Two Governors, Two Governments

Two Governors, Two Governments. The Capitol in the Civil War. , Within the walls of this magnificent Greek Revival-style capitol, designed by famed American architect William Strickland, a Confederate governor and a Federal military governor each administered the state during the Civil War., Governor Isham G. Harris, of Memphis, supported Tennessee secession. From his office, he plotted strategy and planned a military alliance with the Confederacy. He told the legislature in January 1861, “The systematic, wanton, and long continued agitation of the slavery question, with the actual and threatened aggressions of the Northern States and a portion of their people, upon the well-defined constitutional rights of the Southern citizen … have produced a crisis.” The first secession vote failed. After a second vote in June succeeded, Harris led the state into the Confederacy and helped raise 120,000 volunteers for its armies., After the fall of Nashville in February 1862, a new governor managed the state from the Capitol. Former U.S. Senator Andrew Johnson, of Greeneville, served for three years as Federal military governor until he became U.S. vice president in March 1865. More than 31,000 whites joined Union forces during the war, and 20,000 blacks served in the U.S. Colored Troops., By the summer of 1863, the capitol had become the center of the Union occupation in Tennessee. A New York Times reporter wrote, “The Capitol itself is guarded with artillery and a stockade. … Here is going on a great deal of the military and civil business … here Gov. Johnson is carrying on his multifarious affairs; here the officers of the military Government are transacting their appropriate business, and here the Courts-martial meet.”