Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest Stays in Capitol, but Brownlow Still Banished

Back in April 1987, the Tennessee Capitol unveiled a newly renovated library, complete with a restored portrait of former Gov. William G. “Parson” Brownlow. According to news reports at the time, the portrait had been damaged by decades of Democratic legislators walking past it, spitting tobacco juice at Brownlow’s image.

Brownlow was a Methodist minister from Knoxville turned much-loathed newspaper editor (he was hanged in effigy in other states) who became a politician and in 1865, the first Republican governor of Tennessee. Which is to say, Brownlow was a Unionist presiding over a fiercely divided state at the end of the war and during Reconstruction. He later served as a U.S. senator.

At one time Brownlow owned slaves and supported the practice, but he changed his mind in the face of a dissolving union. Brownlow is the reason Tennessee became the first Southern state to rejoin the union, and his (questionably violent) tactics are how the the state passed the 13th and 14th Amendments, abolishing slavery and establishing due process and equal protection under the law, respectively. But Brownlow also prevented former Confederate sympathizers from voting and used martial law to counter violence from the Ku Klux Klan across the state — and as such, he repeatedly came into conflict with former slave-trader and Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who at that point was the Klan’s Grand Wizard.

In the 1970s, Sen. Douglas Henry, a Nashville Democrat, had a bust of Forrest installed in the Capitol with the financial support of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. A decade later, within a month of the Brownlow portrait’s reinstallation, the Capitol Restoration Committee — led by Henry and with nary a Republican on it — voted to move Brownlow’s visage to the Tennessee State Museum for all time.

Read more: http://www.nashvillescene.com/news/features/article/20975223/nathan-bedford-forrest-stays-in-capitol-but-gov-parson-brownlow-still-banished