William Gannaway Brownlow or Parson Brownlow was a unique and interesting character. Born in Virginia, his family moved to Tennessee when he was very young. His parents died while he was still a child and he early on took to the carpentry trade. He then used his meager earnings to educate himself and became a travelling Methodist Minister. He then drifted into the newspaper business and established the Whig, a party paper in Elizabethon, Tennessee. Party politics in East Tennessee was a combination of vitriole and mudslinging reduced to an art form. Brownlow quickly became a master of both. After a particularly brutal assault campaign against the Democratic candidate for Congress someone fired several shots into Brownlow's home narrowly missing his wife. He moved his paper to Jonesboro shortly afterwards where the paper business was better if the politics were no less violent and incendiary. Immediately after moving into Jonesboro Brownlow and his paper, The Whig, became involved in another harsh contest against the Democratic paper in the area published by Landon C. Haynes. Brownlow and Haynes were soon involved in a street brawl which saw Brownlow get a smoothbore musket ball through his leg.
In 1849 Brownlow moved his paper to Knoxville where he built up a very large following and profitable subscription list. Brownlow specialized in scurrilous personal attacks and violent denunciations and was an unmerciless foe of abolitionists and secessionists alike. East Tennessee politics was a hotbead of such hardcore down and dirty politics and one of Brownlow's earliest political foes was Andrew Johnson. Both Johnson and Brownlow had cut their political teeth in contests of mudslinging and personal denunciation and Johnson was later to infuriate a radical Republican Congress with such tactics as President. In Johnson's 1845 run for Congress, Brownlow denounced him as a "coward" a "Godless atheist" and a "bastard."
By 1860 Brownlow's paper had one of the largest subscriptions in the state and he rode the secessionists who were attempting to break up his beloved Union unmercifully. For a sample of Brownlow's unmistakeable style, the following excerpt is from the Knoxville Whig, May 25, 1861 concerning threats to remove the American flag Brownlow proudly flew at his newspaper office:
"If these God-forsaken scoundrels and hell-deserving assassins want satisfaction out of me for what I have said about them,---and it has been no little,-----they can find me on the streets every day of my life but Sunday. I am at all times prepared to give them satisfaction. I take back nothing I have ever said against the corrupt and unprincipaled villains, and hurl down their own lying throats their own infamous calumnies.
Finally, the destroying of my small flag or of my town-property is a small matter. The carrying out of the State upon the mad was of Seccession is also a small matter, compared to the great principle involved. Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I am a Union man, and owe my allegiance to the Stars and Stripes of my country. Nor can I, in any possible contingency, have any respect fo rthe Government of the Confederate States, originating as it did with, and being controlled by , the worst men in the South. And any man saying---whether high or low degree----that I am an Abolitionist or a Black Republican, is a LIAR and a SCOUNDREL. W.G. Brownlow, Editor
In Response to a letter from a reader in June of 1860 intimating that Brownlow had joined the Democratic Party, Brownlow printed the following;
Mr. Jordan Clark: I have your letter of the 30th and hasten to let you know the precise time when I expect to come out and formally announce that I have joined the Democratic Party. When the sun shines at midnight and moon at mid-day; when man forgets to be selfish, or Democrats lose their inclination to steal; when nature stops her onward march to rest, or all the water courses in America flow up-stream; when flowere lose their odor, and trees shed no leaves; when birds talk, and beasts of burden laugh; when ****ed spirits swap hell for heaven with the angels of light, and pay them the boot in mean whiskey; when impossibilities are in fashion, and no proposition is too absurd to be believed, ---you may credit the report that I have joined the Democrats!
I join the Democrats! Never, so long as there are sects in churches, weeds in gardens, fleas in hog pens, dirt in victuals, disputes in families, wars with nations, water in the ocean, bad men in America, or base women in France! No, Jordan Clark, you may hope, you may congratulate, you may reason, you may sneer, but that cannot be. The thrones of the Old World, the courts of the Universe, the governments of the world, may all fall and crumble into ruin,-- the New World may commit the national suicide of dissolving this Union,---but all this, and more, must occur before I join the Democrats!
I join the Democrats! Jordan Clark, you know not what you say. When I join the Democrats, the Pope of Rome will join the Methodist Church. When Jordan Clark, of Arkansas, is President of the Republic of Great Britain by the universal suffrage of a contented people; when Queen Victoria consents to be divorced from Prince Albert by a county court in Kansas; when Congress obliges, by law, James Buchanan to marry a European princess; when the Pope leases the Capitol at Washington for his city residence; when Alexander of Russia and Napoleon of France are selected Senators in Congress from New Mexico; when good men cease to go to heaven, or bad men to hell; when this world is turned upside down; when proof is afforded, both clear and unquestionable, that there is no God; when men turn to ants, and ants to elephants,---I will change m political faith and come out on the side of Democrats!
