Уильям Ганнауэй "Пастор" Браунлоу: Теннесси саяхаты мен қайта құру дәуіріндегі тұлға

American politician (1805–1877)

William Gannaway "Parson" Brownlow (August 29, 1805April 29, 1877) was an American newspaper publisher, Methodist minister, book author, prisoner of war, lecturer, and politician who served as the 17th governor of Tennessee from 1865 to 1869 and as a United States Senator from Tennessee from 1869 to 1875. Brownlow rose to prominence in the late 1830s and early 1840s as editor of the Whig, a polemical newspaper in East Tennessee that promoted Whig Party ideals and opposed secession in the years leading up to the American Civil War. Brownlow's uncompromising and radical viewpoints made him one of the most divisive figures in Tennessee political history and one of the most controversial Reconstruction Era politicians of the United States. Beginning his career as a Methodist circuit rider in the 1820s, Brownlow was both censured and praised by his superiors for his vicious verbal debates with rival missionaries of other sectarian Christian beliefs. Later, as a newspaper publisher and editor, he was notorious for his relentless personal attacks against his religious and political opponents, sometimes to the point of being physically assaulted. At the same time, Brownlow was successfully building a large base of fiercely loyal subscribers. Soon after the Civil War, Brownlow utilized the state government to enfranchise male African American former slaves with the right to vote and run for public office in Tennessee. Soon after, ex Confederate political leaders and military officers used the Ku Klux Klan and likeminded vigilante groups to disenfranchise African Americans. In 1825, Brownlow attended a camp meeting near Sulphur Springs, Virginia, where he experienced a dramatic spiritual rebirth. He later recalled that, suddenly, "all my anxieties were at an end, all my hopes were realized, my happiness was complete." In 1826, Soule gave Brownlow his first assignment as a circuit rider—the Black Mountain circuit in North Carolina. It was here that Brownlow first ran afoul of the Baptists—who were spreading quickly throughout the Southern Appalachian region—and developed an immediate dislike of them, considering them narrow minded bigots who engaged in "dirty" rituals such as foot washing. Brownlow would often travel by flatboat on both the Watauga River and the Holston River in East Tennessee, bringing shipments of iron castings from the O'Brien Furnance to Knoxville. Although Brownlow left the circuit shortly after his marriage during 1836, he would continue his staunch defense of Methodism and Methodist leaders against the published attacks by religious leaders and writers of other sectarian Christian beliefs within his later newspaper columns, books, and speeches. For the remainder of his life and beyond, Brownlow was to become known to friend and foe alike as the "Fighting Parson".</blockquote>

The rising Elizabethton attorney T. A. R. Nelson suggested that Brownlow should launch a newspaper to support Whig Party candidates in the upcoming elections. Brownlow partnered with the Elizabethton newspaper publisher, Mason R. Lyon, and as the editor within their partnership, with the agreement that Brownlow would receive one third of the new profits from the Tennessee Whig. Brownlow and Lyon launched their weekly Tennessee Whig on Thursday, May 16, 1839, and within several weeks, Brownlow and Lyon would rebrand their new weekly newspaper as the Elizabethton Whig starting with the June 13, 1839 edition of the newspaper. As Brownlow's vituperative editorial style quickly brought bitter division to Elizabethton, and he began quarreling with local Whig turned Democrat Landon Carter Haynes. Haynes had read law under Elizabethton attorney T. A. R. Nelson, and Haynes would later follow Nelson to Jonesborough during 1840, where Haynes would eventually edit a Jonesborough newspaper. Brownlow and the Elizabethton Whig also relocated from Elizabethton and to Jonesborough during the same year, where the weekly Brownlow newspaper was again rebranded as the Jonesboro Whig (the Tennessee town has spelled municipal name two different ways through its history), publishing the first edition of the second volume on May 7, 1840. Brownlow had also brought along Valentine Garland along as a new business partner within his Jonesboro Whig enterprise. Garland had previously worked as a journeyman printer with the Elizabethton Whig and had purchased Lyon's interest in the Elizabethton Whig for $550.00, but their business partnership in the Jonesboro Whig was short lived as an announcement published on August 12, 1840 notified the Whig readers that the Brownlow and Garland business partnership was dissolved. Brownlow would later accost Haynes in a Jonesborough street and then proceeded to beat Haynes with a sword cane, prompting Haynes to draw out his pistol and shoot Brownlow in the thigh. and attacked Jackson's supporters, the Locofocos, in his 1844 book, A Political Register. Brownlow joined the Sons of Temperance in 1850, and promoted temperance policies in the Whig (one of his more common personal attacks was to accuse his opponents of being "drunkards"). Following the collapse of the Whig Party in the mid 1850s, he aligned himself with the Know Nothing movement, as he had long shared this movement's anti Catholic and nativist sentiments. Partially a result of Brownlow's persistent opposition to secession within the pages of his newspapers (and partially due to his long time feud with Confederate sympathizer, banker, and Tennessee historian J. G. M. Ramsey), he was later jailed by Confederate States military authorities (the CSA district attorney in Knoxville, Tennessee being related to J. G. M. Ramsey) in December 1861, pardoned, and subsequently forced into exile in the northern United States.

