Isham G. Harris of Tennessee: Confederate Governor and United States Senator

Preface

1. Stanley F. Horn, The Army of Tennessee (1941; reprint, Wilmington, N.C.: Broadfoot Publishing , 1987), 47. Preface “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.” With these defiant words written on April 17, 1861, in response to the U.S. government’s call for troops, Governor Isham Green Harris of Tennessee gave notice that the state would be on the side of the Confederacy in the war started just days before at Fort Sumter. In the weeks that followed, Harris would apply his considerable intellect and talents to transitioning Tennessee into the Confederate States of America, energetically and in some cases ruthlessly attending to the political and military necessities of the state’s “revolution” against the government of Abraham Lincoln in Washington. Indeed, the “popular, cynical witticism” of the time noted by historian Stanley Horn was substantially true: “Tennessee never seceded; Isham G. Harris seceded and carried Tennessee along with him.”1 Isham Harris grew up on the frontier in Middle Tennessee, the youngest of his parents’ large family. He left home as a teenager and found and lost a fortune in the boom and bust times in 1830s Mississippi and West Tennessee. Drawn by an older brother’s example to the law, he was admitted to the bar in 1841 and enjoyed almost immediate success based on a quick intellect, a naturally aggressive nature, and a native ability to influence people. Raised in a family of smallslaveholders , he married into a family whose patriarch owned more than thirty slaves, cementing his views in favor of the “peculiar institution.” He became a Democrat in the days when Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk were Tennessee heroes, and launched a political career in 1847 that lasted, with some interruption , for fifty years, never losing an election. Harris served in the Tennessee state Senate, as a U.S. congressman, and as governor as America slowly slipped into the sectional crisis that became the Civil War. He was governor in the momentous year of 1861, and was conceded by many to be the driving force in Tennessee joining the Confederacy. He spared no effort xii / preface to recruit Tennesseans for Confederate service, and energetically mobilized the state for war. As a volunteer aide, he served each of the Confederate Army of Tennessee ’s commanders on nearly every one of its famed battlefields. To many of the people of his day, he was the most prominent Tennessean in the Confederacy, and was even deemed a possible successor to Jefferson Davis if the new republic should survive the six years of Davis’s single constitutional term as president. Sophisticated students of the War Between the States recognize Harris’s central role in raising the Provisional Army of Tennessee, which in turn became the core of the Confederate Army of Tennessee, and his early role in defense planning along the Tennessee–Kentucky border and the Mississippi River. More casual readers will recall that the distraught governor tended to the dying Albert Sidney Johnston at Shiloh. Those with the ability to simply run a computer search of the Official Records of the war will see a man intimately involved as an advisor to the Confederate government and the high command of the Army of Tennessee, never ceasing his efforts to employ the state’s men and resources on behalf of the Confederate States. With a price on his head, Harris fled from the vengeful Radical government of Tennessee when the Confederacy collapsed in 1865. In an epic journey across the Mississippi River, Arkansas, Texas, and northern Mexico, the fugitive governor ended up in Maximilian’s Mexico, seeking with other ex-Confederates to establish a colony of Rebel refugees in a country that itself was in the throes of civil war. Eventually, Harris’s fellow expatriates began drifting home, leaving him among the last to leave Maximilian’s tottering empire. Harris was able to return to Tennessee in late 1867, after spending the better part of that year in Havana and Liverpool. Harris retained a great deal of influence among former secessionists and other conservatives, and quietly resumed involvement in state politics until 1876, when he mounted a successful effort to become one of Tennessee’s U.S. senators. As a U.S. senator, Harris stuck to his prewar philosophies of keeping tariffs low so that Southern consumers might benefit from Northern...