Friday, January 8, 2010

Brownlow in Philadelphia

PHILADELPHIA, April 18.

Parson Brownlow was received at Independence Hall, by the city authorities this morning, with speeches of the heartiest welcome. He replied in a characteristic address of some length. He recited the tribulations that East Tennessee Unionists had undergone. At one time he had been within one vote of hanging, by the sentence of a drumhead court martial at Knoxville. The vote that saved him was of a corrupt drunken secessionist, and he was tempted to exclaim “Great God, on what a slender thread hangs everlasting things.” He did not want office; he wanted to go back to East Tennessee with a cocked hat, sword and coil of rope. In closing he alluded to his wife and children now held as hostages in rebeldom, and spoke of the joy and exultation with which the Union army will be greeted in East Tennessee. Parson Brownlow has received an invitation from the President to visit the White House.

– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Monday Morning, April 21, 1862, p. 1

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