East Tennessee Convention of 1861 - Origins of Union Support in East Tennessee

Origins of Union Support in East Tennessee

East Tennessee's support of the Union should not necessarily be interpreted as a rejection of slavery. While East Tennessee was home to a substantial manumission movement in the first half of the 19th century, abolitionists still constituted a radical minority within the region. Several delegates at the Unionist conventions were themselves slave owners who believed the U.S. Constitution protected the practice. William Brownlow, one of the convention's most prominent members, had defended the practice of slavery in a well-received speech just four years prior to the convention. Convention co-organizer Oliver Perry Temple later recalled that when speaking during the period, he defended slavery, but said he would do away with the practice if that's what it would take to preserve the Union. East Tennessee had just 10% of the state's slave population, and overall there was widespread ambivalence in the region regarding the abolition issue.

While slavery alone may not have been a primary issue in East Tennessee's pro-Union stance, the practice may have indirectly contributed to it. Many people in the mountainous region (what is now called Southern Appalachia) viewed the Southern slaveholding planter class as a de facto aristocracy with excessive and sometimes autocratic powers. Convention delegate Oliver Perry Temple later wrote:

Seven-tenths of the Union men were non-slaveholders. They cared little about that institution. Some of them were opposed to it on moral grounds. With some it was no special, because associated with an aristocracy of wealth. Many, perhaps nearly every one of the Union men who were slaveholders, preferred the government to slavery.

The strength of East Tennessee's Whigs, who had long stood in opposition to Southern Democrats (who were pro-secession), was another key reason for the region's pro-Union sentiment. The results of the February and June referendums showed that support for the Union was strongest in counties that had traditionally voted Whig. One of the convention's speakers, Thomas D. Arnold, had been among the Whigs who were vehemently opposed to Andrew Jackson in the 1830s. Convention delegate William Brownlow was publisher of the Knoxville Whig, in which he espoused radical Whig views. Convention co-organizer Oliver Perry Temple once called the Democratic party "antichrist", and later wrote that East Tennesseans were "disciples of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, both as to the theory and the administrative policy of the government". The Whigs of East Tennessee were very well organized, and were able to mount aggressive pro-Union political campaigns in the first months of 1861.