Civil_War_Quarterly_-_Spring_2016_

(Jacob Rumans) #1
bridges. Second. All such as have not been
so engaged are to be treated as prisoners of
war, and sent with an armed guard to
Tuscaloosa, Alabama, there to be kept
imprisoned at the depot selected by the
Government for prisoners of war.... In no
case is one of the men known to have been
up in arms against the Government to be
released on any pledge or oath of alle-
giance. The time for such measures is past.
They are all to be held as prisoners of war
and held in jail till the end of the war.”
As many as 1,000 prominent and not so
prominent East Tennesseans were arrested
and taken to Knoxville. Five men were

hanged, and 400 were imprisoned in
Alabama. The number of Confederate sol-
diers in Knoxville quadrupled, with
roughly one soldier for every man, woman,
and child in the city. Wood sent squads of
men door to door to confiscate firearms
from the entire civilian population.
Ultimately, East Tennessee Unionists
were left holding the bag because Thomas,
who had been on his way to support them,
was recalled at the last moment by his supe-
rior, Brig. Gen. William T. Sherman, and
ordered to hold Cumberland Gap against
a suspected attack. Thomas protested, but
it was too late to warn the bridge burners
of the change of plans. In the end, the
attack Sherman feared never came.
In explaining why people in East Ten-
nessee remained loyal to the Union, Samuel
W. Scott, a captain in the 13th Regiment

Tennessee (Union) Volunteer Cavalry and
Samuel P. Angel, the regiment’s adjutant,
later wrote, “One reason may be found in
the fact that the soil and climate are not
adapted to the growth of cotton, rice and
tobacco, the great staples of the South,
hence slave labor could not be employed
to the same advantage as in the Cotton
States. The people, or a large number of
them, were comparatively poor and earned
their living by daily labor. They were not
slow to perceive that slave labor must enter
into competition with them, lessen their
wages and their chances of employment,
and diminish their opportunity to better
their condition either socially or financially.
They could see that by fighting for slavery
they were only fastening upon themselves
the yoke of poverty, and the ban of social
ostracism, hence slavery was not a ques-
tion of paramount importance to them,
unless it was its abolition.”
James Gallant Spears, who fled from his
native Tennessee to Kentucky, where he
organized the 1st Tennessee (Union)
Infantry, was one of the relatively few slave
owners who sided with the Union and
fought for it. Promoted to brigadier gen-
eral in the Union Army, Spears served until
February 6, 1864, when he was arrested
because of his expression in violent lan-
guage of his belief that the Emancipation

Proclamation was illegal and unconstitu-
tional. Refusing to resign, he was dismissed
from the service the following August.
Spears did not realize when he decided
to fight for the Union that its victory would
cost him his slaves. That was not an unrea-
sonable assumption. In his first inaugural
address, Lincoln had pledged “that the
maintenance inviolate of the rights of the
States, and especially the right of each State
to order and control its own domestic insti-
tutions according to its own judgment
exclusively, is essential to that balance of
power on which the perfection and
endurance of our political fabric depend;
and we denounce the lawless invasion by
armed force of the soil of any State or Ter-
ritory, no matter what pretext, as among
the gravest of crimes.”
Spears might also have been influenced
by Congress’s passage of the Corwin
Amendment shortly before Lincoln’s inau-
guration in 1861, which stated, “No
amendment shall be made to the Constitu-
tion which will authorize or give to Con-
gress the power to abolish or interfere,
within any State, with the domestic insti-
tutions thereof, including that of persons
held to labor or service by the laws of said
State.” Lincoln was willing to accept the
amendment, but only two states ratified it
before it became a dead letter.

ABOVE: This bridge at Strawberry Plains was the northernmost target of pro-Union arsonists on “the
Night of the Burning Bridges.” It is shown in an 1864 photograph under Union guard. LEFT: Captain John
Raines, left, served in the 2nd Tennessee Cavalry; his brother, Private Thomas Raines, right, served in
the 5th Tennessee Infantry. Both were Union Army units.

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