[The following takes place during the voting for secession in Tennessee during the opening phases of what would later be called the American Civil War.]
On a hot June day in 1861, the free white men of Tennessee converged on their county courthouses to vote on secession for a second time as the governor’s sullen henchmen lounged around the steps. A lot of Union men stayed home. But not fifty-year-old Fielding Hurst. One of the biggest slave-holders in the county, Hurst lived in the grandest house; served as worshipful master of the local Masonic lodge; and, with his brothers, ruled an estate so vast – sixty square miles traversing the Tennessee River – that it was locally known as “Hurst Nation.” But unlike the majority of his class, Hurst opposed secession. “One country, one language, one flag” was his credo.
”Tall, wiry, with a prominent jaw and an icy gaze, Hurst was accustomed to having his way. He had not the slightest intention of allowing the governor’s ruffians to keep him from the polls. When his turn came to vote, Hurst not only declared himself for the Union but denounced Harris’s henchmen to their faces as thugs, thieves, and traitors to the nation for which his ancestors had bled and died.
This time around, those white males who dared to go to the polls would vote for secession by a large margin. But Harris’s henchmen did not wait for the final tally before clapping Fielding Hurst in irons and carting him off to Nashville, where for the next seven months the lord of Hurst Nation would lie shivering in the penitentiary, nursing a lethal grudge.
Note:
Fielding Hurst would later raise the 6th Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, which served enthusiastically for the Union Army during the war.
Source:
Ward, Andrew. “This Unnatural War.” River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War. Viking, 2005. 10. Print.
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