USA > Tennessee > Notable men of Tennessee, from 1833 to 1875, their times and their contemporaries > Part 32
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He was totally unfamiliar with party machinery and party tricks. With dauntless courage and unparalleled independence he pursued the open highway of right. He walked in no devious byways. His was a plain, manly fight, made in the open day,
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in the sight of all mankind. No one ever doubted where he stood, or on what side. His frank, brave, clarion-like words always proclaimed his position. In truth he was the most independent man of his time. He was apparently rageful and fierce, raven- ous as a lion for prey. But in private life he was the gentlest, tenderest, most childlike of men. Said a stranger once on being introduced to him: "Mr. Brownlow, I have known you a long time by character." "Which character," replied Brownlow, "have you gotten hold of? for I have two characters, one given me by my friends, the other by my enemies."
He possessed a remarkable individuality. He was not like anyone else, nor was anyone like him. He stood like an object against the sky, clear and distinct in outline. While he thus stood alone, he was in sympathy, feeling, and action in perfect harmony with all around him. He was always in touch with the people-never apart from them. Yet he never flattered them ; never pandered to their prejudices or their base passions. He stood ready to reprove them when they were wrong. His word was law, and yet there was no dictation. He simply told his party what he thought and intended doing.
His convictions were earnest and sincere; his feelings deep and intense. In the language applied to another: "His feel- ings, acute and earnest, had given all their warmth to his prin- ciples, and what he once believed his duty commanded he pursued with the devout self-dedication of a religious obligation. To this temper, which by some secret of its constitution has a spell to sway the minds of mankind, there was added a captivating personality."
An Ohio gentleman who located in East Tennessee after the war, who had been a Union soldier, and then like so many North- ern men, turned to be a most bitter Democrat, some years ago asked a prominent gentleman who had been a friend of the South during the Civil War what kind of a man Brownlow was. He replied: "He was a man who never turned his back on a friend or an enemy."
The remarks of Macaulay on Sir James Mackintosh are not inapplicable to Mr. Brownlow :
"He had a quick eye for the redeeming parts of character, and a large toleration for the infirmities of men exposed to strong temptations. But this lenity did not arise from ignor- ance or neglect of moral distinctions. On every occasion he
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showed himself firm where principles were in question, but full of charity towards individuals."
One of the highest compliments ever paid to the ability of Mr. Brownlow was contained in the Knoxville Register, a seces- sion sheet, in February, 1862, written by some bitter enemy who was protesting against his release from custody and against his being allowed to go North. The writer said:
"We do not desire to be understood as attaching an undue importance to the discharge of Brownlow from the custody of the Confederate authorities. The writer of this has known this individual for years. He is, in few words, a diplomat of the first water. Brownlow rarely undertakes anything unless he sees his way entirely through the millstone. He covers over his really profound knowledge of human nature with an appearance of eccentricity and extravagance. If any of our readers indulge the idea that Brownlow is not 'smart' in the full acceptation of the term, they should abolish the delusion at once and forever. Crafty, cunning, generous to his particular friends, benevolent and charitable to their faults, ungrateful and implacable to his enemies, we cannot refrain from saying that he is the best judge of human nature within the bounds of the Southern Confederacy.
"In procuring from the Confederate authorities a safe conduct to a point within the Hessian lines, he has exhibited the most consummate will. Brownlow was triumphant and Benjamin outwitted. In fact, we do not know whether to laugh or get mad with the manner in which Brownlow has wound the Confederate Government around his thumb. *
"Brownlow! God forbid that we should unnecessarily mag- nify the importance of his name, but there are facts connected with the character of the man which a just and discriminating public would condemn if we did not give them due notice.
"In brief, Brownlow has preached at every church and school- house, made stump speeches at every crossroad, and knows every man, woman, and child, and their fathers and grandfathers be- fore them, in East Tennessee. As a Methodist circuit rider, a political stump speaker, a temperance orator, and the editor of a newspaper, he has been equally successful in our division of the State."
