On this day in 1866, in the aftermath of the Civil War, Tennessee became the first Confederate state to be readmitted into the Union. The Volunteer State had also been the last to withdraw from the Union, after holding a statewide referendum on June 8, 1861.
Angered by the withdrawal, Tennesseans from the state’s 26 eastern counties met twice in Greeneville and Knoxville, eventually opting to secede from Tennessee and remain in the Union. The Legislature denied their petition. It sent a 4,000-man force to suppress their secession efforts. During the ensuing struggle, many East Tennesseans waged a guerrilla campaign against the Confederate cause — burning bridges, cutting telegraph wires and acting as Union spies.
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A week before its readmittance, Tennessee ratified the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed citizenship rights to former slaves. As a result, Tennessee became the sole state during the Reconstruction period that escaped the jurisdiction of a military governor.
Elite whites, however, proved reluctant to grant newly emancipated blacks full citizenship rights, including the right to vote. After the state Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of African-American suffrage in 1867, the Nashville Republican Banner, on Jan. 4, 1868, called in an editorial for a revolutionary movement of white Southerners to overthrow one-party rule initially imposed by the Republicans and to restore the legal inferiority of blacks.
Whites continued to control the state during Reconstruction; only two blacks were elected to the Legislature. Nevertheless, many Tennessee whites believed that the Reconstruction process — pursued over a presidential veto by a radical Republican supermajority in Congress — had harmed their interests. In 1868, the Banner editorialized that Congress “has placed the black man over the white as the agent and prime-mover of domination.”
By the 1870s, as white elites sought to reclaim unchallenged political power, they formed paramilitary groups to harass former slaves and their champions, suppress voting and control labor markets. In 1889, the Democratic-controlled Tennessee General Assembly, under the guise of electoral reform, passed four laws disfranchising most blacks as well as many poor whites. The lawmakers thus brought an end to what had been one of the most competitive Southern political systems in the immediate postwar period.
After World War I, Tennessee became the pivotal state in the passage of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women universal suffrage. In 1920, Gov. Albert Roberts called a special session of the General Assembly to consider ratification of the suffrage amendment. The House narrowly voted for passage after an East Tennessee legislator, Harry Burn, switched sides after having received a telegram from his mother encouraging him to support ratification.
Women quickly made their political presence felt by swinging Tennessee to Republican Warren G. Harding in the 1920 presidential election. It was the first time since 1868 that the state had voted for a Republican presidential candidate.
SOURCE: “THE TENNESSEE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF HISTORY AND CULTURE” (1998)