Declaration of independence: The day Scott County took a stand
“If the g**d**n state of Tennessee can secede from the Union, then Scott County can secede from the state of Tennessee.”
That’s what one old farmer is said to have proclaimed at a meeting of the County Court in Huntsville in 1861, soon after Tennessee seceded from the United States and joined the Confederate States of America.
Scott County had rejected secession by the largest margin of any county in Tennessee: 541-19. The county then authorized a proxy to represent it in Greeneville, where delegates from throughout East Tennessee met to draft a petition asking Nashville to allow it to separate and form its own independent state.
The state rejected that petition, of course. And that’s what led to the meeting of Scott County Court in Huntsville. By the time the meeting had ended, members of the court had voted unanimously to secede from Tennessee and declare the Free and Independent State of Scott.
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Scott County wasn’t interested in joining the Confederacy for a very simple reason: Scott County wasn’t much interested in slavery. By the time Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, triggering secession, there were only 61 slaves owned in Scott County. It was one of just two counties in all of Tennessee with fewer than 100 slaves. And, with the exception of a few sparsely-settled counties in the Appalachian Mountains of western Virginia, a smaller percentage of the population was enslaved in Scott County than in any other county in the southern slave states.
As the events preceding secession played out in the 1840s and the 1850s, Scott Countians were largely unaware. Scott County was a rugged and remote area, nearly cut off from the more populated areas of Tennessee and Kentucky. Its first newspaper, the Scott County Call, would not be published until the 1880s, nearly 20 years after the Civil War had ended.
Shortly after South Carolina voted to secede from the Union in early 1861, Rev. Herman Bokum, a colporteur from the Knoxville Bible Society, visited Scott County to deliver Bibles and was amazed to find that Scott Countians knew nothing of the secession crisis.
“I asked the people over in Scott County ‘how were times with them,’ and they said, ‘not very good,’” Bokum said, as quoted by University of Tennessee president Thomas William Humes in an 1880 book. “I inquired if that was because of the troubles in the country. They asked, ‘What troubles?’ I said: ‘Troubles to the Union. Haven’t you heard that South Carolina has seceded?’ They answered, no!’”
Bokum relayed his story to a man he called “Mr. C,” a wealthy Unionist from Knoxville. “He says he is going over to Scott County to live, for if the Union should be dissolved, he will never hear of it over there,” Bokum said.
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However unfamiliar Scott Countians may have been with the secession crisis, they were unified in their stance against secession, twice voting against it by margins in excess of 93%. The same was true for most of East Tennessee. That was partly because there were fewer slaves in East Tennessee than in Middle Tennessee or West Tennessee. But historian Esther Sharp Sanderson said it was also because so many East Tennesseans fought against the British in the Revolutionary War.
“East Tennesseans stood their ground,” Sanderson wrote. “They proved to the overwhelming majority of Tennesseans their loyalty to the Union. East Tennesseans had played important roles in helping to make the United States; they were not going to be a party to its destruction — no never!”
On June 4, 1861, U.S. Senator Andrew Johnston stopped in Huntsville. He was on his way to Kentucky to escape assassination after delivering a series of anti-secession speeches across Tennessee. On the steps of the Scott County Courthouse, where he was joined by U.S. Representative Horace Maynard, he delivered a fiery speech calling upon Scott Countians to stick with the Union. Four days later, 97% of Scott Countians voted to do just that.
A group of 13 Scott Countians met on Straight Fork Creek prior to the secession vote and pledged their support to the Confederacy. But when the actual vote was cast, only six others voted with them.
“Scott Countians can point with pride to the fact that they gave the largest proportional vote to the Union of any county in the state of Tennessee,” Sanderson wrote. “Their supreme sacrifice helped to keep intact an indestructible union of indestructible states, where the Great American Dream still flourishes in the spirit of a free people. United they have stood, where divided they would have perished.”
Across East Tennessee, some 8 in 10 voters rejected secession. Even in places where there were larger numbers of slaves — like Knoxville and other towns throughout the Tennessee Valley — a majority of people voted to remain loyal to the United States. That’s what led delegates from each East Tennessee county to meet in Greeneville after the secession vote. There, they unsuccessfully petitioned Nashville to break away from the rest of Tennessee and form their own state.
Tennessee Gov. Isham Harris might have said “no” to statehood for East Tennessee, but back in Scott County, folks weren’t willing to take no for an answer.
“The irate members of the County Court, all Union sympathizers, angered by the withdrawal of the State of Tennessee from the Union, made a motion that Scott County should then and there declare itself free and independent from the State of Tennessee and that it should thereafter be called The Independent State of Scott,” Sanderson wrote. “It was passed unanimously by a roll call vote, and all members voted unanimously and affixed their signatures to a motion that the minutes of their meeting be carried by hand and delivered in person to the Secretary of State in Nashville.”
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Harris, Tennessee’s pro-slavery governor who had successfully pushed for secession, wasn’t pleased with the defiance in Scott County. He sent a regiment of Confederate troops to Huntsville with orders to arrest and hang members of the county court who had declared the county’s independence.
Things came to a head in August 1862, when Confederate soldiers skirmished with Union troops and members of the Scott County Home Guard at a breastworks just south of town. The Rebels won the battle and seized the town, but they were unable to capture any members of the county court; the squires had gone into hiding. The Confederate soldiers ransacked the courthouse, instead, and some court records were apparently seized or destroyed.
No one is exactly sure when Scott County declared its independence from Tennessee, because no official documents exist to show when the Free and Independent State of Scott was formed.
In his 2001 book, “Scott County in the Civil War,” Paul Roy speculated that the vote may have taken place in December 1861, when county court formed the Scott County Home Guard to protect against Confederate guerrillas. But it has also been speculated that the vote took place in June 1861 — weeks, if not days, after Tennessee seceded from the Union.
In her book, Sanderson wrote that James W. Baker found the minutes from the 1861 county court meeting before they were destroyed in a courthouse fire in 1946. However, it is widely believed that the minutes were taken or destroyed by the Confederate soldiers who ransacked the courthouse following the Battle of Huntsville. The latter speculation is backed by a recently-discovered book of court minutes dating from April 1866 to February 1870. In it, there is a reference made to Scott County’s wartime records being destroyed and needing to be re-transcribed.
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Although neither Tennessee nor the United States ever acknowledged the Free and Independent State of Scott, it was not until 1986 that Scott County formally rejoined the Volunteer State.
That year, as part of the Homecoming ’86 festivities that marked the 200th anniversary of Tennessee’s statehood, County Executive Dwight Murphy drafted a resolution seeking readmission to the Volunteer State. It passed by an 11-2 vote of County Commission. And, in Nashville, Gov. Lamar Alexander signed legislation passed by the General Assembly that welcomed Scott County back into the state.
Some 125 years after declaring its independence as a show of support to the United States, Scott County was once more officially a part of Tennessee.
By that time — 1986 — time had healed most of the scars from the Civil War. Scott County’s role in the war had become a mere footnote to a bitter and bloody conflict that had resulted in more than a million casualties. But despite being an isolated community that simply wanted to be left alone, Scott County had been unable to escape the realities of war. Many Scott Countians joined the fight, most of them heading north into Kentucky to sign up for the Union Army. And in September 1861, less than three months after Tennessee’s secession, the war would come to Scott County.