William G. Brownlow: Fighting Parson of the Southern Highlands

Tennessee has had its share of outrageous characters over the years but none more so than William G. Brownlow. A legend in his own time and mythic in times after, Parson Brownlow was a circuit-riding Methodist minister, upstart journalist, and political activist who wielded a vitriolic tongue and pen in defense of both slavery and the Union.

E. Merton Coulter's 1937 biography of Brownlow remains the standard account of the parson and his times. It traces his religious, journalistic, and political career and shows that, wherever he went, Brownlow created a storm, becoming a hero to his admirers and the devil incarnate to his enemies. "If I have any talent in the world," he once wrote, "it is that talent which consists in piling up one epithet upon another."

Coulter drew on a wide range of sources and his own knowledge of southern history to bring Parson Brownlow to life, and his lively prose captures the exaggerated rhetoric with which Brownlow assaulted all enemies--Democrats, abolitionists, Presbyterians, and finally Rebels. Although Coulter's interpretations were biased by racism, his vision of the American South included Appalachians and African Americans at a time when most of his contemporaries ignored those groups.