Parson Brownlow’s New York Thanksgiving

During which the Knoxville editor meets a former president, a leading abolitionist, and a pioneer laryngologist

It was on a Monday afternoon at 3:00, in another November, exactly 165 years ago, that a tall, gaunt, severe-looking man appeared at the East Tennessee & Virginia Railroad station off Depot Street. In those days, several remarked on his sallow complexion and his black suit that often looked as if he’d slept in it. His voice was so hoarse he could hardly speak.

For Parson W.G. Brownlow this trip north would be a remarkable adventure. The editor of the Knoxville Whig didn’t travel much. Born in western Virginia, he’d spent most of his life in East Tennessee, and rarely strayed from his home region.

Still, his name was known in the North. He had subscribers as far away as New England who enjoyed his often outrageous rhetoric ridiculing both abolitionism and the Southern aristocracy. He had little use for consistency.

It was not the influence of neighbors, but a fierce patriotism and a complicated ideology that made him the most fervent Unionist in the South. He loved an argument. Brownlow, who had begun his weird career as a circuit-riding Methodist preacher, had been a journalist for 20 years, of a paper whose point of view was mostly secular, give or take the parson’s enthusiasm for condemning his political enemies to Hell. He had once supported abolitionism, during a period when that was not uncommon in Tennessee, but perhaps just because he was so offended by the presumptions of some Northern abolitionists, Brownlow soured on the whole idea of abolitionism. In any case, by the 1850s, he was outspokenly pro-slavery, especially insofar as the point of view allowed him to attack abolitionism.

A few months earlier, his fiery debate in Philadelphia with another Methodist pastor, Rev. Abram Pryne, a sometime editorial colleague of Frederick Douglass, had gotten national attention. Brownlow’s rhetoric was reactionary. He insisted that slavery was good for everybody, and that these Northern abolitionists didn’t know what they were talking about.

However, Brownlow was a peculiar pro-slaver in that he opposed spreading slavery to the territories. That in itself was perhaps the most controversial issue of the day, one represented by Abraham Lincoln, the former congressman from Illinois, and the new Republican Party. Still a proud Whig, Brownlow had not yet joined that party, which was so unpopular in the South that they didn’t even organize chapters in most slave states, including Tennessee. But Brownlow’s public stance on limiting slavery’s growth seems identical to Lincoln’s. The slave interests were insisting on the expansion of slavery to insure its survival in America.

Brownlow was a complicated man, and his overlarge head seemed constantly at war with itself. Perhaps that was the source of his tendency toward illness. He was often rumored to be dying.

***

“I do not travel for pleasure, and have no money to spend in that way,” the abstemious Brownlow admitted to his readership, no surprise. His urgency wasn’t business, but a stubborn sore throat and chronic bronchitis that was undermining his health and energy and ability to speak. He’d been promised that a New York surgeon, Professor Horace Green, could make him better, and prioritized the trip. For his readers, he made the most of it as a travelogue.

So he left Knoxville on the E.T. and Va. Railroad on Nov. 14, 1859, for what was then a two-day journey to New York, with some stops along the way, Richmond, Washington, Philadelphia. He described parts of his trip for his Knoxville Whig. Arriving in Washington, D.C., at dawn, Brownlow described a city on the brink: Buchanan-administration Washington was “the abode of thieves and robbers, and the greatest sink of Iniquity this side of Hell… the very Dome on the Capitol looked sorrowful, and said to me, in an undertone, ‘There are no Clays, no Websters, Calhouns, Leighs, Tazewells, Whites, Berrians, or Wrights here.’” (Those were former U.S. Senators, most of them Whigs, but not necessarily all in accord with Brownlow’s worldview. “White” was Hugh Lawson White of Knoxville, dead since 1840 but still much admired, an opponent of Jackon’s administration regarded as a spiritual founder of the Whig Party.)

“These are all gone, and this goodly building is occupied by corrupt county-court lawyers, villainous crossroad politicians, and such other unscrupulous demagogues as have come here upon issues disgraceful to themselves and their constituents. The truth is, dishonesty in Washington has assumed a chronic form, and stealing is epidemic. What is to become of the country, God only knows….”

