Tennessee Senate

• The ghost of the Confederacy hangs heavily over the Tennessee Legislature.
• Justin Jones, one of two Black members expelled from the state’s House of Representatives in April 2023, had run afoul of House leadership before.
• In 2019, as a private citizen, he was arrested following his actions in protesting a bust in the state capitol honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and later Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
• While the expulsion of Jones and his colleague, Justin J. Pearson, riveted the nation’s attention, a curious and related event in the Legislature’s other branch, the Tennessee Senate, passed nearly unnoticed.

Safeguarding slavery

• That was to safeguard racial slavery from the threat posed by the election of an antislavery Northerner, Abraham Lincoln, as president of the United States.
• In 2021, the University of Tennessee Press published “Tennessee Secedes: A Documentary History.” It shows that in Tennessee, as elsewhere, the protection of slavery was the sole motive for secession.
• Isham Harris convened the state’s Legislature with a message denouncing the North’s “systematic, wanton, and long continued agitation of the slavery question,” crowned by the insulting election of a president who “asserted the equality of the black with the white race.” Harris went on: “To evade the issue thus forced upon us at this time, without the fullest security for our rights, is, in my opinion, fatal to the institution of slavery forever.
• Abandon it, we cannot, interwoven as it is with our wealth, prosperity and domestic happiness.” In all the deliberations that followed, no cause or grievance but slavery was mentioned.

‘Be not deceived by names’

• The proclamation casts the Confederacy in the mode of the American Revolution.
• Yet from another perspective, the Confederacy was nothing more than an armed mass rebellion against a legitimately elected government.
• It was, ironically, a famous Tennessean, President Andrew Jackson, who had warned would-be seceders in an official proclamation in 1832: “Be not deceived by names.

Celebrating insurrection

• Generally the American Revolutionaries are deemed patriot heroes rather than rebels and traitors because they won their war, and because the course of subsequent history appears to have vindicated their cause.
• Yet many Confederate acolytes, the proclamation’s sponsors among them, seem to have difficulty confronting what the Confederacy actually stood for.