The following tribute to the memory of Governor Brownlow appeared after his death in the Austin Statesman, edited by a life-long Democrat, Colonel L. J. DuPre, who was formerly a
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citizen of Tennessee and an officer in the Confederate Army, stationed at Knoxville part of the time during the war, and who was a large-minded, generous man : * * * Whatever may be said of William G. Brown- low, as he was in the pulpit, in the sanctum, or as a politician, his personal honesty was never questioned, his boundless gen- erosity never doubted, and in private life his truthfulness was never suspected. He was personally the most generous of men and most devoted and tenacious in his attachments, and the very poor in East Tennessee never knew such a friend. When Knoxville was once ravaged by cholera there was no hut of pov- erty and wretchedness that did not have its pale watcher by the bedside of the plague-stricken in the person of the violent, fight- ing parson. When Brownlow's Whig was the most successful newspaper in money-making in the South, the editor and pro- prietor who railed out so bitterly against his partisan enemies, gave money to the poor and helpless until he was himself almost impoverished. Bitterly as he was denounced and fiercely as he was hated as a party leader, it was never safe where Brownlow, the man and private citizen, was personally known to denounce his name or deeds. His friends were not exclusively of his own church or party, and Brownlow's grave will be bedewed with tears by the whole population of Knoxville. His widow is as gentle and amiable and practical as the inflammable parson was full of enthusiasm and violent as a preacher, editor, and party leader. In fact, Brownlow never came before the footlights save as a tragedian. Behind the scenes the very Brownlow himself was as kindly and generous and gentle as became the husband of such a wife. Now that he is dead the public will learn for the first time, long as Brownlow has been conspicuous, that there were two Brownlows as different from each other as light from darkness. The press and people of East Tennessee will now tell how very little they knew of the private citizen, the friend and philanthropist, who only knew the preacher, the fiery editor, and furious party-leader. Brownlow, when in good health, was an admirable story-teller. As a fireside colloquist he was simply peerless. Here was ever illustrated all that was admirable in his many-sided character. He knew personally all the party- leaders of his time. He was an acute listener and observer, and his sketches of great men were inimitable. As a Methodist, as an editor, as a stump speaker, he was irresistible in the midst
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of his adherents of mountains and valleys, and when we remem- ber that he was a Whig and Andrew Johnson, his neighbor at Greeneville, a Democrat, both omnipotent, each in his own party, it is not amazing that these two led after them into Unionism the great body of the people of the mountainous districts of three coterminous States."
I add two other extracts, one from the Memphis Avalanche, and the other from the Memphis Ledger, both Democratic papers.
From the Memphis Avalanche-" 'Parson' Brownlow be- longed to that class of 'good haters' so dear to Dr. Johnson. Yet a more tender, kinder heart never beat beneath the bodice of a woman. His hates were public. They grew out of political or religious controversies. To his friends and neighbors in pri- vate life his heart went out in kind acts and deeds. His charities were numberless and unostentatious. The heart of the fearless, fiery politician who in excitement hurled the thunderbolts of burning invective at his antagonists, and was even willing in his zeal to lay aside his religious creed and enforce argument with something stronger than words, could bleed in the presence of a child's grief. By the people with whom most of his life was spent he was much beloved as a neighbor and a friend. Noth- ing in his stormy career served to alienate him from their affec- tions. They overlooked and forgave the faults springing from his impetuous nature, for they knew something of the heart that beat within."
From the Memphis Ledger-"He was true to his friends and relentless toward his enemies. He could express more vitupera- tiveness and scorching hate than any half a dozen men that ever appeared in American politics. His style has been imitated, but never successfully copied, by men of less native intellect and courage. His private life was an utter contradiction of the nature he exhibited in public. Socially, he was genial and sym- pathetic, in his family almost idolized, and among his immediate neighbors, especially the poor, he was held in the highest esteem. . The man was a strange compound, and there are no more like him. The style of journalism by which he brought himself into notice and became so terrible to his ememies happily passed away before its author, and is no longer tolerated by an intel- ligent public. Whatever his faults and the warp of his nature, he was honest, fearless and consistent in his way."