The scene at Dr. Green’s office, crowded with patients being treated as others watched, “rather disturbed the quiet of my nerves for the moment,” Brownlow noted. Dr. Green was inserting a long device called a “sponge-probang” into the throats of his patients, occasionally drawing out “offensive-looking matter,” then employing silver nitrate to cauterize the wound. In Brownlow’s case, with tools “fearful to the eye of a poor patient,” Dr. Green extracted from the Parson’s epiglottis “a sort of fungus growth, three quarters of an inch long.”

Dr. Green (1802-1866) was sometimes disparaged as a quack in his day, but is well remembered by history as a founder of the Medical College of New York, and reputedly America’s first airway specialist, and even “the Father of American Larygology and Tracheo-Bronchology.” (That’s the assessment of the modern-day American Broncho-Esophagological Association.) Parson Brownlow was impressed, and remarked that he found the fellow trustworthy. Brownlow seems to have gotten better, and against all odds lived another 18 years, enduring a jail term, death threats, epidemics, and a few crossings of lines in a bloody war.

Still, Professor Green was only one of several historic figures whom Brownlow encountered during his memorable Thanksgiving jaunt to New York.

After his operation, Parson Brownlow took the opportunity to have a look around the big city. Of course, it had no Statue of Liberty, no skyscrapers, and Central Park was incomplete, then mainly a massive construction site. But New York was already a city of 800,000, and rapidly growing.

“New York is a great city, and no mistake!” Brownlow said.

“The Devil has more popularity here, and more devoted friends, than anywhere in the civilized world, according to population, with the single exception of Washington city. Murder, robbery, forgery, adultery, and every abomination known to the laws of God, are practiced here on a large scale, both day and night!”

Brownlow was impressed with the spectacle, nonetheless.

“The man who has never visited New York can form no idea of its grandeur and business operations.” He was especially impressed with the horsedrawn omnibuses on Broadway, which he estimated passed by 420 times per hour, seeking six-cent fares. “Motion your hand to the driver, and he halts for you to get in.”

But Brownlow at least briefly acknowledged his role as tourist. “As to sightseeing, there is enough of that to employ a stranger’s time and attention for a month. The great sights of the city have no charm for me. The Exchange is worth seeing, because it is one of the most massive and magnificent buildings in the United States…. Old Time will add many a wrinkle to his brown before the noble edifice crumbles into dust.”

The four-story Merchants Exchange Building was on Wall Street. Designed in the 1840s in the Greek Revival style, it had become a bank building before three of its stories were retained in a major expansion of the building in the early 20th century. It’s now eight stories, but presumably much of what impressed Parson Brownlow in 1859 is still visible.

Brownlow claimed to witness a funeral parade for U.S. Sen. David Broderick, a “free-soil” statesman from California who had been killed in a duel in San Francisco two months earlier, but for some reason had a funeral parade in New York. “The hearse was as fine a thing as we have ever seen,” Brownlow remarked, “covered with mourning plumes and drawn by eight gray horses, heavily draped with crepe and attended by Black grooms. On the sides of the hearse were these words, in large gilt letters: “NEVER DESERTED PRINCIPALS -BRODERICK.” Brownlow estimated 500 walked in the procession, with another 5,000 lining the streets.

New York often struck newcomers as disorderly. It was, Brownlow admitted, an “inclement season” to view the city, a term that could have applied to the chilly weather or to the politics. Thanksgiving came just a week before the scheduled execution by hanging of violent abolitionist John Brown, a convicted murderer, but a man of faith and devotion to a just cause. The recent events at Harpers Ferry, the military installation Brown and his men had besieged, divided the nation.

Brownlow had been an advocate of the “Know-Nothing” anti-immigrant American Party, which arose in reaction to unprecedented waves of European immigration, refugees from the catastrophes in Central Europe and Ireland were rapidly changing American culture, even Knoxville, in ways that scared some natives. Although the odd semi-secret party was fading from the scene, Brownlow’s own Know-Nothingism resurfaced in Manhattan, especially as he encountered “a number of European exiles and escaped convicts from European prisons.” He seemed particularly alarmed that some of them were extolling the virtues of John Brown.

Brown’s story had resonated in Knoxville, sometimes in personal ways. The Doyle family, from Knoxville, were not slaveholders but aligned themselves with the pro-slavery immigrants in Kansas. In the middle of the night Pleasant Doyle and his sons William and Drury Doyle were kidnapped from their home, then shot and hacked apart, and left in the yard for their wife and mother to find.

