East Tennessee bridge burnings
The conspirators managed to destroy five of the nine targeted bridges, but the Union Army failed to move, and would not invade East Tennessee until 1863, nearly two years after the incident.
A pro-Union newspaper publisher, William G. "Parson" Brownlow, used the arrests and hangings as propaganda in his 1862 anti-secession diatribe, Sketches of the Rise, Progress and Decline of Secession.
[2] As secessionist sentiment raged through the South in late 1860 and early 1861, a majority of East Tennesseans, like many in the Appalachian highlands, stubbornly remained loyal to the Union.
[3] Furthermore, the Whig Party and its successors dominated large parts of East Tennessee, and its adherents viewed with suspicion the actions of the predominantly-Democratic Southern legislatures.
The legislature rejected the petition, and Governor Isham Harris ordered Confederate forces under General Felix K. Zollicoffer into East Tennessee.
[1] Carrying a letter from Thomas, Carter travelled to Washington, D.C., to meet with President Lincoln, Commanding General George McClellan, and Secretary of State William H.
[1] Lincoln, under immense pressure from Senator Andrew Johnson and Congressman Horace Maynard to provide some sort of aid to East Tennessee's Unionists, agreed with the plan.
A raid into Kentucky by Zollicoffer, though repulsed, changed the timing of the invasion, however, and following Confederate excursions into the western part of the state, Sherman became concerned that his line was stretched too thin.
[1] At the Strawberry Plains bridge, Pickens and his crew encountered a lone Confederate guard, James Keeling (also spelled Keelan in some sources).
[1] News of the bridge burnings thrust East Tennessee's Confederate leaders into what Knoxville attorney Oliver Perry Temple described as a "wild and unreasonable panic.
Confederate district attorney J.C. Ramsey vowed to hang anyone involved in the conspiracy, and Zollicoffer, who had initially followed a more lenient policy, rounded up and jailed dozens of known Unionists.
"All such as can be identified in having been engaged in bridge-burning are to be tried summarily by drum-head court martial, and, if found guilty, executed on the spot by hanging in the vicinity of the burned bridges".
[8] For those who had not participating in the burnings, but had otherwise been identified as part of the organized Unionists, Benjamin ordered, "All such as have not been engaged are to be treated as prisoners of war" and were to be transported and be held as such.
[1] Harrison Self was tried, convicted and sentenced to hang, but was released hours before his execution after his daughter, Elizabeth, obtained a last-minute pardon from President Jefferson Davis.
[1] Confederate authorities immediately suspected William "Parson" Brownlow, the radical pro-Union editor of the Knoxville Whig, of engineering the bridge burnings.
Brownlow had written in a May 1861 editorial, "let the railroad on which Union citizens of East Tennessee are conveyed to Montgomery in irons be eternally and hopelessly destroyed,"[2] and had suspiciously gone into hiding in Sevier County just two weeks before the attacks.
Lacking evidence of Brownlow's complicity, and wanting to be rid of his agitations, Confederate authorities offered him safe passage to the northern states.
Aimed at northern readers, the book's chapter on the bridge burners focuses on alleged atrocities committed by Confederate soldiers and politicians, and includes several engravings depicting the executions and last moments of some of the condemned conspirators.
In 1862, Radford Gatlin, a Confederate who had been chased out of his largely pro-Union namesake mountain town, published a glorified account of James Keeling's actions at the Strawberry Plains bridge.
