Lincoln’s only vote: As the 1860 election triggered secession, only one Scott Countian voted for Abe Lincoln
When President Abraham Lincoln successfully sought re-election in 1864, he carried the popular vote in Tennessee and in Scott County — even though the Volunteer State was still officially a part of the Confederate States of America and the votes would not count. In fact, Lincoln overwhelmingly captured the popular vote in Scott County that year.
That was noteworthy, because just four years earlier — in 1860 — Lincoln had received a single, solitary vote in Scott County.
This is the story of the primary event that precipitated secession and the Civil War — the election of Lincoln in 1860 — and the one man in Scott County who dared to vote for him: Shadrack Lewallen, known to his friends as Shade.
Setting the stage for 1860
Today, Abraham Lincoln is considered by many to be the best president the United States has ever known — the man who saved the union and, perhaps, preserved the world’s best hope for democracy.
But in 1860, Lincoln’s election touched off the greatest crisis in the history of the United States.
Lincoln was the nominee of the yet-new Republican Party, which had been formed in 1854 in opposition to the western expansion of slavery. Lincoln ran on a platform to stop the expansion of slavery into the western territories, but not to interfere with slavery in the South. In fact, abolitionists in the North were angry at the nomination of what they viewed to be a moderate, a man who they believed would not achieve their goal of abolishing slavery. But in the South, Lincoln was so unpopular that he didn’t appear on the ballot in most states — including Tennessee.
So how did Lincoln receive Shade Lewallen’s vote? That’s not exactly clear. Prior to the 1880s, states did not issue standardized ballots. Instead, ballots were printed and distributed by the candidates and their parties.
Nevertheless, Jehu Phillips — an early elected official in Scott County — wrote for the Cumberland Chronicle in 1904: “When Abe Lincoln ran for president in 1860 the people called him a black Republican, and he received only one vote in Scott County. That vote was cast by Shade Lewallen, who lived in Huntsville.”
Who was Shade Lewallen?
Not long after casting that noteworthy ballot for Lincoln, Shadrack Lewallen died. In 1862, a smallpox outbreak swept through Huntsville, and both Shade and his wife, Elizabeth Stepp, were among its victims. He was 55 at the time; she was 54.
According to numerous sources, both were buried on the family’s plot of land, which was located near Huntsville’s Presbyterian Church. The Lewallen Cemetery no longer exists today; in 1878, the lot was sold by Lewallen’s heirs to Alfred Gill. The graves were not marked.
Beyond that, Shade Lewallen’s heritage is quite muddled.
Some accounts of the Lewallen family history consider Shade Lewallen to be Rev. Andrew Aleutian Lewallen, a veteran of the War of 1812. It has been written that Andrew Lewallen — who was one of the sons of a Welshman named Anderson Grant Lewallen — was known by the nicknames of “Shade” and “Shadrack.”
In her book, “Scott County and Its Mountain Folk,” historian Esther Sharp Sanderson wrote that Lewallen fought in the Battle of New Orleans under General Andrew Jackson. “It was a favorite pastime for Shade to tell his nephews, Bill, John and Aleutian, about ‘Jackson’s War’ and how the Tennessee boys in buckskin rallied around Old Andy at ‘Orleans,” she wrote.
But Andrew Lewallen, the War of 1812 veteran, was born in 1795. By the 1860 census, he would have been well into his 60s — more than a decade older than the Shadrack Lewallen that is listed in the Scott County census for that year. Additionally, Andrew Lewallen married Malinda Davis, from Kingston, and his children are not the children that were listed in Shadrack Lewallen’s household in the 1860 census. Andrew Lewallen wasn’t even a resident of Scott County in 1860; he was granted 150 acres of land in Morgan County in 1855. Even if he lived in Scott County, the Anderson Lewallen line settled in the Glenmary area of southern Scott County, several miles south of Huntsville.
For the record, Andrew Lewallen died in 1873 and is buried in the Carpenter Cemetery off Nydeck Road near Glenmary.
It seems safe to say that Shade Lewallen did not fight in the War of 1812. If he had been at the Battle of New Orleans, which was fought in January 1815, he would have been an 8-year-old boy.
So what do we make of the confusion? It seems likely that there were two Lewallens known by the nicknames “Shade” or “Shadrack” — one being Rev. Andrew Aleutian Lewallen, the War of 1812 veteran, and the other being the Abraham Lincoln voter — and that history has confused the two. Sanderson wrote that the Shade Lewallen who fought in the Battle of New Orleans is buried at “the oldest cemetery in Huntsville, beside the Presbyterian Academy lot.” That is indeed where Shade Lewallen, the Lincoln voter, is buried, but that Shade Lewallen was simply too young to have fought in New Orleans.
That tells us nothing more of the Shade Lewallen who voted for Abe Lincoln. So who was he? This is what we know: According to the 1860 census, Shade and Elizabeth had five children — Eleenda, Mary, Elizabeth, William and Nancy. What became of the children after their parents’ death isn’t recorded. Elizabeth, William and Nancy would have been minors at the time, and would have likely been taken in by relatives or neighbors. Eleenda would have been about 20 and Mary about 18 at that time.
We do not know who Shade Lewallen’s parents were. The only clue that can be gleaned about the identity of Shade Lewallen comes from an old Scott County deed book, which records the sale of a plot of land that Shade and Elizabeth — and, apparently, two others — were buried on. It states that “William Sherman & Fernando Lewallen, sons of James Lewallen, ded’d sold their interest in this lot.” That may indicate that Shade Lewallen’s real name was James.
A little more is known about Lewallen’s wife, Elizabeth. She was the daughter of James and Dorothy Step, and was born in Bumcombe County, N.C.
The politics of the 1860s
To say that Lincoln had few supporters in the South would have been an understatement. In Virginia, the only of the 11 secession states where Lincoln was on the ballot, he received only 1.15% of the popular vote, and did not receive a single vote in 121 of 145 counties. Across the 15 slave states as a whole, Lincoln won just two counties.
As secession unfolded and war ensued, Scott County would prove to be a Union enclave. It would vote against secession in 1861 by the largest margin of any county in Tennessee. Then, after learning that secession had succeeded across the state, Scott County’s leaders voted to secede from Tennessee and form the Independent State of Scott.
But that didn’t mean the voters here were necessarily fans of Lincoln’s. Along with Campbell and Anderson counties to the east, Scott Countians voted for Constitutional Party candidate John Bell, a former U.S. Senator from Tennessee, favoring him by a small margin over Southern Democratic candidate John C. Breckinridge, the vice president of the United States. To the west, Morgan and Fentress counties supported Breckinridge.
Things had changed by 1864, when Lincoln sought re-election. “When Abe Lincoln ran for president the second time most of the voters in Scott County were fighting for the Union Army, but there had been a wonderful change of sentiment and most of those in Scott County voted for Abe Lincoln for president,” Phillips wrote.
Phillips also noted that the war changed the politics of Scott County.
“Before the Civil War, the Whig and Democratic parties were about equally divided in this county,” he wrote. “I was raised a Democrat, but after the war nearly every citizen of this county voted the Republican ticket and have been doing so since that time.”
But 1864 was a long ways from 1860. In 1860, before the smallpox epidemic that claimed the lives of Shade and Elizabeth Lewallen, Shade’s favored candidate — Abe Lincoln — had become president by capturing 180 electoral votes to Breckinridge’s 72. In fact, the other three candidates combined had only 123 electoral votes. It was a resounding victory for Lincoln. And war was coming.