June 8, 1861 – Tennessee Secedes from the Union

On this day in history, Tennessee became the 11th and final state to join the Confederacy.

As the Washington Post explained in a history of this event,

Tennessee was geographically divided on the issue. The planter-dominated west supported secession. Middle Tennessee was about 50/50. Mountain yeomen in the east with little allegiance to or use of slavery, supported Washington.”

Tennessee’s Gov. Isham Harris, a western Tennesseean, strongly supported secession and pushed for a state referendum.

When, on April 15, 1861, Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for 75,000 volunteers for the defense of Washington, the governor wrote to Secretary of War Simon Cameron stating:

Tennessee will not furnish a single man for coercion, but fifty thousand if necessary for the defense of our rights, and those of our Southern Brethren.”

 

John Bell, on the other hand, former speaker of the Tennessee House and presidential candidate who carried Tennessee in the 1860 election, campaigned vigorously against secession.  

As the Tennessee Historical Society reports, the issue largely came down to a division between those who depended on slavery for wealth and those who did not:

When the state first voted on secession in February 1861, Tennesseeans rejected leaving the Union. A second vote was held in June 1861, after the firing on Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call to Tennessee for soldiers; 105,000 voted in favor of leaving the Union to 47,000 against. West Tennesseans, whose plantation economy relied on the labor of the enslaved, supported secession before United States forces fired on Fort Sumpter in 1861. East Tennesseans, who owned far fewer enslaved people, opposed secession two-to-one. Middle Tennesseans were divided between avowed secessionists and more ambivalent Unionists.”

Via Teach Tennessee History

The Tennessee Historical Society notes that East Tennessee remained a stronghold of Unionist sentiment throughout the war; many of the 31,000 Tennesseans who served in the United States Army came from East Tennessee.

Tennessee’s rivers and rail lines were important arteries to the Deep South, and Lincoln and Grant were determined to gain control over them. Some of the hardest-fought battles of the Civil War took place at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Stones River, Chattanooga, Franklin, and Nashville.

Ulysses S. Grant

Following the end of the Civil War in 1865, Tennessee became the first secession state to rejoin the United States.