Rejecting secession: East Tennessee spoke loudly against leaving the Union, but Scott County spoke loudest of all

As Civil War loomed in the United States, there was perhaps no greater proponent for secession in Tennessee than Gov. Isham Harris, a former congressman from Tullahoma, Tenn. who had been elected governor in 1857 and re-elected in 1859.

Harris would eventually see Tennesseans grant his wishes to secede from the Union and join the Confederate States of America. But East Tennessee offered fierce resistance to secession. And, within East Tennessee, no county offered fiercer resistance than Scott County. After its voters rejected secession by the largest margin of any county in Tennessee, Scott County refused to submit to the withdrawal from the Union, and voted to secede from Tennessee, declaring itself the Free and Independent State of Scott. Gov. Harris would respond by dispatching troops to Scott County with orders to arrest and hang the members of County Court who had declared Scott County’s secession.

This is the story of the events that precipitated the rise of a Union enclave in East Tennessee.

The election of 1857

By the time of the 1857 election, the issue of secession was already well underway in Tennessee. Isham Harris, a Democrat who had served in both the state senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, was a staunch proponent of slavery and argued vehemently against the rising abolitionist movement in the North.

Harris’s opponent in 1857 was Robert H. Hatton, a Whig who had a successful law practice in Wilson County. Hatton was just as staunchly opposed to secession as Harris was in favor of it.

As the 1856 campaign unfolded, Harris and Hatton engaged in a series of heated debates, on one occasion getting into a fist-fight. There were several issues that had the state on edge, including the prohibition of alcohol. But the biggest was the issue of secession. And that would prove to be Hatton’s downfall.

As a whole, Tennesseans favored remaining with the Union. Tennessee was a border state, where anti-Union sentiment wasn’t nearly as strong as it was in the cotton states further south. But Tennesseans nevertheless eyed the growing abolitionist movement in the North with wary disdain. And Hatton’s campaign was bogged down by support from the abolitionists — though he certainly didn’t favor abolition himself, even proposing that immigrants not be allowed to vote until they had lived in the state for 21 years and attempting to persuade slave-owners that immigrants would help abolish slavery. 

When the final votes were tallied, Harris had defeated Hatton by a margin of 71,178 to 59,807, a resounding victory. He carried each of the state’s three grand divisions. Ironically, Hatton campaigned as an anti-secession candidate in 1857, but would go on to serve as a general for the Confederate army during the war.

The secession crisis deepens

The 1857 election represented a bit of a shift in Tennessee’s politics. Traditionally, the Whig Party had controlled East Tennessee, while the Democrats controlled Middle Tennessee and the two parties were evenly split in West Tennessee. But nationwide debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott case — the former effectively appealing the Missouri Compromise and opening the western territories to slavery, and the latter rejecting constitutional rights for African-Americans — had caused West Tennessee to tilt Democratic. And the Whig Party had collapsed, thanks to the rise of the abolitionist-fueled Republican Party in the aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Harris won re-election in 1859 by again campaigning fiercely in favor of secession, constantly reminding voters of Northern aggression. Even before Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, Harris warned that secession was the only acceptable way forward if Lincoln’s campaign was successful.

Lincoln, the Republican nominee for president, did not campaign as an abolitionist. In fact, while Lincoln believed that slavery was morally wrong, he also believed it to be an institution that was upheld by the Constitution. He made it clear in an 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas, who was running against him for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois, that he did not believe in “negro equality.”

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,” Lincoln said in September 1858.

As a presidential candidate, Lincoln campaigned on a platform that would not interfere with slavery in the South, but would oppose the expansion of slavery into the western territories. His stance angered Northern abolitionists, who believed him a moderate candidate incapable of delivering on their ultimate goal of ending slavery. But it also angered Southerners, who saw him as a threat to the institution of slavery.

Among those angry Southerners was Gov. Isham Harris. During his first inaugural address in Nashville, he told the crowd that Tennessee and the rest of the Southern states had to stick to a “strict construction of the Constitution, upon which rests the principle of ‘non-interference by Congress with domestic slavery either in the states or territories.’” As the 1860 election loomed closer, Harris warned that Tennessee must consider secession if the “reckless fanatics of the North” should gain control of the federal government. Even before Lincoln had taken office following his victory in that 1860 election, Harris had called the state legislature into session to consider secession.

The first secession effort

Tennessee legislators convened in Nashville on Jan. 7, 1861, two weeks after South Carolina had seceded from the Union, and two days before Mississippi would become the second state to secede.

Pro-Union newspapers across Tennessee slammed the assembly of the legislature by Harris. A newspaper in Huntingdon, Tenn. called for the governor to be hanged for treason.

