Tennessee speakers of the state House of Representatives have been a hearty bunch. They haven’t died in office, and with just one apparent exception they’ve served out their terms.
Current Speaker Glen Casada, R-Franklin, is expected to change that string if he resigns, as he said he will do in the next few weeks, after a widening series of scandals. He would become the first speaker in state history to serve only one legislative session in office and apparently the first House speaker to resign in more than 150 years.
The last speaker of either branch of the state legislature to resign, according to state archives, was Senate Speaker Scott P. Fitzhugh of Shelby County in 1931.
We suggested two weeks ago that Casada should leave his position and believe it will be a step toward better state government when he does. He has not indicated whether he will leave the House altogether, but we believe it would excise the cancer currently growing around him if he does.
The apparent last resignation by a Tennessee House speaker was William Heiskell in 1866.
The Knox County representative’s exit was not, as Casada’s will be, because of his own undoing but because he believed the legislature was acting illegally in its consideration of the controversial 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
If one believes we’re living in volatile times today, one should consider what the first state legislative session after the end of the Civil War must have been like.
In East Tennessee, Republicans supporting U.S. President Andrew Johnson of Tennessee belonged to one faction, and Republicans supporting the radical agenda of Gov. William Brownlow belonged to another. Both had been pro-Union during the war, but the former group was more sympathetic to former Confederate sympathizers.
Heiskell, on Johnson’s side, was elected to the state House in 1865 and upon the House convening was elected speaker, defeating James R. Hood of Hamilton County.
By 1866, when Brownlow called a special session of the legislature to consider the 14th Amendment, tensions already were boiling over because Heiskell had opposed two “franchise laws,” which kept former Confederates from voting and gave the governor the power to throw out counties’ entire voter registrations.
Both laws passed, but Heiskell was accused of initially organizing his group – the Conservative Unionists – to prevent a quorum when the second law came up for a vote.
When state Rep. James Mullins, who was in the Brownlow camp, accused Heiskell of organizing the quorum bust, Heiskell let loose with a few ill-chosen words and threw his gavel at Mullins, according to the 1937 book “William G. Brownlow: Fighting Parson of the Southern Highlands.” The action nearly ignited a brawl.
After the state Senate agreed to the 14th Amendment, the state House was to take it up. But Heiskell and the Conservative Unionists didn’t have the votes to block it, so some of them again left the Capitol, preventing a quorum. When the House sergeant-at-arms rounded up two of the “escapees” and held them in a committee room, Heiskell ruled the body still didn’t constitute a quorum.
However, the House overruled his decision and OK’d the amendment. Heiskell refused to sign it and resigned his speakership in protest. John Norman, the House speaker pro tempore, signed it in Heiskell’s absence, and Brownlow certified its ratification by the state.
The 14th amendment addresses citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws, and its ratification was made a qualification for the former Confederate states to regain representation in Congress. However, its first section, one of the most litigated parts of the Constitution, has been used to support Supreme Court decisions in a number of controversial cases such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), on racial desegregation; Roe v. Wade (1973), on abortion; Bush v. Gore (2000), on the 2000 presidential election; and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), on same-sex marriage.
Brownlow, in sending the ratification to Washington, according to the 2014 book “The Reconstruction Years: The Tragic Aftermath of the War Between the States,” included this missive: “My compliments to the dead dog (Johnson) in the White House.”
Heiskell served on the board of trustees in 1865 of what later became known as the University of Tennessee and also on the inaugural board of trustees for Hiwassee College, which was organized in 1849 and will close at the end of this academic year. He died in 1871.
By dint of good governance, Tennessee apparently has gone 223 years with the resignation of only one House speaker. Casada will make two. We hope his downfall will signal an unprecedented new era where the House speaker puts the well-being of the state before himself.