John C. Brown of Tennessee: Rebel, Redeemer, and Railroader by Sam Davis Elliott (review)

The challenge facing the biographer of John Calvin Brown, Confederate general and first elected governor of Tennessee after "Redemption," is that virtually none of his personal papers have survived. Chattanooga attorney Sam Davis Elliott, author of a respected biography of Isham G. Harris, accepted the challenge, and in this work he reconstructs Brown's life from newspapers, official records, and "what glimpses can be afforded of the man in the writings of others" (p. x).

As the brother of antebellum Tennessee governor Neill S. Brown, John C. Brown may have achieved prominence even if the Civil War had never occurred. Nevertheless, military service became the basis for his postwar renown. Before the war, Brown followed his brother into the Whig Party and strongly opposed secession, but after the clash at Fort Sumter he cast his lot with the Confederacy. Though wounded at the battles of Perryville, Chickamauga, and Franklin, Brown was elevated to the rank of major general due to wartime attrition, despite endorsing a scheme to force Braxton Bragg's removal as commander of the Army of Tennessee. The realities of war, and especially a brief imprisonment at Fort Warren in Boston, weakened Brown's Unionist sympathies. Elliott concludes that Brown probably supported Patrick Cleburne's proposal to arm slaves, because by 1864 Brown likely "deemed southern independence more important than the racial issue involved" (p. 86).

Still, Brown's Whig, Unionist, and racist roots proved crucial to his postwar success. He united with other former Confederates to oppose Governor William G. Brownlow's Radical Republican regime, and Brown's resistance likely included leadership in the Ku Klux Klan, although no direct evidence proves his involvement. Publicly, Brown voiced paternalistic attitudes toward African Americans while leading former Whig Unionists into a coalition with secessionists to rebuild Tennessee's Democratic Party. Brown was elected to two terms as governor, but party factionalism and the Panic of 1873 undermined his effort to fund the state's huge debt. Bitter opposition from former president Andrew Johnson and Brown's fumbling when selecting a location for a state mental hospital further frustrated his administration. Denied a U.S. Senate seat when he declined to seek a third term as governor, Brown ended his political career, though his name still emerged occasionally as a possible cabinet appointee or senatorial or vice presidential candidate.

Business affairs dominated Brown's final decade. The Texas and Pacific Railway named him its president in 1875, and his legal acumen convinced railroad magnate Jay Gould to hire the former governor as his general solicitor. Brown's roots in the antebellum planter class kept him from exactly fitting C. Vann Woodward's definition of a New South redeemer, Elliott concludes, though Brown "clearly did have the 'industrial, capitalistic outlook' that Woodward discerned" among New South leaders (p. 219). Brown resigned in 1888 when Gould no longer needed him. Declining health and personal tragedies, including the unexpected deaths of two daughters, increasingly preoccupied Brown's later years. He died of severe hemorrhaging in August 1889, only five months after assuming the presidency of the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company.

The lack of sources prevents Elliott from saying much about Brown's inner thoughts or private views. When discussing the Civil War years, Elliott sometimes devotes several pages to describing campaigns with either no mention of or few references to Brown. Enough remains for Elliott to conclude that, despite faults, "Brown was arguably as successful as any other division commander," while the two chapters covering the Reconstruction era carefully and clearly navigate the complexities of Tennessee's postwar politics (p. 147). Overall, Elliott has resurrected Brown as effectively as possible. This work should interest scholars of the Confederate military and of the Gilded Age South.