Harry T. Burn's Mother's Note: How Tennessee Became the Thirty-Sixth

On the morning of August eighteenth, nineteen twenty, Harry T. Burn opened a letter from his mother. He was twenty-four years old, the youngest member of the Tennessee House of Representatives, and he had already committed himself publicly to voting against ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which would grant women across the country the right to vote.

His mother's name was Febb Ensminger Burn. She lived in Niota, a small town in McMinn County in eastern Tennessee. In the letter she told her son to be a good boy and vote for suffrage. She told him that a woman in Chattanooga named Carrie Chapman Catt had asked her to reach out. She said not to forget to be a good boy, and to do right.

He put the letter in his pocket and went to the chamber. When his name was called on the ratification vote, he voted yes.

The final tally was forty-nine in favor and forty-seven against. Every vote had been lobbied and pressured and counted and recounted for weeks. The suffrage forces had handed out yellow roses. The opposition had handed out red roses. The hotel lobbies in Nashville had been full of organizers and agitators and legislators for over a month. And in the end it came down to one vote, and that vote came from a young man in McMinn County who did what his mother told him.

Tennessee was the thirty-sixth state. The amendment was certified. Women voted in the November election. Febb Ensminger Burn's letter is held in the Tennessee State Library and Archives. It is handwritten on plain paper, and it is the reason the Nineteenth Amendment exists.