This Tennessee County Seceded From Confederate Tennessee

It was about the county’s independence, not slavery

Growing up in New York, I was taught to demonize the South and its role in the Civil War. They were the side of slavery, after all, and my demonizing only exacerbated after I attended Emory University in Atlanta and had many friends who had teachers and textbooks call it the “War of Northern Aggression.” As I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen the history of the North’s racism as not the same, but as pernicious as that of the South. My students have learned about how institutional policies like redlining and school segregation hurt Black people in the North after the Great Migration.

What I never realized, until reading To Kill a Mockingbird for the second time as a teacher, is that some parts of the South were strong Unionist strongholds. According to Evan Andrews at History, Scott County, Tennesee, was one notable stronghold. Tennesee was the last state to vote in favor of the secession, but East Tennessee was much more resistant to secession than West Tennessee. Andrews notes that East Tennessee was full of small farmers and mountain people who saw the people of West Tennessee as slave-owning, rich, and elitist.

Background

The most fervent pro-Union stronghold was Scott County, which had 95% of its citizens vote against secession — the most of any county in Tennessee. According to the Independent Herald, Scott County was very disillusioned with…