Politics

Reconstruction judge and governor Alvin Hawkins was seven years old when his family moved to Carroll County. After attending McLemoresville Academy and Bethel College, he tried his hand as a farmer, blacksmith, and teacher before determining to become a lawyer.…

Whig Party leader and Confederate senator Gustavus A. Henry was born in Scott County, Kentucky, on October 8, 1804, to William Henry and Elizabeth Flournoy Henry. He graduated from Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1835 and soon thereafter was…

Governor Ben W. Hooper was born Bennie Walter Wade in Newport, Cocke County, on October 13, 1870, the illegitimate son of Sarah Wade and Dr. Lemuel Washington Hooper. The child and his mother moved to Dandridge, Mossy Creek (now Jefferson…

Henry Horton was elected governor of Tennessee with the support of Luke Lea, head of a powerful faction of the Democratic Party, and was little more than a front man for the Lea political machine. When Lea's political and financial…

Leonidas C. Houk, congressman and judge, was born near Boyds Creek, Sevier County. The death of his father in 1839 left him and his mother impoverished. His formal education consisted of only a few months at a country school; thereafter,…

Tennessee governor and Texas hero Sam Houston was born to Samuel and Elizabeth Houston in 1793 near Lexington, Virginia, and raised with five brothers and three sisters. His father, a militia colonel, died in 1806. The following year, his mother…

Hilary Howse, significant Nashville politician and mayor in the early twentieth century, was born in Rutherford County. In 1884 Howse came to Nashville, found work in a furniture store, and helped five of his siblings get started in the city.…

As congressman, U.S. secretary of state, and Nobel Laureate, Cordell Hull had a remarkable career. Born to a poor family in the isolated "Mountain Section" of upper Middle Tennessee, he was educated first at home, then free schools, and, as…

Adam R. Huntsman, attorney and congressman, was born in Charlotte County, Virginia, February 11, 1786, to Jacob and Mary Devine Huntsman. Huntsman attended schools in Virginia before migrating to Knoxville around 1807. There he studied law and was admitted to…

The Immortal Thirteen were the Democratic members of the state Senate in the 1841-42 session of the general assembly. These thirteen Democrats maintained a one-seat majority in the Senate, but the rival Whig Party's majority in the House of Representatives…

Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States, serving from 1829 to 1837. As war hero and the "savior of his country," he was one of a handful of Americans who dominated the first half of the nineteenth…

U.S. senator (1881-86), Sixth Circuit Court (1886-92), Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals (1892-93), and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1893-95), Howell E. Jackson was best remembered for his role in the Pollock Income Tax Decision of 1895. He…

Consisting of President Andrew Jackson and his circle of advisors, the Jacksonians were recognized as leaders of the Democratic Party both nationally and within Tennessee. Jackson's Tennessee associates included Judge John Overton; Senator John H. Eaton; Major William B. Lewis;…

Born in a log cabin on December 29, 1808, in Raleigh, North Carolina, Andrew Johnson knew abject poverty and personal tragedy almost from the very beginning of his life. Jacob Johnson, Andrew's father, a landless and illiterate worker in Raleigh,…

Cave Johnson, a prominent Jacksonian, served as a Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives (1829-37, 1839-45), postmaster general of the United States (1845-49), and president of the Bank of Tennessee (1854-60). Johnson was born near Springfield in Robertson County,…

One of the most popular Whig politicians in antebellum Tennessee, James C. Jones was born in Wilson County. Reared by an uncle after his father's death, Jones learned farming by working for his guardian. He occasionally attended common schools and…

This Nashville barber, businessman, and politician became the first African American elected to the Tennessee General Assembly. Keeble was born circa 1832 in Rutherford County to slave parents, Sampson W. and Nancy Keeble. From the age of nineteen until 1863…

U.S. Congressman and Senator Estes Kefauver was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1956. Kefauver was born in Madisonville and received his education at the University of Tennessee (1924) and Yale Law School (1927). He practiced law in Chattanooga (1927-39) and…

New South advocate and first Tennessee Commissioner of Agriculture, Joseph B. Killebrew was born May 29, 1831, in Montgomery County, the son of Bryan Whitfield and Elizabeth Smith Ligon Killebrew. In 1835 Bryan Killebrew bought a farm in adjoining Stewart…

The infamous Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was organized in May or early June of 1866 in a law office in Pulaski by six bored Confederate veterans (the "immortal six"). The Ku Klux Klan was, in its inception, a social club…