The speakers for a sesquicentennial look at the Civil War secession crisis in Tennessee and Georgia agreed that 1860 was a very confusing time, especially for residents of local mountain regions who were torn between the Blue and the Gray.
Dr. Keith Bohannon, professor of history at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton, told an audience Saturday at the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park that the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln as president forced people throughout the South to choose between their beliefs.
How they chose put them in one of three basic camps: secessionists, cooperationists or Unionists, he said.
Georgia’s then-Gov. Joseph E. Brown was an ardent secessionist raised in the mountains of North Georgia. He wrote what Dr. Bohannon described as a very inflammatory newspaper essay directed at the mountain communities — normally cooperationist or Unionist in leanings. The essay described how abolition could put former slaves in competition for wages with mountain people. The essay also suggested that if abolition allowed slave owners to be compensated for their loss of slaves, Georgia taxes would have to be raised.
In Tennessee, then-Gov. Isham G. Harris had to blur the rules of Tennessee’s Constitution to overcome East Tennessee’s continued opposition to secession.
“It’s been said that Tennessee didn’t secede. Isham Harris did, and took Tennessee with him,” said Sam Davis Elliott, a Chattanooga attorney and author who has written a book about the Volunteer State’s Civil War governor: “Isham G. Harris of Tennessee.”
“He did all he could, legally, illegally and extra-legally to get Tennessee out of the Union,” Mr. Elliott said.
Although then-Gov. Harris called a special session of the Tennessee General Assembly in January 1861, Tennessee lawmakers put three layers of public votes in the path to secession. Through a series of maneuverings, some even violating the state’s constitution, the governor won a vote for secession.
Speaker Patrick Lewis, a former ranger at Chattanooga and Chickamauga Military Park and now graduate student, said Sam Watkins, the Maury County, Tenn., Confederate soldier whose memoirs provide most of the world a look at daily soldiering in Chickamauga, skirted the details of slavery in Southern life in his “tightly cropped” stories.
Only two slaves are ever mentioned in the young soldier’s accounts, and they are “happy with their lot,” Mr. Lewis said. What’s not noted in the memoir is that Mr. Watkins, son of a wealthy plantation owner, had at least one servant with him as he soldiered. His fellow Maury County soldiers likely did, too, as 80 percent of the householders in Maury County in 1860 were slave owners, Mr. Lewis said.
Even religions felt the pressures of the times, according to Dr. Daryl Black, executive director and curator of the Chattanooga History Center.
The debate over slavery resulted in splits among Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians, he said.