If you think politics are nasty now, you should have lived in southern Appalachia in the middle of the nineteenth century. That’s where a Methodist circuit rider named Parson William Brownlow began his rise to political power as governor from his home in East Tennessee. Generally ranked dead-last on historians’ lists of Tennessee governors, Brownlow’s stubbornness and radical viewpoints made him one of the most divisive figures in Tennessee political history and one of the most controversial Reconstruction Era politicians of the United States.
Today we tell his story.
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