[Colonel Kangaroo]

the good Unionist people of East Tennessee ,i>

You mean bridge burners and collaborators with the enemy, like the miscreant, Parson Brownlow? He was the Jose Padilla of his time.

I look at it another way. I see Brownlow, the bridge burners and Union soldiers of the South as the true patriots fighting against the usurping alien slave empire. The Taliban would be proud of the jackbooted way reb armed force attacked peaceful loyal communities for merely flying the Stars and Stripes. How would we like it today if an outside force called the "Confederate States of America" attacked those loyal to Old Glory?

And it was the slave governor Isham Harris, not Brownlow, who abandoned Tennessee when things got rough for his side. Which one of the two governors were the loyal man?

[smug]

Which one of the two governors were the loyal man?

Ah, but there is the rub, loyal to what? The people of his state, or to a corporate entity called the government of the United States. The people of Tennessee remained loyal to the latter until Lincoln's call for more volunteers and an order to blockade all southern ports. They then voted themselves out of the Union. Brownlow turned against his neighbors and Tennessee as a whole.