The Chattanooga Civil War Round Table will hold its February meeting on Tuesday, February 9, 2010 {note that this is a special meeting night, the second Tuesday instead of the normal third Tuesday).
The meeting is at 7 PM and will be held in the Millis-Evans Room of Caldwell Hall on the campus of the McCallie School. Enter the McCallie School campus on Dodds Avenue and follow the signs to the Academic Quadrangle.
Historian, Author, and Attorney Sam Davis Elliott is the speaker. Author Elliott will speak on the subject of his just released book, Isham G. Harris of Tennessee: Confederate Governor and United States Senator, the first full-length biography of this important figure in the Volunteer State's history ever published. The meeting is free and open to the public.
In many ways, he epitomizes Confederate Tennessee. A native of the Middle division of the state, Isham Green Harris rose to prominence in the new western division, first as an attorney and then in the world of politics for fifty years.
State senator and then U. S. Congressman, he was elected Governor in 1857 as a Southern Rights Democrat. During the Secession crisis, Harris worked hard to take the Volunteer State out of the Union and into the Confederacy.
At the same time, he unprecedentedly won a third term and committed his all in an effort to maintain Confederate fortunes to be able to hold on to the State. While his third term officially ended in the fall of 1863 and Robert L. Caruthers was supposed to be his successor, Confederates' lack of possession of any significant portion of the state made any term by Caruthers impractical and as a result, Harris continued to essentially represent Confederate Tennessee to the end of the war.
Throughout, Harris also served as a volunteer aide to all of the commanders of the Army of the Mississippi and the Army of Tennessee and was on nearly all of the famed battlefields of that army, including Shiloh where it was he who found the mortally wounded Albert Sidney Johnston.
Exiling himself in Mexico right after the war, he soon returned and re-entered politics. In 1877, he was elected to the United States Senate and held that seat until his death in 1897.
Despite Harris's importance to Tennessee's mid-19th century history, there was no extensive biography of the Governor until now. Sam Davis Elliott's Isham G. Harris of Tennessee: Confederate Governor and United States Senator has just been released by Louisiana State University Press.
It is an important addition to Tennessee historiography is very timely as we consider the events in Tennessee and the country that 150 years ago that pitted the North and South against one another in deadly conflict.
Come out and learn about Tennessee's Confederate Governor. Historian, Author, and Attorney Sam Davis is the author of Soldier of Tennessee: General Alexander P. Stewart and the Civil War in the West and Doctor Quintard, Chaplain C. S. A. and Second Bishop of Tennessee: The Memoir and the Civil War Diary of Charles Todd Quintard. He is a partner with Gearhiser Peters Lockaby Cavett & Elliott in Chattanooga and lives on Signal Mountain.