While Brownlow left the preaching circuit in the 1830s, he continued responding to the critics attacking the Methodist faith until the Civil War. In 1843, his feud with Haynes led to Haynes being barred from the Methodist clergy. That same year, J. M. Smith, editor of the Abingdon Virginian, accused Brownlow of having stolen jewelry at a camp meeting. Brownlow denied the charge, and accused Smith of being an adulterer. At a meeting of the Methodists' Holston Conference that year, Smith tried unsuccessfully to have Brownlow expelled from the church. In the early 1840s, Brownlow supported the American Colonization Society, which sought to recolonize freed slaves in Liberia. Brownlow's friend and colleague, Oliver Perry Temple, stated that social pressure in the 1830s pushed most abolitionist Southerners to adopt pro slavery views. Historian Robert McKenzie, however, suggests that Brownlow's pro slavery shift might have been rooted in the rivalry between Northern and Southern Methodists over the issue in the 1840s. By the 1850s, Brownlow was radically pro slavery, arguing that the institution was "ordained by God. "</blockquote>

During the course of the Civil War, Brownlow would return to an anti slavery stance, calling for emancipation.

On October 24, 1861, Brownlow suspended publication of the Whig after announcing Confederate authorities were preparing to arrest him. perhaps not insignificantly, Brownlow's sons, John B. Brownlow and James P. Brownlow, both saw combat as Union cavalry officers thus making his state the first of the Southern states to leave the Confederacy. The military governor, Andrew Johnson, had enacted a series of measures that essentially prevented ex Confederates from voting, and on March 4, Brownlow was elected by a 23,352 to 35 vote, and the amendments passed by a similarly lopsided margin. He was sworn in on April 5, and submitted the 13th Amendment for ratification the following day. The Radicals nominated Brownlow for a second term for governor in February 1867. His opponent was Emerson Etheridge, a frequent critic of the Brownlow administration. That same month, the legislature passed a bill giving the state's black residents the right to vote, and Union Leagues were organized to help freed slaves in this process. Members of these leagues frequently clashed with disfranchised ex Confederates, including members of the burgeoning Ku Klux Klan, and Brownlow organized a state guard, led by General Joseph Alexander Cooper, to protect voters (and harass the opposition). The William G. Brownlow Family Papers, 1836 1900, archived by the Tennessee Secretary of State, contains one letter dated July 4, 1868, from the Great Grand Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan Stella Morton, in which Morton threatens Governor Brownlow's life. In an interview with the Cincinnati Commercial, Forrest stated, "I have never recognized the present government in Tennessee as having any legal existence." He objected to Governor Brownlow calling out the militia and warned if they "committed outrages" that "they and Mr. Brownloe's government will be swept out of existence not a Radical will be left alive." Forrest claimed the Klan had more than 40,000 members in Tennessee and 550,000 in the southern states. He said the Klan supported the Democratic Party. Forrest suggested that a proclamation of Brownlow called for shooting members of the Klan. Forrest denied being a member of the Klan himself. Forrest and twelve other Klan members submitted a petition to Brownlow, stating they would cease their activities if Confederates were given the right to vote. Blockquote|text="The leading men in the South still look upon the separation of the south from the Union as a hopeful probability. The devil is in them, and they will get up another rebellion if they see any chance of success. They exalt in private over the reduction of the regular army, which Congress foolishly cut down to 30,000 men, and they boast of having enough arms to organize an army at any time. Davis, Toombs and Stephens express the sentiments of the masses of the Southern people [the plan is to] try to accomplish at the ballot box and by legislation what they failed to do in the field to get control of the National Government by the aid of the Democratic party, to destroy all the work of reconstruction, and during the administration of a Democratic President to reorganize the Southern Confederacy, after long and careful preparation. "|author=Parson Brownlow, August 1871 Having sold the Whig in 1869, Brownlow purchased an interest in the Knoxville Chronicle, a Republican newspaper published by his old protégé, William Rule. The paper's name was changed to the Knoxville Whig and Chronicle. On the night of April 28, 1877, Brownlow collapsed at his home, and died the following afternoon. The cause of death was given as "paralysis of the bowels."

