East Tennessee's Unionists: Bridge Burners and the Siege

When Tennessee voted to secede from the Union in June of eighteen sixty-one, it did not do so unanimously. East Tennessee voted against secession by a substantial margin. This was not a small or quiet dissent. It was a cultural and economic divide that ran through the state like a fault line, and in the fall of eighteen sixty-one it produced one of the most audacious acts of civilian resistance in the history of the Confederacy.

A Carter County minister named William B. Carter traveled to Washington and presented Abraham Lincoln's administration with a plan. East Tennessee Unionists would simultaneously burn nine strategic railroad bridges used by the Confederacy, while a Union army moved in from Kentucky to take the region. Lincoln and his secretary of war authorized the plan. The army did not move.

On the night of November eighth, eighteen sixty-one, the conspirators went ahead alone. They destroyed five of the nine targeted bridges, cutting Confederate rail supply lines into a region the South needed to hold. The Union army never came. Confederate forces swept through East Tennessee. District attorney J.C. Ramsey vowed to hang anyone involved. The Confederate War Secretary ordered summary execution by drumhead court martial near the burned bridges. Five of the conspirators were hanged. Dozens more were jailed. The surviving Unionists spent nearly two years hiding in mountain hollows or fleeing north.

Union General Ambrose Burnside finally took Knoxville on September second, eighteen sixty-three, entering a city that greeted him as a liberator. The Confederates had been using the University of Tennessee's Hill campus buildings as headquarters and a hospital. Union forces built a fortification they named Fort Byington on the Hill and dug earthworks throughout the western neighborhoods.

Confederate General James Longstreet, sent to push Burnside out, laid siege to the city from November seventeenth to December fourth, eighteen sixty-three. His assault on the earthwork called Fort Sanders, on the morning of November twenty-ninth, collapsed into a Union wire entanglement. Confederate casualties totaled eight hundred thirteen. Union losses were eight dead and five wounded. Longstreet withdrew five days later.

East Tennessee remained occupied Union territory for the rest of the war. The Knoxville National Cemetery, established in eighteen sixty-three during the occupation, holds the remains of Union soldiers who died here and in the surrounding campaigns. It is one of the few places in the state where the Civil War is told entirely from the Unionist side, because this city was on the Unionist side.