Lincolnites and Rebels: A Divided Town in the American Civil War (review)

Civil War historians have routinely conflated East Tennessee with the entirety of Appalachia and accordingly depicted a region dominated by apparently courageous unionists who opposed slavery and the Confederacy. Since the late 1980s, scholars labeled “Appalachian revisionists” have dismantled that stereotype of monolithic unionism and replaced it with a more sophisticated scholarship that acknowledges mountain diversity in regard to slavery, secession, and wartime sentiments. Rather than serving as an exemplar, East Tennessee has emerged in the new literature almost as a baffling exception to the general rule, its majority unionism routinely acknowledged but never fully explained. Muddying the waters even more, scholars such as Noel Fisher and Todd Groce have called attention to the minority that supported the Confederate cause within East Tennessee, controversial loyalties that led to a brutal guerrilla war across the region.

Robert Tracy McKenzie’s excellent study of wartime Knoxville reinforces that recent scholarship with exhaustive research and interpretive verve. As the subtitle suggests, he maintains that division is the key concept necessary to understand East Tennessee’s largest city. Ethnicity, economic class, and politics divided antebellum Knoxville. Racism and a widespread support for slavery among whites united the city to a point, as did moderate unionism that promised to protect rather than eliminate slavery, but state secession wrecked any consensus. Unlike those in surrounding counties where unionism did dominate, Knoxville’s residents split almost down the middle on whether to support the Confederacy, with former Whigs favoring the Union and Democrats leaning toward Richmond. Despite the boilerplate claims of a “reign of terror” served up in the north by the exiled newspaper editor “Parson” William Brownlow, Knoxville’s inhabitants—including unionists— initially reacted to a relatively conciliatory Confederate occupation with calm. Commerce continued as many ostensible unionists traded with the Confederates. Conscription and tightening control finally pushed many unionists off the fence and out of the city, however, only to return when Union forces moved in during the autumn of 1863. Knoxville’s Confederates now embraced low profiles or took to the road themselves as Brownlow and his allies sought vengeance, and many, to their peril, returned at war’s end. Reconstruction found Knoxville still occupied by troops, physically battered by a failed Confederate attempt to reconquer it, angry, and more divided socially and politically than ever. Yet the scars of war disappeared surprisingly quickly.

Lincolnites and Rebels has many notable strengths. The author of an earlier, well received book on wartime Tennessee, McKenzie knows the ground well. Many of his conclusions are based on a remarkably detailed database of information compiled for half the city’s residents. His depiction of James Longstreet’s failed Confederate assault on Fort Sanders is perhaps the best brief account published. McKenzie also shines in depicting Knoxville’s neighborhoods, their rhythms and fault lines, and the city’s personalities, including Brownlow, who emerges almost as much a charlatan as a zealot. The book’s only disappointment comes when McKenzie attempts to explain Knoxville’s unionism, listing one characteristic after another before concluding like other historians that “no simple generalizations will suffice” (128). Perhaps, but given the author’s obvious familiarity with regional unionism, one wishes for more. This caveat aside, Lincolnites and Rebels deserves to find an audience among all scholars of the war, not just those who look to the mountains.