AT A MEETING OF THE CITIZENS OF THE COUNTY OF FENTRESS CALLED TOGETHER TO SELECT DELEGATES TO ATTEND A STATE CONVENTION..

Fentress County, 1870. Single leaf, 7-1/2" x 12." Printed on recto only. Old horizontal folds, entirely in ink manuscript. Possibly incomplete. Except as noted, Very Good.

Fentress County citizens-- from north central Tennessee-- meet to choose delegates to an upcoming State Convention and to "select candidates to represent the district in the next legislature." Among the chosen was J.D. Hale, also the Secretary of the Meeting; these Minutes are likely in Hale's hand.
Jonathan D. Hale, a courageous Union man during the War, had been Chief of Scouts for the Army of the Cumberland. He had suffered greatly from attacks by Confederate guerrillas, (truncated) including particularly Champ Ferguson, who was later hanged by order of a post-War military commission. The sole Resolution recorded by these minutes was an expression of "unbounded faith" in Governor Senter [spelled here, 'Center'] and "our present member of Congress [the Hon. Wm. B. Stokes], the right man in the right place."
"On February 10, 1869, Tennessee Governor William G. 'Parson' Brownlow tendered his resignation as he prepared to take his seat in the United States Senate, to which his Radical allies in the General Assembly had elected him in the aftermath of the 1867 state election. On resigning, Brownlow expressed full confidence in Dewitt C. Senter, the man who would succeed him. Stunningly, six months later Brownlow's Radical party verged on collapse after its Conservative rivals captured control of the General Assembly in the August 1869 state election. The new legislature speedily repealed many of the enactments of the five years of 'Brownlowism'. Conservatives and ex-Confederates crushed the Radicals in the August 1870 judicial and November 1870 gubernatorial and legislative elections. With the election of Governor John Calvin Brown, a former Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan member, Tennessee's Reconstruction era ended" [Hardy, "Fare well to all Radicals": Redeeming Tennessee, 1869-1870, page vi] [online doctoral dissertations at U. TN]. (Inventory #: 37540)