William Gannaway Brownlow - Slavery and Secession

Slavery and Secession

Brownlow's views on slavery changed over time. While his pre-Civil War writings reveal a strong pro-slavery slant, his name appears on an 1834 abolitionist petition. In the early 1840s, Brownlow supported the American Colonization Society, which sought to recolonize freed slaves in Liberia. In subsequent years, however, he shifted to a staunchly pro-slavery stance. Brownlow's friend and colleague, Oliver Perry Temple, stated that social pressure in the 1830s pushed most abolitionist Southerners to adopt pro-slavery views. Historian Robert McKenzie, however, suggests that Brownlow's pro-slavery shift might have been rooted in the rivalry between Northern and Southern Methodists over the issue in the 1840s.

By the 1850s, Brownlow was radically pro-slavery, arguing that the institution was "ordained by God." He gave a Scriptural defense of slavery in a speech delivered in Knoxville in 1857, and in the following year, he issued a challenge to Northern abolitionists to debate the issue. The challenge was initially accepted by Frederick Douglass, but Brownlow refused to debate him because of his race. The challenge was then taken up by Abram Pryne of McGrawville, New York, a clergyman with the Congregational Church, and editor of an abolitionist newspaper. At the debate, which took place in Philadelphia in September 1858, Brownlow stated in his opening argument:

Not only will I throughout this discussion openly and boldly take the ground that Slavery as it exists in America ought to be perpetuated, but that slavery is an established and inevitable condition to human society. I will maintain the ground that God always intended the relation of master and slave to exist; that Christ and the early teachers of Christianity, found slavery differing in no material respect from American slavery, incorporated into every department of society... that slavery having existed ever since the first organization of society, it will exist to the end of time.

While Brownlow opposed the abolition of slavery, he was equally opposed to Southern secession. He argued that secessionists wanted to form a country governed by "purse-proud aristocrats" of the Southern planter class. Brownlow endorsed his friend, pro-Union candidate John Bell, for president in 1860, and in September of that year, interrupted a pro-Breckinridge rally in Knoxville to spar with the rally's keynote speaker, William Yancey of South Carolina. When South Carolina seceded following Lincoln's election in November 1860, Brownlow derided the state and its "miserable cabbage-leaf of a Palmetto flag" as being descended from British loyalists, thus giving it an affinity for the aristrocratic types that would govern the proposed Southern Confederacy.

By 1861, the Knoxville Whig had 14,000 subscribers, and was considered by secessionists the root of the stubborn pro-Union sentiment in East Tennessee (the region had resoundingly rejected a referendum on secession in February of that year). Knoxville's Democrats tried to counter Brownlow by installing radical secessionist J. Austin Sperry as editor of the Knoxville Register, touching off an editorial war that lasted throughout much of the year. Brownlow called Sperry a "scoundrel" and a "debauchee," and mocked the relatively small circulation of the Register.

Throughout the Spring of 1861, Brownlow and his colleagues, Oliver Perry Temple, T.A.R. Nelson, and Horace Maynard, canvassed East Tennessee, giving dozens of pro-Union speeches. In May and June 1861, Brownlow represented Knox County at the East Tennessee Union Convention, which unsuccessfully petitioned the state legislature to allow East Tennessee to form a separate, Union-aligned state. In the weeks following Tennessee's secession in June 1861, Brownlow used the Whig to defend Unionists accused of treasonous acts by Confederate authorities. By the Fall of 1861, the Whig was the last pro-Union newspaper in the South.