Existing comment:
"The South has done more in fourteen months that I expected to see accomplished in several years. Slavery is abolished. The Confederate debt is repudiated. The people are submissive. What more do you want?"
-- US President Andrew Johnson, to a group of radical Republican congressmen, 1866
Bringing Order out of Chaos:
While the Reconstruction era was 1865-1877, it began with Union Army control of a Confederate state. Readmission to the Union required restructured political, social and economic systems. Tennessee, the first state readmitted, began Reconstruction in 1863 when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect.
In 1864, Montgomery County voters who took the loyalty oath elected a sheriff, a registrar and court clerk. In 1865, Clarksvillians elected Joshua Cobb their first mayor since the war began.
Governor William G. Brownlow (1865-1869) denied former Confederates voting rights. Under law, voters in the elections in February and March of 1865 were automatically registered, but poll books were stolen or destroyed to eliminate proof of qualification. Brownlow raised the Tennessee State Guard in February 1867 to enforce his voting laws, allowing him to sweep the state in the 1867 election.
Rising statewide against Brownlow's Radical Reconstructionist policies and later against Freedmen, local Ku Klux Klansmen met regularly at Dunbar Cave, the basement of Stewart College, and operated a barber shop at Strawberry Alley. Clarksville's Freedmen's Bureau reported in 1868 the Klan was "openly drilling in force."
Controlling the Vote:
Prominent Rossview planter Joseph B. Killebrew never fully approved of the Confederacy, but was still denied voting rights. He said of the 1867 election, "Every voter had to get a certificate from a creature appointed by Brownlow to do this dirty work with the command to give certificates to no one who had the least sympathy with the Confederate cause. I was refused because I was a white man. Soldiers were kept at the polls to see that no one voted against the powers that existed." |