Although Brownlow’s own rhetoric was often violent, he had no patience for those who defended John Brown. He was especially skeptical of these immigrants in the Bowery:

“Mark, reader, these Devils, cutthroats and refugees from justice were all foreigners, of the most hateful character. This city abounds with the lousy, stinking, bloated, revolting devils who are a disgrace to humanity and crowd the thoroughfares at such a rate that a decent man can scarcely pass.”

Of course, Brownlow was in pain from his operation, obliged to return to the professor’s office every morning for several days for a fresh application of silver nitrate, but he made a couple of notable acquaintances in New York, satisfying his interest in encountering a couple of notable men he’d heard of for years. One of them, he had learned, was another guest in his very hotel, the 1,000-room St. Nicholas, on Broadway.

That celebrity from Buffalo was former president Millard Fillmore himself. Brownlow’s Knoxville paper had supported Fillmore’s unsuccessful campaign to return to the presidency, and he and a few other Whigs requested permission to visit the icon in his room.

“Our reception was very cordial, and his treatment to us was such as to increase our esteem for the man.

One of the finest-looking men in America, he is cheerful and contented, and shows at once that he has a good conscience.” In his run for president in 1856, Fillmore had come in a distant third, but approaching age 60 he was still a hero amongst the dwindling Whiggery.

Brownlow’s name appeared in the New York press a couple of times while he was there, not all of them referring to his visit. The Times ran Brownlow’s letter denouncing Rev. Pryne and his presumed association with John Brown.

While Brownlow was in the city, the New York Herald remarked on his continued skirmishes with Rev. Pryne, the upstate New York abolitionist with whom he had debated the slavery issue. In print, Brownlow had proposed that Pryne be hanged, offered to be the attending minister on the scaffold. In response, Pryne called Brownlow “an offshoot of Tennessee heathenism; a sort of fungal growth of Tennessee barbarism.”

Various fungi were going around.

***

Amongst all this political thrall, Brownlow observed a holiday he was unable to enjoy. Due to his throat and silver-nitrate treatments, he was forbidden from any feasting. One candidate for the worst misery of life, he remarked, was “to have the appetite of a ravenous wolf, with a table before you, groaning under the weight of everything palatable, and yet be unable to swallow! This is my condition. I manage to get down a little tea and wet toast, so as to keep soul and body together.”

It was perhaps the worst time of year for fasting in a big city. On Thursday, November 24, Brownlow had been in New York more than a week, when he noticed some hubbub in the streets.

“This is Thanksgiving Day, and a day it has been, to such lookers-on as myself! Every preceding day in this week the eastern trains and steamers have borne thousands from this city, to their old homesteads and paternal firesides in New England, to enjoy an old-fashioned Puritanical Thanksgiving among relatives. This old anniversary, with its festivity, its mirth, its drunkenness, its reunion, and over and above all, its pious recognition of the Great Engineer of the Universe, was imported from New England, and is intended to remind us of the sterile, ocean-lashed shore of Plymouth. But my God, how it has been desecrated this day in New York, by low excess and the indulgence of vulgar appetites, by floods of mean whiskey, and showers of profane oaths! Here and in most parts of this great nation, Thanksgiving has degenerated into mad revel, stupid excess, profane swearing, and riotous demonstrations, disgraceful to the country and the parties concerned. How many participating in the festivities of this time-honored occasion think of the Mayflower and her time-honored band upon the waves of the Atlantic—how many think of the Plymouth Pilgrims through that grim season of cold, starvation, and of sorrow and sufferings sustained by men of resolute will!”

Brownlow’s own perspective on Thanksgiving is puzzling; there’s little evidence that Thanksgiving should have evoked any deep nostalgia for a Knoxvillian. Although there’d been a tenuous attempt to launch Thanksgiving here in the late 1840s resulting in some confusion about whether the holiday should be held before or after Christmas, and whether it should be held with feast or fasting, it was only in the previous four years that it been declared a state holiday in Tennessee.

But Brownlow does seem aware that Thanksgiving began as a New England holiday. New England was distanced enough from slavery that abolitionism flourished without much fear of unsettling the common order. By the 1840s, Thanksgiving Day itself had become a traditional day for preachers to give political speeches in church, and often about abolishing slavery.

