Unionist regions covering almost all of East Tennessee, Kentucky Pennyroyal-allied Macon County, and the five West Tennessee Highland Rim counties of Carroll, Henderson, McNairy, Hardin and Wayne[3] voted Republican – generally by landslide margins – as they saw the Democratic Party as the “war party” who had forced them into a war they did not wish to fight.

[4] Contrariwise, the rest of Middle and West Tennessee who had supported and driven the state's secession was equally fiercely Democratic as it associated the Republicans with Reconstruction.

[5] In 1868, Ulysses S. Grant easily carried the state due to disfranchisement of former Confederates and the Ku Klux Klan Act.

[7] Nevertheless, blacks and Unionist whites forged adequate support for the GOP to create a competitive political system during that decade,[8] although the Democratic Party won all statewide elections.

However, at the beginning of the 1880s, a divide in the Democratic Party on this issue of payment of state debt allowed the GOP to claim the governor's mansion,[8] but this did not seriously alter presidential voting and Tennessee was won by General Winfield Scott Hancock (D–Pennsylvania), running with former Representative William Hayden English, with 53.26 percent of the popular vote, against Representative James A. Garfield (R-Ohio), running with the 10th chairman of the New York State Republican Executive Committee Chester A. Arthur, with 44.26 percent of the vote.