The East Tennessee bridge burnings were a series of guerrilla operations carried out during the American Civil War by Southern Unionists in Confederate-held East Tennessee in 1861. The operations were planned by Carter County minister William B. Carter and authorized by President Abraham Lincoln. The campaign emerged from the strong Union sentiment that persisted in East Tennessee despite secessionist fervor sweeping the South in late 1860 and early 1861. A majority of East Tennesseans remained loyal to the Union, partly because slavery was not very important to the East Tennessee economy, and the region had long been at odds with the state government over insufficient state appropriations for internal improvements. When Tennessee voted to secede in a referendum on June 8, 1861, nearly two-thirds of East Tennesseans rejected the measure and maintained their Union sympathies.
The bridge burnings targeted the East Tennessee and Georgia (ET&G) and East Tennessee and Virginia (ET&V) railroads, which were vital to the Confederacy as they provided a crucial connection between Virginia and the Deep South without requiring transit around the southern Appalachian Mountains. Reverend William Blount Carter, a delegate from the Greeneville session, traveled to Camp Dick Robinson in Kentucky, where many East Tennessee Unionists had fled to enlist in the Union Army. There he met with generals George H. Thomas and William T. Sherman, as well as his brother Samuel P. Carter, a U.S. Navy officer who had been appointed a general in the Union Army. The conspirators carried out coordinated attacks on the railroads, including the destruction of the Lick Creek bridge.
The Confederate response was severe. Several participants were found guilty, and five were hanged for their role in destroying the Lick Creek bridge. Those detained Unionists who had not directly participated in the burnings but were identified as part of the organized Union resistance were ordered by Confederate authorities to be treated as prisoners of war and transported and held as such. William Carter maintained absolute secrecy about the identities of those involved, never revealing names even decades after the war's conclusion. In 2002, a granite monument was erected near Mosheim to honor the five Pottertown bridge burners who were hanged, with the nearby road renamed "Bridge Burners Boulevard."
The American Civil War (1861–1865) was the deadliest conflict in American history, killing an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians. The Confederate States of America, formed by eleven seceding Southern states, faced the Union in four years of warfare across 23 states and territories. Major engagements included First and Second Bull Run, Antietam (the bloodiest single day in American history, September 17, 1862), Chancellorsville, Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), Vicksburg (surrendered July 4, 1863), and Sherman's March through Georgia and the Carolinas (1864–1865). President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, transforming the war's stated purpose to include the abolition of slavery and enabling the enlistment of approximately 180,000 Black men in the United States Colored Troops. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. The war resolved the question of secession and ended American slavery, though Reconstruction would face sustained resistance in its attempt to secure civil rights for formerly enslaved people.
Content adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any location in the US, drawing on NRHP records, battlefield archives, census history and geological data to tell the full story of a place.