Metro Pulse/Secret History/The Death of the Parson

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A 125th-anniversary elegy for a peculiar man, and era

by Jack Neely

It had been a wet spring, but that Saturday, the last day the old man ever stepped out of his big rambling house on old East Cumberland, the sun was out, the flowers were blooming, the birds were singing.

Young men all around town were playing baseball—there was a regular "base ball mania" hereabouts, according to the Chronicle—and the Templars were preparing their downtown Strawberry Festival, promising music and prizes. Mr. Spiro was hawking ice cream on Gay Street. Most people were finally putting the war behind them. That's one thing the Parson could never do.

The big house on East Cumberland was so close to the street the sidewalk practically crossed its narrow front porch. Carpenters were doing some patch-up work on its awkward porches and fences, as the stiff, haggard, lumpy old man stood outside and watched with deep-set gunmetal gray eyes, giving instructions in a strained whisper. If the men were grateful for the work, they were probably more grateful to go home that evening. A lot of people weren't comfortable around the Parson. His temperament wasn't suited for springtime in Tennessee.

That evening, he wasn't feeling very comfortable himself, "suffering from a derangement of the bowels."

The Parson had been ill for a long time: maybe 30 years, ever since the subject of one of his columns had beaten him severely with a club. He suffered from a paralytic condition they called paralysis agitans, the old phrase for Parkinson's disease. Repeatedly, hopeful rumors that he was dying made the rounds of Gay Street and Nashville's Capitol Hill. Now and then, someone impatient with the progress of his disease squeezed off a shot at him. One pioneer bioterrorist mailed the Parson a letter laced with smallpox.

Few expected Brownlow would reach his 70s. But here he was, still living with his wife and a couple of grown daughters in the big white house on the east side.

It was like the Parson that when he finally got around to dying, no one expected it. He startled people then, as he startles people today.

"Parson" William Gannaway Brownlow, the former Reconstruction governor of Tennessee and former U.S. Senator, had begun his career as a barely educated Methodist circuit rider from rural Virginia; after he turned journalist and insult comic, his newspaper, the Whig, was allegedly the largest-circulation paper in the South, even if many of its subscribers were up North. It was named for his chosen political party. In the 1850s, as the Whig Party seemed to be disintegrating, a friend asked Brownlow when he was going to give it up and turn Democrat. "When the Pope of Rome will join the Methodist Church," Brownlow replied helpfully. "When Queen Victoria consents to be divorced from Prince Albert by a county court in Kansas."

Some read him for the shock value. The Parson was a connoisseur of hate. He hated Confederates, Presbyterians, immigrants, Democrats, Catholics, Baptists and a variety of other religious and political denominations, and many hated him right back. A pro-slaver, he distrusted black people and abolitionists—in 1853 he called Harriet Beecher Stowe a "deliberate liar" and a woman of questionable virtue. His saving grace was that he also distrusted the white people who sold and owned slaves. Somewhere in sorting and savoring his hates he became the most rock-solid Unionist in the Confederacy. Brownlow was the Ahab of the Union cause.

He saw no excuse for treason, by the name "Confederacy" or any other. His secessionist colleagues in the clergy drew his fiercest wrath: "The worst class of men, so help me God, on Southern soil, are the Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian preachers" he wrote during the war. "I intend to expose their damnable hypocrisy, villainy, and falsehood to the gaze of the world...and pour hot shot into their rotten hulks."

Even during Confederate occupation, Brownlow and his wife kept the stars and stripes flying above their house on East Cumberland. Jailed as a traitor to the Confederacy in Knoxville, Brownlow escaped and spent much of the war up north on a rambunctiously popular lecture tour. Lincoln invited him to visit the White House, but the Parson turned him down, explaining that he had work to do.

That first summer after the war, Brownlow's old Unionist ally, Judge Connally Trigg, showed unexpected mercy on some imprisoned ex-Confederates. Brownlow declared, "some men have nobly served their country by dying on the battlefield. All men like Trigg would serve their country by dying anywhere."

War somehow transmogrified the pro-slaver into a civil-rights advocate so radical that many freed slaves believed he was black. The South's first governor to grant freedmen the vote, he happily barred former Confederates from that privilege. Brownlow's racist instincts probably never left him, but in 1865, he allowed that "In my judgment a loyal Negro is more eminently entitled to suffrage than a disloyal white man." The Ku Klux Klan was founded largely as an anti-Brownlow club. They assassinated at least one of his agents, but they never touched the Parson. Only what the newspaper called "the King of Terrors" could get in the Parson's door, and it finally arrived that Sunday in April.

Several of his Knoxville friends skipped church that morning, when they heard he was sick again. Brownlow asked his daughter, Annie, to read the Sunday Knoxville Chronicle, the Brownlow-sympathetic heir of the old Whig, to him. He listened carefully to the wire stories, the news of the gathering Russo-Turkish war.

An enema, frankly described in the next day's Chronicle, seemed to offer the Parson some relief. But later on, he began to sink; he spoke little and seemed to strain just to recognize the mounting number of visitors around his bedside.

"Like a flickering taper," went the Chronicle, "he revived and sank at intervals and at last simply ceased to breathe...."

By then—2:05 p.m.—there were 17 people "and others, perhaps," at his bedside: old Unionists, mostly, and the Parson's own son, editor and politician John Bell Brownlow.

"While the bright sunshine of Spring was illuminating the beautiful earth, and while the birds were chanting their midday notes, all that was mortal of W.G. Brownlow passed away from the earth...." William Rule, the Chronicle's young editor, wrote that under stress; it would have been the other way around. Wherever the rest of him went, all that was mortal of Parson Brownlow stayed here, and hundreds of Knoxvillians filed by to look at it before they buried it in Old Gray.

Brownlow's death earned headlines around the country. The New York Evening Post remarked that many were surprised that Brownlow was "only 71"; it seemed as if he'd been around forever. The Post described his "racy style," his "blunt speech," his "plain and straightforward manners. It is not surprising that sometimes his plainness ran very close to vulgarity...."

But Brownlow endured "difficulties of which the Northern agitator could have no conception....It was one thing to speak and print burning words against the Southern system from the safe retreat of Boston," concluded the Post. "It was another thing to denounce Secession in the Southern States, where it was defended by rifles and bowie knives."

The New York Times ran an admiring obituary: "Half-way measures he abhorred with a fervor which was almost grotesque in its expression. Wrongheaded though he sometimes was, his flinty honesty gave him an impregnable place in the esteem of the American people."

For the next 37 years, his remarkable widow lived on in that odd old house at 211 East Cumberland, enjoying her status as Knoxville's most famous widow. During his life, Brownlow had been Knoxville's chief claim to national fame. After his death, the Brownlow house was Knoxville's chief tourist attraction, visited by every Republican president who came to town: Teddy Roosevelt, a Brownlow admirer, made a special trip there, as did Hayes, McKinley and Taft. In 1923, several years after Eliza Brownlow died, the house was torn down for a housing project—which was later, in turn, torn down for a highway project. The site's somewhere beneath James White Parkway. Sometime in the last few years, the state historical marker that commemorated it vanished from its location in front of the Civic Coliseum.

In 1987, the state Legislature voted to remove the Parson's ancient, glowering gubernatorial portrait, famously stained with Confederate tobacco spit, from the state Capitol. Some legislators said they were afraid tourists and children might see it.