The following month, February 1861, Tennesseans dealt Harris a blow, rejecting secession by a vote of 68,000 to 59,000. 

In Scott County, the secession vote was only 29 in favor of, and 385 against.

Secession had been soundly defeated. But Harris wasn’t finished.

The second secession effort

The period of February 1861 to June 1861 was a time of rapid change, both in Tennessee and across the United States. In April 1861, Confederate troops surrounded Fort Sumter in South Carolina, which remained under Union control. Angry that the Union still controlled the fort, even though South Carolina had seceded, the Confederate soldiers were given orders to fire on the Union troops.

There were no casualties in the Battle of Fort Sumter; a Confederate horse was the only exception. But the first shots had been fire. The Civil War had begun.

In response to the Confederate assault on Fort Sumter, President Lincoln called on the states to furnish troops to squash the rebellion. He asked Tennessee for 50,000 troops.

Harris responded: “Tennessee will not furnish a single man for purposes of coercion but 50,000 if necessary for the defense of our rights and those of our southern brothers.”

Harris read his response in front of a cheering crowd in Nashville on April 17, 1861, adding that he would rather cut off his right arm than provide Lincoln the troops he wanted. A week later, he called the legislature back into session. Tennessee was to consider secession again, and this time, the mood had shifted.

On June 8, 1861, Tennesseans voted to join the Confederate States of America, becoming the 11th and final state to leave the Union. The change in sentiment came mostly in Middle Tennessee. With East Tennessee staunchly opposed to secession and West Tennessee decidedly in favor of it, Middle Tennessee’s vote shifted from only 49% in favor of secession in February to 88% in favor of secession in June.

Anti-secession campaign in Scott County

In Scott County, Congressman Horace Maynard visited Huntsville on June 4, four days before the secession vote. Maynard, a former Whig who represented Scott County and the rest of Tennessee’s 2nd District in Washington, was at that time opposed to ending slavery, but was also dead-set against secession (he would later change his stance on slavery and become an abolitionist). In the weeks leading up to the secession referendum, he delivered dozens of speeches throughout East Tennessee, rallying voters to reject Gov. Harris’s call to secede.

With Maynard that day in Huntsville was Andrew Johnson — the former governor and future president. Johnson was a Democrat who had delivered a valedictory address at Harris’s inauguration four years earlier, but now he was attempting to save the Union. 

Like Maynard, Johnson wasn’t opposed to slavery. In fact, he gave a speech to the U.S. Senate in 1859, warning Northern abolitionists that their efforts to end slavery would endanger the Union. He also did not believe that the “all men are created equal” line from the Declaration of Independence applied to African-Americans.

Nevertheless, Johnson was fiercely committed to the Union. After secession talks began in earnest in 1860, Johnson delivered another speech to the Senate, saying, “I will not give up this government … No; I intend to stand by it … and I invite every man who is a patriot to rally around the altar of our common country and swear by our God and all that is sacred and holy that the Constitution shall be saved, and the Union preserved.”

Johnson and Maynard reflected the viewpoints of many East Tennesseans: opposed to both secession and abolition. 

Johnson delivered a fiery anti-secession speech on the steps of the Scott County Courthouse that June afternoon, fueling the pro-Union sentiment that already existed here.

When the secession vote was taken four days after Johnson and Maynard visited Huntsville, Scott Countians voted 521 to 19 to remain with the Union. The 97% who voted against secession was the largest majority of any county in Tennessee.

In Morgan County to the south, 93% of voters rejected secession. And in Fentress County to the west, 84% of voters rejected secession. But in Overton County to the northwest — which included what is now Pickett County — the referendum vote reflected the shifting sentiment of Middle Tennessee. In Overton County, 61% of voters had rejected secession in February, but 80% of voters cast ballots in favor of secession in June.

Despite the efforts of Johnson and Maynard, Tennessee had joined the Confederacy — and Scott County with it. Johnson was the only U.S. Senator from the South who did not resign his seat; Maynard was one of the few U.S. Representatives from the South who did not resign. Both called on President Lincoln to send federal troops into East Tennessee to free Scott County and the rest of the eastern part of the state from the Confederacy. 

Meanwhile, counties from across East Tennessee sent delegates to Greeneville for a convention (Scott County was not represented at the convention but appointed a proxy), where it was decided to petition Gov. Harris and the state legislature to let East Tennessee break away and form its own state. Not surprisingly, the request was denied. But Scott County refused to take the decision lying down. So a new state was on its way to being born. And that’s where Scott County’s Civil War legacy would truly begin.