East Tennessee bridge burnings facts for kids
The East Tennessee bridge burnings were a series of guerrilla operations carried out during the American Civil War by Union sympathizers in Confederate-held East Tennessee in 1861. The operations, planned by Carter County minister William B. Carter (1820–1902) and authorized by President Abraham Lincoln, called for the destruction of nine strategic railroad bridges, followed by an invasion of the area by Union Army forces then in southeastern Kentucky. The conspirators managed to destroy five of the nine targeted bridges, but the Union Army failed to move, and would not invade East Tennessee until 1863, nearly two years after the incident.
The destruction of the bridges, all of which were quickly rebuilt, had almost no military impact. However, the attacks caused a shift in the way the Confederate authorities regarded East Tennessee's Union sympathizers. Parts of the area were placed under martial law, and dozens of known Unionists were arrested and jailed. Several suspected bridge burners were tried and convicted, being sentenced to death. This in turn brought increased pressure on Lincoln to send Union troops to occupy East Tennessee.
A pro-Union newspaper publisher, William G. "Parson" Brownlow, used the arrests and hangings as propaganda in his 1862 anti-secession diatribe, Sketches of the Rise, Progress and Decline of Secession.
Legacy
Having sworn an oath of secrecy, William Carter never revealed the names of anyone involved in the bridge-burning conspiracy, not even after the war had been over for decades. As a result, many of the conspirators are still unknown. In 1871, the names of the southeastern Tennessee conspirators were made public when their leader, Alfred Cate, petitioned Congress for compensation for their actions. Oliver Perry Temple uncovered still more names through correspondence with known conspirators as he collected information for his book, East Tennessee and the Civil War, in the 1890s.
Along with the detailed account in Temple's book, several accounts of the bridge burnings have been published. In 1862, Radford Gatlin, a Confederate who had been chased out of his largely pro-Union namesake mountain town, published a glorified account of James Keeling's actions at the Strawberry Plains bridge. Union supporters Thomas William Humes and William Rule, who were both in Knoxville when the bridges were burned, included brief accounts of the conspiracy in their respective works on the war in the late 1880s. Novelist William E. Barton published a fictional version of the bridge-burning conspiracy in the late 1890s. More recently, in 1995, Cameron Judd published an historical novel about the incident, entitled The Bridge Burners. In 1996, Donahue Bible, a Greene County native and historian, published a book about the Lick Creek bridge burners entitled, Broken Vessels: The Story of the Hanging of the Pottertown Bridge Burners.
In 2002, a granite monument was erected near Mosheim to honor the five Pottertown bridge burners who were hanged by Confederate authorities for their role in destroying the Lick Creek bridge. The monument stands near Harmon Cemetery, where two of the bridge burners, Jacob and Henry Harmon, are buried. A nearby road, connecting Pottertown Road with U.S. Route 11, has been named "Bridge Burners Boulevard."
