RECONSTRUCTION!!!

[ole]

Brown is an embarrassment now; he was an embarrassment then. If he had an ounce of Christian charity in his soul, he didn't show it.
Ole

[trice]

Originally Posted by ole

Brown is an embarrassment now; he was an embarrassment then. If he had an ounce of Christian charity in his soul, he didn't show it.

"Parson" Brownlow was a fire-and-brimstone Methodist preacher in his youth, riding the circuit in eastern TN, northern GA, and the western Carolinas. He was instrumental in the establishment of Methodism in that area (what would later be called Southern Methodist). He established, published and edited the paper that would become Brownlow's Knoxville Whig -- widely circulated throughout that area, with a circulation about 3 times the total population of Knoxville.

In the days before the Civil War, he was a noted pro-Southern, pro-slavery, pro-Union man. He was obviously very pro-Methodist, and he was also known as a "nativist", an anti-immigrant man. Associated with the dying Whig party, he was a strong anti-secession man in 1860, and I assume supported Bell for President.

After the TN vote for secession in June, he was a strident and adamant critic of the TN and Confederate government in his speeches and paper. (IOW, a real PITA.) His paper was shut down in response (there goes freedom of the press), he went into hiding, and he was eventually allowed to go North through Union lines (where he toured the Northeast, giving inflamatory speeches and urging that the Union crush the Confederacy and rescue east Tennessee.)

In the Winter of 1861-62, he came back to Knoxville to reopen his paper and urge resistance to the Confederacy. He was arrested and imprisoned. Due to an extortion plot involving the local magistrate and a jailor, he was subjected to very harsh physical and mental abuse while in prison. The Confederate government eventually discovered this and released him.

It is pretty obvious that Brownlow was an inflexible, intolerant man who castigated his opponents strongly in the best of times. That experience in prison (i.e., deliberate torture) seems to have really thrown him into the deep end, where all restraint was lost and the desire for vengance became paramount. From that moment on, he seemed bent on a holy war to exterminate his enemies.

Regards,
Tim

[william42]

I found this article and thought I would place it on this thread, since it pertains to the post Civil War years. (and I'm trying to be more "thread concious").

In order to understand the impulse behind the Black Codes, we must keep in mind that white Southerners were entirely convinced that the freedmen presented a fearful menace to white society both by refusing to work (thereby becoming public charges and, more serious, bankrupting all planters who depended on them as a labor force) and by performing violent acts against their former masters. But plainly the principal motivation for the Black Codes was economic. White Southerners were determined to force freed blacks to work for them on the terms and under the conditions they prescribed. They were determined to dominate their ex-slaves almost as completely as they had dominated them under the institution of slavery itself. There was nothing about the simple fact of emancipation to alter, in the slightest degree, the white image of the black man or woman.

http://www.civilwarhome.com/blackcodes.htm for the entire article



Source: "Trial By Fire, A People's History of the Civil War and Reconstruction" by Page Smith


Terry