It was one of those Thanksgivings that greeted Parson Brownlow in New York.

As a man of the cloth, Brownlow was especially interested in who was preaching in New York on Thanksgiving Day. As it happens, in Manhattan’s pulpits was a whole cast of Christian celebrities, most of them denouncing slavery to congregations who may never have witnessed it in person.

“This has been a high day in the preaching line, as well as in the business of drinking, swearing, fighting, and gambling!” The Parson seemed fascinated.

One of those preachers was a man familiar to Brownlow, 52-year-old New England abolitionist George Cheever who had in recent years maintained a pulpit at New York’s Church of the Puritans; a Maine native, he had recently published the book God Against Slavery: And the Freedom and Duty of the Pulpit to Rebuke It as a Sin Against God. Brownlow had previously ridiculed him as a “vagabond philanthropist.”

At the same time, young Methodist Rev. John P. Newman, a future bishop, was speaking that day at Bedford Street. Young abolitionist Presbyterian J.R.W. Sloane was preaching at Fifteenth Street. At Bloomingdale lBaptist, young Rev. Robert Lowry, who would soon be known as the author of familiar hymns “Shall We Gather at the River” and “How Can I Keep from Singing?” (Composed in the next decade, those hymns were unknown in 1859.)

Brownlow remarked on all those preachers, even if it’s unlikely whether he could have sampled all their sermons. But he was critical of them as abolitionists, “the tribe of clerical hypocrites who held forth here today, denouncing slaveholders, praying for Ossawattomie [John] Brown and justifying the Harper’s Ferry foray. The gospel these hypocrites preach is a gospel of rifles, of revolvers, of pikes, of fire, murder, insurrection, and the horrors of civil war.”

Of course, this particular Thanksgiving was only 17 months before secessionists fired on Fort Sumter, commencing the actual Civil War.

“My honest opinion,” Brownlow wrote, “is that the worst, and most dangerous class of men in New York are the Reverend Clergy!”

He made some surprising exceptions.

One was the Rev. Edwin Hubbell Chapin, the Universalist poet and editor formerly of Boston, famous for questioning the existence of Hell. Brownlow, for whom Hell was a favorite subject, was no Universalist, but showed an interesting respect for Chapin.

“He can out-preach all the men I have heard here,” he wrote. “He is a man of great eloquence, power, and originality of thought, and of manifest sincerity. The doctrines of his discourses no Christian would object to. He does not express himself in the circumlocutory style of modern times, but comes to the point, and drives the nail on the head every lick!”

Twice during his stay, Brownlow attended sermons by an even more famous preacher, getting a ferry over to Brooklyn. Augustus Roebling had recently proposed a bridge, but construction of the Brooklyn Bridge would not commence until after the Civil War.

The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher was speaking at his famous venue, the enormous Plymouth Church, which held over 3,000 worshippers. “It is a fine church,” Brownblow wrote, “a sort of Religious Theatre.”

At 46, Beecher, younger brother of novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, was probably the most famous abolitionist in America, then known for sending rifles to abolitionist settlers in Kansas. Parson Brownlow entered this church he’d criticized, and sat in the third row, within 10 feet of Beecher.

“Beecher is a strange man, and difficult to comprehend,” Brownlow wrote for the Knoxville Whig. During a hymn, “Today we’ll sing a song of praise / To him who reigneth far above,” the Knoxville editor observed, “Beecher sat back in his cushioned chair, seemingly quite subdued, and while a smile played on his countenance, large tears rolled down his cheeks, as if the depths of his soul were stirred by the sentiments of the poetry. I came to the conclusion that he is not a bad-hearted man. And crazy as he is, on the subject of slavery, those of our friends in the South who are fortunate enough to get to Heaven, need not be astonished to find HENRY WARD BEECHER there!”

“He is a rapid speaker, but for one hour he held the large audience spellbound,” Brownlow wrote. “I was amazed at the novelty of his position, and his utter contempt for anything like system! I was again charmed with his eloquence, originality of thought, wit, sarcasm, and the vehemence with which he uttered his sentiments. And in turn I was disgusted with the infidel tendency of some of his doctrines. He is certainly not an orthodox divine. He is a Beecher, and there is but one Henry Ward Beecher living.”
A couple of months later, Abraham Lincoln, not yet a confirmed candidate for the presidency, attended one of Beecher’s services there. The Plymouth Church, where Parson Brownlow beheld Beecher, is still there today, on Orange Street, one of the most historic buildings in Brooklyn.

