Lots of Americans had Civil War stories

…but not many had stories like this guy’s.

East Tennessee’s Unionist insurgency

The Knoxville News Sentinel has an article on the “bridge burners,” the Unionist insurgents who tried to wrest control of their homeland away from the Confederates in 1861.  The plan was to destroy the railroad bridges connecting East Tennessee with the rest of the Confederacy, and then rise up to join Union forces coming down from Kentucky.  They managed to torch some of the bridges, but the Yankees didn’t come.  The bridge burners who didn’t manage to escape to Kentucky ended up facing the wrath of Confederate authorities on their own.  For some of them, it meant death at the end of a noose.

“Volunteer County of the Volunteer State”

Check out this editorial on Unionist volunteers from Campbell County, TN.  Campbell Co. is just down the road from yours truly, and like the rest of East Tennessee, it was an anti-secession stronghold during the Civil War.  The editorial links the mountaineers’ patriotism with that of their Revolutionary ancestors, a comparison made by prominent Unionists in the 1800′s.