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Finally, my remarks made at a public memorial meeting, held in Knoxville immediately after Mr. Brownlow's death, are given :
"Mr. President: In rising to second the resolutions just read, I avail myself of the opportunity to pay a slight tribute to the memory of an old friend. I have known Governor Brownlow well and intimately for many years, and I can truthfully say he was a remarkable man. With no adventitious aids, with no great fortune, he won honor and achieved greatness, and filled the land with his fame. To-day his name is known and his memory honored in every hamlet, village, and city of the land.
"Of all the public men whom I have known he stood the nearest to and was most in sympathy with the great body of the people, and this was the secret of his wonderful power and influence. He swayed the public mind, where he was well known, with a magnetic power such as no other man could exert. He was the sincere and unpretending friend of the people. All were treated alike, all with kindness, whether rich or poor. No man was ever refused a favor by him. He was the most generous man I ever knew. His 'hand was open as day to melting charity.' Though the idol of the people and a great popular leader, he was no demagogue. He did not win popularity by flattering the people, but rather by his deep sympathy with them and by a manly de- fense of their rights. He feared not, when it was right, to cen- sure them, or to oppose their will or defy their wrath. He was utterly fearless. Thirty years ago, when Federalism was exceedingly odious, he gloried everywhere in being a Federalist of the school of Alexander Hamilton. His undaunted courage, both physical and moral, has won the admiration of the world. By his bold and fearless words in his speeches and writings he has often presented himself to the public in an untrue light, as implacable, bitter, and unforgiving. He was the very contrary. To his enemies, while the battle lasted, he was fierce and terrible as the Nemean lion ; to his friends and his family he was gentle and playful as the lamb. He was full of sympathy, full of kind- ness, full of forgiveness, full of the most childlike tenderness and sweetness.
"The last of three remarkable men who lived in adjoining counties-Johnson, Nelson, and Brownlow-has passed away. Johnson, strong, self-reliant, aggressive, and invincible, fought his way to the highest seat of honor ; Nelson, the noble and the true, full of courage, full of a fiery, lofty eloquence, the Chevalier
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Bayard of the South, without fear and without reproach; and Brownlow, with keen intellect, noble devotion to right, personal magnetism, determined will, and an audacity in courage never surpassed.
"All these remarkable men have passed away, leaving only their names and deeds and memory behind. Yesterday they were with us ; we heard their mighty voices ; to-day they are silent in the stillness of death.
"In the presence of the mighty dead all passion should be hushed into silence. Anciently, among the old Greeks, no mortal body was supposed to be able to cross the river Styx into the shadowy land beyond; so, here, hatred, malice, and envy should not pass the threshold of the chamber of death.
"Mr. President, our friend fell not until his mission was ful- filled. In his life, as well as in his death, he was like the lofty oak of his native mountains-tough, compact, unyielding in fiber ; casting its roots deep into the earth and lifting its spread- ing branches high into the sky; the gentle breeze moved not its giant form; it falls not until in the fullness of time the axe is laid to its roots, or until upheaved by the earthquake, or swept by the fury of the tornado."
All things considered, Mr. Brownlow should, and I believe will, stand out in history as the most conspicuous of all the Union leaders of the South. No comparison can be justly drawn between him and the Union leaders of Kentucky and Missouri. These States were never out of the Union. Their loyal people were at all times under the protection of national authority, and the national army. There was, therefore, no strain at any time on the loyalty of the Union leaders of these States. If any of them ever grew weak it was not caused by danger, or pressure, or despair, but resulted from waning patriotism.
How different the case with Mr. Brownlow. For more than four months before his paper was suspended, the last vestige and sign of the authority of the United States had disappeared in Tennessee. Yet, during all this time, with unparalleled au- dacity, he openly and defiantly denounced the Confederate Gov- ernment as a dreadful despotism. He boldly proclaimed that he would be rejoiced at all its defeats and at its overthrow. Finally, in hourly danger of his life, he became a wanderer in the depths of the mountains. At last lured by a false promise of protection he returned to his home and was arrested and thrown
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into a filthy prison, where he was kept nearly a month. When, to save his life, he was released from prison he was kept under military guard in his own house more than two months longer. Long before this every prominent Union leader except himself had disappeared, or become silent, or joined the enemy. No other Union leader in all the secession States had since May, 1861, dared to raise a feeble voice publicly in behalf of the Union. And yet during all this time the voice of this brave man was still heard cheering on the loyal and the true, and proudly defying and insulting those making war on the Government. Where was there a parallel to his case?
