Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,885

This is the grave of William Brownlow, better known as Parson Brownlow.

Born in 1805 in Wythe County, Virginia, Brownlow’s parents died young and he was an orphan by the time he was 10. He ended up living with extended family and eventually became a carpenter. In 1825, he went to a revival as part of the growing Second Great Awakening and was converted. Not only that, he came to believe that all of his previous life was a waste and he determined to become a minister. He became known as Parson Brownlow to nearly everyone who knew him the rest of his life. He was admitted as a Methodist circuit rider in 1826, about which there was some certification, which I didn’t really know before this. Brownlow was an aggressive Methodist. I find this amusing today, but I kind of respect it. After all, if you are a Methodist and someone else is a Baptist or Presbyterian, aren’t they inherently wrong and schismatic and going to Hell? If not, what’s the point? This is how Brownlow felt. He would go around not just converting people to Methodism but damning other Protestant sects and telling listeners that their preachers and missionaries were friends of Satan. Give me that old time religion, indeed. In fact, one of them sued him for slander in 1828 and was sued again by another guy in 1831.

Brownlow worked the circuit for about a decade, through Tennessee and South Carolina primarily. He married in 1836 and left the circuit. He decided to open a newspaper in Elizabethton, Tennessee. It was largely a Methodist paper, continuing his denunciations of evil Baptists and Presbyterians. He increasingly turned to politics too. As he was an absolute viper with tongue and pen, he made a lot of enemies. He became an anti-slavery writer, except when he changed his mind and was actively pro-slavery, a cycle in which he spent the next two decades going through. Either way though, he was full of hate. He wasn’t really an abolitionist even in his anti-slavery period, but like a lot of people in east Tennessee, he hated the plantation owner class and their domination over the state’s politics. He would attack them and their culture and their supporters. In 1840, that led to a fight in the streets of the town of Jonesborough, where he was then operating. He started to beat a political enemy with a cane. The guy was able to pull out his gun and then shot Brownlow in the leg.

Brownlow decided to go into politics himself, as a committed Whig. He ran for Congress in 1844 and defeated Andrew Johnson in the election. He used his typical rhetoric in doing so. He claimed publicly that Johnson’s family were a bunch of murderers, that Johnson was a illegitimate bastard, and that Johnson was an atheist. Just throw the kitchen sink in there. In Congress, Brownlow was a pretty standard Whig, big internal improvements guy. He wrote a book attacking Andrew Jackson and his supporters in 1844. Generally, he was a big Henry Clay guy and really wanted him to be president, which of course never happened. He was an even bigger John Bell guy and named a son for him.

By the early 1850s, Brownlow became an active temperance guy, though temperance in language was not his way to approach the problem. If you ran against Brownlow, he was sure to call you a drunk. To be fair, he was undoubtedly accurate about this most of the time. He also became a vociferous immigrant hater, especially of the Irish. Naturally, he was a big supporter of the Know-Nothings and in 1856 wrote a book titled Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism and Bogus Democracy. The problem? The Irish.

As the nation moved toward the Civil War, Brownlow was unsurprisingly deeply opposed to secession. He threatened to shoot secessionists and the like. So of course he was arrested when Tennessee committed treason in defense of slavery. That didn’t last long and the Confederates released him into exile. Again, none of this meant that Brownlow was pro-Black. Most whites who opposed slavery did not do so out of any respect for modern versions of anti-racism. The problem was how it affected white people. As for Brownlow, he wanted all the Blacks gone and was a big supporter of the American Colonization Society before the war. Moreover, he would switch his positions in the years before the war. As late as the mid-1850s, he had turned back into being pro-slavery and giving his usual harsh speeches, this time in favor of the practice, before turning against slavery again once it came to the Civil War. The only place where Brownlow was consistent is in damning his enemies, supporting Methodists, and hating Catholics. Otherwise, everything was dependent on who he hated at a given time.

In any case, Brownlow spent most the war back in east Tennessee, very much engaged in the personal nastiness that was the war in that place. After his exile, he became a popular speaker in the north and went on some tours, especially in Ohio, to build up unionist sentiment there. He wrote the book Sketches of the Rise, Progress, and Decline of Secession in 1862 and it soon sold 100,000 copies. He became a famous guy in the North after stories of his bravery in the face of his Confederate enemies went public, true or not. There was a dime novel called Parson Brownlow and the Unionists of East Tennessee that was published in 1862 and then a song called “Parson Brownlow’s Quick Step,” which was popular in sheet music sales in 1863.

After the war, Brownlow was named governor of Tennessee. He deeply loathed Nashville, both as a city and as a home of secession, and his major goal was punishing his enemies. He immediately decreed that traitors would lose the suffrage for at least 5 years, with up to 15 for leaders. Since he already hated Andrew Johnson, he attacked the new president for cozying up to southern leaders and became an ally of the Radical Republicans in Congress. He strongly attacked the KKK and by 1869 had placed nine counties under martial law. To say the least, he and Nathan Bedford Forrest loathed each other deeply.

Brownlow was sent to the Senate after the 1868 elections. But by this time, his health had started to fail. He had some sort of palsy, perhaps from minor strokes. But for his whole term, he remained in the Senate and remained a true hater of his old enemies. He famously told a reporter in 1871 that Reconstruction was probably going to fail because his fellow southerners were such scumbags. About that, he was correct. By 1874, Democrats had reclaimed Tennessee and they were not going to give Brownlow another term. He returned to Knoxville, worked for Rutherford Hayes’ election, and died in 1877, at the age of 71.

Parson Brownlow is buried in Old Gray Cemetery, Knoxville, Tennessee.

If you would like this series to visit other southern unionists, a complex bunch to say the least, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Sam Houston is in Huntsville, Texas and William Sharkey is in Jackson, Mississippi. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.