Supposing this full and frank letter will enable you to fix upon the period when I will come out a full grown Democrat, and to communicate the same to all whom it may concern in Arkansas,
I have the honor to be,
W.G. Brownlow
In response to a letter from South Carolina denouncing Brownlow and his paper he printed the letter and his response in October of !860, part of his response follows:
Now sir, what is your pedigree? You hail from a State which mustered more Tories in the War of the Revolution that all the other states in the confederacy put together. There are, I am free to allow, many Union loving, law abiding, patriotic, and gallant citizens in South Carolina, and there were during the War of the Revolution; but still, I repeat, it was the resort of Tories, and the home of traitors, during that dark and trying period of our history. And I have no doubt that your ancestors, on both sides, were operating in the Cypress Swamps, and figured with that illustrious class of robbers who were hunted down by General Marion, for giving "aid and comfort" to the British Army.
I have no doubt there are Tories enough still in South Carolina, and the descendents of Tories, to influence an attempt to go out of the Union in the event of Lincoln's election. And I think it is a great misfortune that the Constitution does not provide some means of letting that State go peaceably. As matter stand, she will have to be thrashed into line.
On January 12, 1861 Brownlow printed a letter from the Spring of 1780 in which many of the leading citizens of Charleston had offered to repledge their allegiance to the king and renounced the Declaration of Independence as a "doctrine orginating in the Northern Colonies" and which their "nature revolted at the idea." Brownlow followed this letter with its original signers, some 200 of the leading figures in Charleston at the time. The following excerpt followed the signatures;
We print the names of these infamous Tories, because their descendents are spread all over the South, and a portion of them are now figuring in this Secession movement, and some of them ever in their late Convention. They have a hereditary title to the contempt of all honest and patriotic men. Did not a man by the name of R. Barnwell Smith, some twenty five or thirty years ago, have his name changed to that of Rhett, by the Legislature? and, if so, what was the motive? Was he not prominent in the late Convention, in declaring South Carolina out of this Union? We ask for information; because there have been more name changes in South Carolina, by Act of General Assembly, than in any State in the Union!
Some other quotes from Brownlow;
May 14, 1861
I am a native of Virginia, and so were my parents before me, and, together with a numerous train of relatives, they were all slave-holders. For thirty years I have lived in Tennessee, and my wife and children are native Tennesseans. My native State did more to form the old Confederacy and to form the Constitution of the United States than any other State; her soil is not the resting place of the honored dead, the most ultra old Unionists dead or alive,---Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Marshall, Henry, and a host of others. I am sorry to have to record that it has, in the mysterious providence of God, been reserved to Virginia to do more towards overthrowing the Confederacy and the Constitution than any other State, South Carolina not even excepted. It took the Virginia Convention of 1861 to overthrow her State Government, ---changing her organic political status contrary to the expressed direction of her people at the ballot box when they elected the men who perpetrated the deed! Virginia, I am sorry to say, if I may be allowed to use and humble illustration, is like a hill of potatoes, ----the best part under ground; the part above ground reminds me but of vines. When citizens of other States are called upon to name their great statesmen, the point to LIVING men. Make the call to Virginians, and they ask you out into a GRAVEYARD, when they will point you to the tomb of Washington, the monument erected over Madison, or the grave of Jefferson!
Not surprisingly, after the secession of Tennessee, Brownlow was soon under arrest for the articles he continued to run excorciating the Confederate States of America and its leaders. His newspaper was stopped and he was later exiled into the Union lines after a confusing series of arrests and releases by first the military authority in Tennessee and then the civil government. Brownlow returned to Tennessee in 1863 to restart his paper which he renamed the "The Knoxville Whig and Rebel Ventilator."
In 1865 Brownlow was elected Governor of Tennessee on a platform promising to Punish the secessionists who had run him out of the state and took his property in 1861. His polemics were just as harsh, if not more so, against the rebels who had attempted to destroy his beloved Union.
In Response to complaints that his writings were inciting Unionists to murder returning Confederates Brownlow replied,
"If we have been instrumental by our speeches or editorials, in bringing to a violent death any one or more of the God-forsaken and hell deserving persecutors of Union families in East Tennessee, we thank God most devoutly----shall take encouragement from the past and do more of the same sort of work."
After assuming office as Governor Brownlow responded to pleas for help in calming passions in the war-torn state by issuing the following statement;
"The treason of rebellion is a crime against law, liberty and humanity. Those who are guilty of it have foreited all rights to citizenship, and to life itself. Every field of caranage, every rebel prison, every Union man's grave unite with a violated law and demand the penalty, and if the courts do not administer it, an outraged people will."
It seems that many of the most vehement calls for punishing the "rebels" came from native southerners who saw their life, liberty, and property destroyed by the attempt at secession. East Tennessee was a heavily Unionist area that was under martial law for much of the time the
CSA controlled it with arbitrary arrests, seizures, and acts of violence against Unionists the rule of thumb.
blackirish
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