McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture’s Curator of Civil War History. 

Loyal to the Union

East Tennesseans voted by more than 2-to-1 that June against secession -- 33,000-to 14,000.

Unionist feelings were so strong that after Tennessee decided to secede, East Tennessee leaders met at the Greene County Courthouse. They petitioned the Tennessee Legislature to let East Tennessee become its own state. That state would have been loyal to the Federal government.

Their mid-June request was denied. On July 26, Gov. Isham Harris ordered Confederate troops into East Tennessee. They’d occupy the region through the war’s first half. 

Tennessee conflicts ran strong. While their neighbors and sometimes brothers fought for the South, some 31,000 Tennesseans joined the Federal army. Tennessee sent more white soldiers to fight for the Union than any other Southern state. Most were from East Tennessee, Astor said.

Greeneville resident Andrew Johnson was the only U.S. senator from the South to remain loyal to the Union after his state seceded. That loyalty was rewarded — President Abraham Lincoln named Johnson Tennessee’s military governor in 1862 and his vice-presidential running mate in 1864.

Still, some divided

But it’s oversimplifying to say all East Tennesseans supported the Union. Sections were Confederate strongholds. Cities and families were divided in loyalties and actions. In Knoxville, ardent separatists and fervent Unionists lived on the same streets, attended the same churches and shopped at the same stores. 

“Loyalty can change over the course of the war; people switched sides,” Astor said. “Generally speaking, more East Tennesseans were pro-Union. “

The region’s pro-Confederate minority often lived along railroad lines, Astor said. Their feelings were part economical, part cultural.

“These people imagined East Tennessee as part of a larger social and regional Southern market. … You get your news from Georgia and Virginia; those are your people,” he said. 

Knoxville was always divided. Confederates controlled the city from 1861 to fall of 1863. Confederate troops and prominent Rebel citizens then fled before the advancing Union army. Federals took over in September 1863.

“The powerful became the oppressed, the oppressed became the powerful,” Markel said.

Prayers and bloodshed

Knoxville Unionists, who had suffered under Rebel rule, dug their U.S. flags out of hiding and waved them in the streets. Knoxville lawyer and Unionist Oliver P. Temple said the Federals’ arrival was “to a Union man a moment of supreme happiness, for it was the moment of deliverance.”

Knoxville Confederate Ellen Renshaw House viewed the same action as disaster. “The Yankees are here. Just think, here — here in Knoxville. How I hate them,” the 22-year-old wrote in her journal.

Episcopal priest Thomas Humes returned to his St. John Church pulpit to lead a prayer for thanks and deliverance. Humes had left the church in 1861 rather than pray for then-controlling Confederates.

Knoxville businessman Joseph Mabry, a self-proclaimed “notorious rebel,” outfitted a Confederate regiment at the war’s start. But when the Union troops took over Knoxville, he offered to supply them with whatever “will be of use to your army.”

Fort Sanders bloody battle

Knoxville's major battle happened months later. Confederates failed to take Fort Sanders from Union troops in a bloody, brief Nov. 29, 1863, fight. There were 826 dead and wounded - 813 Confederate - in the battle. The fort's long gone; a neighborhood near the University of Tennessee retains its name.

“I think East Tennessee in the war is a metaphor for the country as a whole,” Astor said. “It’s internally divided. It’s being pulled in directions it did not want to go. It was pulled into a war it did not seek.”

Other than the end of slavery, the war left East Tennessee with little. “For the most part all it got was bloodshed and destruction.”