Politics

John W. Butler, state representative from Macon, Trousdale, and Sumner Counties (1923-27), wrote the Tennessee Anti-Evolution Act, better known as the Tennessee Monkey Law. The son of a long-settled farming family in Macon County, as a young man Butler taught…

Former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Joseph W. Byrns was an important political leader in early twentieth-century Tennessee, serving in the Tennessee General Assembly and then fourteen terms in the U.S. Congress. Born at Cedar Hill in 1869,…

George Washington Campbell served as a U.S. senator, secretary of the treasury, ambassador to Russia, and U.S. district court judge of Tennessee. He was born in Scotland, the son of physician Archibald Campbell and Elizabeth Mackay Campbell, and migrated with…

William B. Campbell, lawyer, soldier, state legislator, congressman, and governor, was born on Mansker's Creek, Sumner County, on February 1, 1807, the son of David and Catherine Bowen Campbell. He studied law at Abingdon, Virginia, with his relative, Governor David…

Newton Cannon, Tennessee's first Whig governor, was born in North Carolina. His family settled in Williamson County, Tennessee, in 1790, where Cannon received a common school education. He attempted several occupations before establishing himself as a wealthy planter. His public…

Four Tennessee towns have served as the State Capital. Knoxville was the first capital city, from the drafting of the state constitution and the first meeting of the Tennessee General Assembly in 1796 to 1812, when the general assembly moved…

Edward Ward Carmack, a powerful figure in turn-of-the-century Tennessee politics and a leader in the state's temperance movement, was born in Sumner County. His father, a Christian Church minister, died during Carmack's infancy, leaving the child to be raised amid…

William Carroll served as Tennessee's governor for all but two years between 1821 and 1835. He was a prominent figure in the state's early Democratic Party, and his career symbolized the era's popular protest against established political interests. Carroll was…

Robert R. Church Jr., a prominent Republican, civil rights leader, and businessman, was born in Memphis on October 26, 1885. He was the son of millionaire Robert R. Church Sr. and his wife Anna Wright Church. Robert Church Jr. married…

Robert R. Church Sr., noted Memphis businessman, philanthropist, community activist, and political leader, was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1839, the son of Charles B. Church of Memphis, who owned several Mississippi River steamboats. His mother, Emmeline, lived with…

Tennessee's strategic location made it a prime target of the Union armies during the Civil War. It was, in fact, the only Confederate state that came entirely under Union control before the war ended. The invasion of Tennessee began early…

In the history of southern statehouses, there have been numerous incandescent governors whose rhetorical skills and platform theatrics mesmerized voters, but none was more skillfully trained or more spectacular than Frank Clement, Tennessee's governor from 1953 to 1959 and again…

A series of events from 1947 to 1958 placed the Civil Rights story of Clinton, the seat of Anderson County, on the national stage as one of the starting points in the modern Civil Rights movement. With the end of…

William Cocke was a distinguished Revolutionary War veteran, experienced legislator, Sevier faction partisan, one of Tennessee's first two U.S. senators, and the first Tennessee jurist to be impeached and removed from office. After serving as a captain in the Fincastle,…

Of those who carried the Tennessee Democratic banner during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, few were as colorful, magnanimous, diligent, or fearsome as General Levin Coe. As a political warrior, Coe had few peers in either party. After…

Organized in the mid-1880s shortly after the establishment of the Agricultural Wheel in Tennessee, the Colored Agricultural Wheel supported the same demands for economic and political changes that white Wheelers advocated. Similarly, the Colored Wheel adopted secret passwords and rituals…

This grassroots agrarian cooperative movement was founded in 1886 by sixteen African American farmers in Houston County, Texas, and spread rapidly across the South. Similar to the white Farmers' Alliance, the Colored Alliance advocated a program of uplift that promoted…

Governor Prentice Cooper was born in Shelbyville to William Prentice and Argentine S. Cooper. He was educated in Bedford County schools, including Hannah's School at Shelbyville, Butler's Creek Elementary School, and the Webb School at Bell Buckle. He attended Vanderbilt…

A prominent member of the U.S. House of Representatives for almost thirty years, Jere Cooper was born in Dyer County on July 20, 1893. Cooper attended local schools and graduated in 1914 from Cumberland University Law School. He was admitted…

Governor John Cox constitutionally inherited his position as Tennessee's chief executive when Governor James Frazier (1903-5) resigned the office to assume the U.S. Senate seat of the late William B. Bate. Before becoming governor, Cox was a consummate public official,…