1
ANDREW JOHNSON.
CHAPTER I.
Early Youth-Apprenticeship in Greenville, S. C .- Removal to Greene- ville, Tenn, Where Tailor Shop Still Stands-Elected to Legislature, 1835-Defeated, 1837-Again Elected, 1839.
ANDREW JOHNSON was born, as is well known, near Raleigh, N. C., in 1808. His parents were poor and very humble. In Raleigh he was bound at the age of ten as an apprentice to learn the trade of a tailor, and worked at his trade for two years at Laurens Court House, S. C .* It is reasonably certain that he worked for a while also in Greenville, S. C. In 1826 he determined to move to the West, and accordingly started on his journey. One Saturday afternoon in the beautiful month of May, a little one-horse wagon, primitive in construction, drawn by a poor and blind horse, was driven into the outskirts of the village of Greeneville, Tenn., where the exhausted horse was halted. In this low flat ground there rises an excellent spring, then open to public use, but long afterward purchased by the boy who drove the wagon. Over the spring there now droops a large willow tree, planted by him when a sprig, taken, it is said, from the celebrated willow over the grave of Napoleon, in St. Helena. The last residence of this adventurous boy stands on a lot that embraces this spring, now owned and occupied by the Hon. Andrew J. Patterson, his grandson. In the wagon, or accompanying it, were Mrs. Mary McDonough Dougherty, the mother of Andrew Johnson, and Turner Dougherty, her second husband, and Andrew himself, eighteen years of age. They had crossed the mountains into East Ten-
*Mr. Johnson was bound out to a man of the name of J. J. Selby. Selby was a hard and cruel master, according to the statement of W. W. Jordon, a neighbor of Mr. Johnson in Greeneville, Tenn., to whom the latter detailed all the facts of his early life. He ran away, when he was about seventeen, because of ill-treatment, after giving Selby a good whipping. This is the account given by Mr. Jordon, derived from Mr. Johnson and recently published by the daughter of Jordon, Blanche Gray Jordon.
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nessee from North Carolina by the road leading to Jonesboro, the same road, it is believed, by which Andrew Jackson had entered the State about forty years previously. These two men, remarkable in more senses than one, traveled the same road in their poverty and obscurity until they both reached the object of their aspirations. Both were young, both were filled with irrepressible ambition. Jackson came as a lawyer, Johnson came as a journeyman tailor. Jackson came as a knight, finely mounted, leading a racer, with a brace of pistols in his holsters ; and several hundred dollars in gold. Johnson came in a cart driving one poor horse.
Soon after the arrival of the little party, Andrew, with a quick elastic step, went into the village in search of old Joseph Brown,* from whom he wished to purchase corn fodder. Mr. Brown was soon found, for at that day it was an easy matter to find any of the citizens of the little town, so few were they. William R. Brown, a son of Joseph, a mere lad, was sent with Johnson to Brown's farm a mile away, to procure the fodder.
The next morning the peaceful stillness of a Sabbath in a Presbyterian Scotch-Irish village reigned over Greeneville. Scarcely a sound was heard save the singing of birds in the neighboring groves, and the noise of the water falling from the race-head of a little mill that stood at the foot of a great hill south of the town-for though the mill rested on the Sabbath day, the water flowed on unceasingly. The scene was full of beauty and loveliness. The atmosphere was laden with the per- fume of honeysuckles and wild roses. From the neat gardens cultivated flowers shed their fragrance on the soft air. Greene- ville, at all times lovely, was never more so than on that bright May morning, as it lay in solemn stillness flooded with light, nestling serenely among its green hills. From the tops of these hills, which so charmingly encircle the town, was seen off a few miles southward the great Smoky Mountains, more than six
*The said Joseph Brown was formerly a Scotch-Irish school teacher and a Justice of the Peace. He was a worthy man and the patriarch of Greeneville. Away back, in the dim past, I had the advantage of his learning, as well as of his ferrule, when in the due course of his alterna- tions from schoolhouse to schoolhouse, then so common, his school fell within my reach.
