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1. Reprinted in Knoxville Daily Herald, Oct. 31, 1868. Chapter Three Queen City of the Mountains: Knoxville and the Vision of a New South I can only wonder why my great-great- and great-grandfathers, Henry and Luke Banker, moved from Michigan to war-ravaged Knoxville in the late 1860s. Perhaps the multiple misfortunes they experienced in their new home in the years thereafter explain why they left no explanation for a move they may have considered dubious. A report from the Richmond Whig that a Knoxville paper reprinted in the fall of 1868 may shed light on what my forebears left unexplained. “Knoxville” the column declared, “is perhaps the widest awake and livelist [sic] town of its population, not only in Tennessee, but in the southern states.” The reporter’s contention that Knoxville’s ten thousand residents had “all the conveniences of a city—gas, water works, paved streets, &c, &c,” exaggerated both the city’s size and its services. But the reporter’s prediction that Knoxville was on the verge of a wholesaling-induced economic boom proved prescient. Perhaps that expectation, combined with the report’s claim that many “beautiful, cultivated, and intelligent ladies, both married and single” made their homes in Knoxville, lured my forebears to East Tennessee.1 The reporter’s glowing appraisal serves two useful purposes here. First, it manifests a self-reassuring bravado that Knoxville has exhibited from the days of William Blount to the 1982 World’s Fair. During the half-century after the Civil War, this heady boosterism was, for better and worse, an essential Knoxville trait. Secondly, historians have too long overlooked the broader significance of this characteristic swagger from the heart of Appalachian East Tennessee. A closer look at Gilded Age Knoxville reveals important glimpses into the regional elusiveness that is this book’s greater concern. Anyone who had been in Knoxville just five years earlier would certainly have been surprised at the optimistic tone of the 1868 report from the Queen City of the Mountains 84 Richmond reporter. When Union and Confederate armies departed the city in early December 1863, Knoxville was devastated and demoralized. Days earlier, General Longstreet’s futile assault on Fort Sanders ended the Confederates’ nearly three-week siege of Knoxville. Union and Confederate units had set up camps astride the city’s recently completed suburbs and railroad tracks—products and symbols of a new Knoxville that, after years of uncertainty, had emerged in the 1850s as the economic hub for productive farms of the Tennessee Valley. New Knoxville’s suburbs and railroad facilities were the most notable casualties of the Confederate siege. Smoldering ruins of once “fine residences,” twisted rails of the ETV&G, and the furious, bloody assault on Fort Sanders brought war’s horrors to Knoxville. Those miseries did not end when the two armies left town. UnionvictorybroughtParsonBrownlowandotherloyalistsbacktoKnoxville, and their hostility toward Confederate sympathizers unleashed a cycle of violence , assassinations, lynching, and general mistrust that continued beyond the final fifteen months of the war. While Reconstruction for East Tennessee was less harsh than for other, more defiant parts of the old Confederacy, the difference was only a matter of degree. Moreover, postwar Knoxville’s miseries and misfortunes were not all manmade. Periodic epidemics swept through the city; an 1866 smallpox outbreak was particularly devastating. A flood the following year saw the Tennessee River crest thirty-three feet above its normal level and sweep away bridges, several manufacturing establishments, and livestock; perhaps as many as two hundred Knoxvillians, mostly poor folk living along the river and the First and Second Creeks, lost their homes. In March 1869, lightning during a violent thunderstorm started a fire that left much of the city’s Gay Street business district in ashes. Yet Knoxvillians rebounded from these setbacks with surprising resiliency and energy. Union control during the war’s final months probably saved the city from the unpleasant fate Atlanta and other, more defiant Confederate cities experienced . Many Knoxville Confederates and Unionists had been friends and business allies before Fort Sumter; after Appomattox, pragmatists from both camps sought reconciliation. More than one hundred Unionists, for example, pledged to refrain from violence against ex-Rebels. Even firebrand Parson Brownlow, appointed governor of Tennessee when the war ended, was unusually forgiving. When fifty Knox County Confederates sought his pardon between 1865 and 1867, the governor approved all but eight (and President Andrew Johnson, another East Tennessee Unionist, pardoned six of the latter). Former enemies cooperated against the raging waters of the 1867 flood. Perhaps...

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