Considering his own extremist-sounding rhetoric, Brownlow often seemed to couch his hatred with admiration. On his way back to Knoxville he attempted to attend the hanging of John Brown. Reports of enormous crowds discouraged him. But back in Knoxville, Brownlow was impressed with reports of Brown’s calm demeanor as he went to the gallows impressed Brownlow, who compared the elderly terrorist to Socrates, adding that he was “as game a man as ever lived.” Brownlow declared that Brown was “in intellect and courage … the superior of four-fifths of the men in Congress.”

Certainly no secessionist, Brownlow was not yet an abolitionist, though he was slowing moving in that direction.

Just after Christmas that year, back in Knoxville, Brownlow praised the cooler heads who prevented the lynching of a Mr. Cregar, a nurseryman from New York. Cregar had just been run out of Asheville for abolitionism, but a movement led by attorney John Crozier Ramsey insisted that violence was the only way to deal with abolitionists, and that the man be hanged.

***

An Indiana newspaper remarked in 1862 that Parson Brownlow was “the most misunderstood man in the country.” Whether popular misunderstandings made him seem better or worse as a human being was a question that seemed to shift with the seasons. What happened to Brownlow’s mind over a period of two or three years could fill a book, but still be confounding to modern readers.

As many of his allies fled the city during Confederate occupation, Brownlow remained in Knoxville through the beginning of Confederate occupation, still printing the pro-Union Whig, still raising his U.S. flag every morning over the home he shared with his wife, Eliza, on East Cumberland Avenue. Brownlow’s patriotic unionism created a new legend.

After trying to ignore Knoxville’s most famous citizen for a while, Confederate authorities arrested him in December, 1861. His arrest and weeks in a Knoxville jail, brushing with the prospect of execution, may have been the best thing that could have happened to his career. “The Fighting Parson,” now known by name even in the British press, became a legend. A New Zealand paper reported that Brownlow, leading 2,000 Union soldiers, “attacked a large rebel force, and defeated them with great slaughter.”

In early 1862, Brownlow escaped to the North, grateful for Professor Green’s help with removing that weird item in his throat, and restoring his voice. The Fighting Parson, who could hardly speak in 1859, gave dozens of talks on a legendary six-month a pro-Union speaking tour that began in Cincinnati and included Columbus (the Ohio Legislature, in a joint session), Indianapolis, Boston, Philadelphia (Independence Hall, no less), Pittsburgh, Chicago, sometimes speaking to as many as 10,000 at once. He returned to New York for 10 days in May, 1862.

It was in September, during that much-hailed tour of the North when Brownlow was enjoying the applause of thousands of Unionists, that one of Brownlow’s fiercest abolitionist enemies of the 1850s, debate opponent Rev. Abram Pryne, committed suicide by cutting his own throat.

By the end of that second northern trip, it was becoming obvious that Brownlow opposed slavery himself.

Lincoln invited him to visit him at the White House. Brownlow declined, although he clearly was coming to admire the slightly younger maverick from Illinois, endorsing Lincoln’s policies, though fearing he would be too lenient with secessionists.

Read the Northern newspapers of 1862. Reborn as a national legend, the aging parson, once most famous in the North as a proponent of slavery, created a persona of fearless liberator.

Through an astonishing turn of events, about five years after his first New York adventure, Parson Brownlow, who approaching the age of 60 had never before held elective office, found himself chosen to be the Republican governor of Tennessee. Before the Civil War was quite over, he led his state to pass the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery forever. Soon Brownlow and his allies, sometimes resorting to unorthodox and perhaps illegal means, made Tennessee a leader in its very early passage of the more-controversial 14th amendment, guaranteeing equal protection under the law. And even when most Northern states forbade Black men from voting, Black men in Tennessee could vote, and did. The preacher-editor’s four years in office constitute perhaps the most disorderly, outrageous, reckless, and in the end progressive gubernatorial administration in Tennessee history.

Something happened in Brownlow’s troubled mind to change it, and it may have seeds in a New York Thanksgiving.

By Jack Neely