Disunion and Restoration in Tennessee

John Randolph Neal was there. A Tennessee lawyer who served in the Confederate Army before becoming a Republican during Reconstruction, Neal wrote this account in the late 19th century as both history and confession. He pulls no punches in examining how and why Tennessee, the last Southern state to secede, eventually joined the Confederacy, tracing the political maneuvering of Governor Isham G. Harris and the fierce regional tensions that divided East from West, mountain yeoman from plantation lowlands. The book matters because Neal witnessed what he documents: the referendum fraud, the mob violence, the economic pressures that coerced a reluctant majority into supporting disunion. The 1860 election data proves his point most Tennesseans initially voted for Bell and Everett, the Constitutional Union candidates who pledged only to the Constitution and the Union. Yet the state seceded anyway. This is the story of how that happened, and what it cost.