"A man severe he was, and stern to view ; I knew him well, and every truant knew ; Well had the boding tremblers learned to trace The day's disasters in his morning face."
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thousand feet in height, stretching away forty or fifty miles southward and eastward in surpassing grandeur. The moun- tains, their lofty summits and wide and graceful sweep of out- line lifted up sharply against the deep blue sky, presented a view of restful majesty rarely to be found.
On this Sabbath day, young Andrew Johnson again went up into the village. Whether, as he walked along the main street with quick determined steps, indicative of the powerful will with- in, he dreamed of the future of schemes of ambition-no one can ever tell. Naturally he directed his steps to the post- office. The office was in the storehouse of William Dixon, a wealthy as well as a worthy Covenanter from Ireland. He had been postmaster for a long time, and was so to remain until his death nearly twenty years afterward. Andrew took a seat in the store, and either asked for, or someone handed him, a newspaper, and he began to read. Little did the villagers who stood around dream that in that boy there was a man of destiny.
John A. Brown, elder brother of William R. Brown, the lad who had gone for the fodder the day before, was a clerk in the store. Seeing Johnson was a stranger, perhaps attracted by his appearance, he entered into conversation with him. He learned where the lad was from; that he had merely stopped over to rest, that he was on his way to the West. He also learned that Johnson was a tailor by trade. Thereupon Brown urged the young man to settle in Greeneville, telling him the only tailor there, a Mr. Maloney, was getting old and was not able to do much work. As a further inducement for him to remain he proposed to Johnson to let him make for himself at once a suit of broadcloth.
These and perhaps other considerations had the effect of changing the mind of Johnson. So, the next morning he came to the store, got the material for the suit and made it up. Johnson's first suit as a tailor, in Tennessee, was made for John A. Brown, and his location in the State was largely, if not entirely, due to the fact that he got that job. How trifling are the circumstances which often shape our ends,
"Rough hew them as we may."
How far his destiny might have been changed had he gone further West, no one can tell. I believe he would have risen into
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prominence, no matter where he might have gone, provided the population (where he settled) had been such as to afford a field, as Greene County did, for his peculiar talents. But no other part of the country, except East Tennessee, would have given him his ladder to the presidency, in 1861-5 .*
Mr. Johnson was married in Greeneville, Tenn., in 1826, to Eliza McCardle. Her father was a Scotchman and a shoe- maker. I believe Mrs. Johnson was as well educated as the facilities in Greeneville permitted at that day,-they were not remarkable. According to the universal testimony of those who knew her, she was a worthy woman, of an extremely retiring disposition. Although I lived near by in the small village, until I was twenty-eight years of age, I have no recollection of ever seeing her. After the death of Mrs. Johnson's father, her mother married a silversmith named Moses Whitesides.
The facts I have given, on the authority of William R. Brown, derived from his brother John, and from the family, as to the ability of Mr. Johnson to read when he first reached Ten- nessec, before he had ever seen his future wife, effectually dispose of the story, so often and so pathetically told hy his enthusiastic admirers, that he was taught to read by his wife after they were married. Those who knew the activity of his mind, his cager desire for knowledge, his industry and his intense ambition, would, independently of these positive facts, be slow to believe that a young man of his capacity and application, reared in a place like Raleigh, where there were good schools, could reach the age of eighteen without learning to read. To say the least of it, it looks like a sensational story, intended to add éclat to a half romantic life, crowned even without this incident with marvelous success. I might add that the story is inherently improbable.
There are other facts, however, which tend to show the falsity of this story. While Johnson was an apprentice in Raleigh, a man of leisure and of wealth, named Hill, used to go among the workingmen in that city, reading to them ex-
*The foregoing facts as to Johnson I obtained in 1891 from the lips of William R. Brown, the younger brother of John A. Brown and the son- in-law of Johnson, he having married Mrs. Mary Stover. No one stands higher for integrity and veracity than he. In reply to a direct question Brown told me emphatically that it was not true that Mrs. Johnson had taught her husband to read; that such was not the understanding in the family.
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