In 1870, William Rule, who had been a journalist for the Whig, launched the Knoxville Chronicle, which he considered the Whig's pro Republican successor. Rule continued editing this paper, which was eventually renamed The Knoxville Journal, until his death in 1928. The Knoxville Journal remained one of Knoxville's daily newspapers until it folded in 1991. Adolph Ochs, who later became publisher of the New York Times, began his career at the Chronicle in the early 1870s. William Rule wrote that Brownlow was "a master of invective and burning sarcasm, and he flourished in an age when such things were expected of a public journalist." J. Austin Sperry, Brownlow's rival editor in pre Civil War Knoxville, admitted that Brownlow was a remarkable judge of human nature.</blockquote>

Brownlow remained a divisive figure for decades after his death. In 1999, historian Stephen Ash wrote, "more than 120 years after his death, merely mentioning his name in the Volunteer State can evoke raucous laughter or bitter curses." A 1981 poll of fifty two Tennessee historians that ranked the state's governors on ability, accomplishments, and statesmanship, placed Brownlow dead last. Journalist Steve Humphrey argued that Brownlow was a talented newspaper editor and reporter, as evidenced by his reporting on events such as the opening of the Gayoso Hotel in Memphis and Knoxville's 1854 cholera epidemic. The Capitol Committee of the Tennessee General Assembly removed the official portrait of Governor Parson Brownlow that had only been briefly installed during April 1987 within the Legislative Library of state capitol building, upon the recommendation of Democratic Tennessee state Senator Douglas Henry.

Brownlow married Eliza O'Brien (1819–1914) during 1836 in Elizabethton, Tennessee. They had seven children: Susan, John Bell, James Patton, Mary, Fannie, Annie, and Caledonia Temple. Eliza O'Brien Brownlow lived at the family's home formerly on East Cumberland Avenue (at the present day James White Parkway) in Knoxville until her death in 1914 at the age of 94. In the 1890s and early 1900s, numerous visitors, including three presidents (William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft), called on Eliza Brownlow when visiting Knoxville. The Brownlows' younger son, James Patton Brownlow (1842–1879), was also a colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War, though he was later brevetted to brigadier general by President Andrew Johnson. He served as an adjutant general in the state guard during his father's term as governor. Walter P. Brownlow (1851–1910), a nephew of Parson Brownlow, served as a U. S. congressman from Tennessee's 1st district from 1897 until his death. James Stewart Martin (1826–1907), another nephew of Parson Brownlow (the son of his sister, Nancy), served as a U. S. congressman from Illinois in the mid 1870s. Louis Brownlow (1879–1963), a prominent 20th century political scientist and city planner, was a grandson of one of Parson Brownlow's first cousins. He served a tumultuous 3 year term as Knoxville's city manager in the 1920s.