“Mere Supplicants at the Gate”: Northeast Tennessee Politics in the Antebellum Era

Antebellum political historians have long studied the era between Andrew Jackson’s election and the secession crisis through the colored knowledge of the Civil War. This project is an effort to reverse that trend. It explores northeast Tennessee’s political culture from the late 1830s through the st...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Early, O.J.
Format: Others
Language:English
Published: Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University 2016
Subjects:
Online Access:https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3023
https://dc.etsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4456&context=etd
Description
Summary:Antebellum political historians have long studied the era between Andrew Jackson’s election and the secession crisis through the colored knowledge of the Civil War. This project is an effort to reverse that trend. It explores northeast Tennessee’s political culture from the late 1830s through the start of the Civil War. It reveals that the Second American Party System, a wave of new enfranchised voters, and the area’s demographics mixed together to lay a foundation for the aggressive and populist political style that permeated the region from the 1830s through the 1850s. At the heart of these issues was the transition of power from East Tennessee to Middle Tennessee. As a way to analyze the region’s political culture, I look specifically at Democrats Andrew Johnson and Landon Carter Haynes and Whigs William Brownlow and Thomas Nelson.