Born in 1796, James Gettys McGready Ramsey was a man of broad talents who left a permanent imprint on Tennessee. He was a physician, public servant, religious leader, banker, railroad advocate, and tireless scholar of early Tennessee history.

A states-rights Democrat, he enthusiastically supported secession in 1861 and later served the Confederacy as a treasury agent and field surgeon. But East Tennessee was deeply divided over the war, and many in his native Knoxville vilified Ramsey for his secessionist stance. He fled Tennessee in 1863, living in virtual exile in Georgia and North Carolina before returning to Knoxville in 1872.

Written in the 1870s and originally published by the Tennessee Historical Commission in 1954, Ramsey’s autobiography focuses mainly on the home front during the war years. Although Ramsey left Knoxville before Union troops arrived, his wife and daughters remained there for some time, reporting to him on life under the occupation.

After the war, Ramsey remained largely unreconstructed politically. Still devoted to his state, he continued his work with the East Tennessee Historical Society, which he had founded in 1834, and served as president of the Tennessee Historical Society from 1874 until his death in 1884.

The book includes selected letters from both before and after the Civil War. These shed light on several aspects of Tennessee history, including the coming of the railroad (a project in which Ramsey was instrumental), as well as on Ramsey’s personal conviction that slavery was a beneficial institution that lay at the heart of the secession crisis.

The Editor: William B. Hesseltine (1902–1963) was a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin. His books included The Rise and Fall of Third Parties, Civil War Prisons, and Ulysses S. Grant, Politician.

Robert Tracy McKenzie is associate professor of history at the University of Washington. He is author of One South or Many?: Plantation Belt and Upcountry in Civil War-Era Tennessee.

Visit Dr. J. G. M. Ramsey: Autobiography and Letters Download Page

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Paperback: 367 pages
Publisher: University of Tennessee Press (March 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1572331739
ISBN-13: 978-1572331730

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In the wake of Todd Groce's Mountain Rebels: East Tennessee Confederates and the Civil Wac 1860-1870, there has been renewed interest in Confeder- ates in a section of Tennessee long noted for its Unionist sympathies during the Civil War. No single person was a greater exemplar of pro-slavery East Tennesseans loyal to the South than Dr. James Gettys McGready Ramsey (17961884).

Dr. Ramsey was a multifaceted individual whose activities left a permanent imprint on the political, social. and economic development of antebellum East Tennessee. He was a physician, public official, religious leader, banker, railroad advocate. scholar, staunch secessionist, and writer of an invaluable early chronicle of Tennessee history in 1853, The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century.

Perhaps no one better demonstrates the complexity of capitalism in the antebellum South than does Dr. Ramsey. An early supporter of efforts to build a canal system to bypass navigational hazards on the Tennessee River in order to connect Knoxville merchants and regional farmers to markets in the wider world through the Mississippi River, Ramsey by the 1830s had turned, against the wishes of many of his fellow boosters, to railroads as providing the best economic avenue for East Tennessee to reach larger markets.

His efforts cul- minated in the completion by 1855 of the East Tennessee and Georgia Rail- road, connecting Knoxville to both Virginia and South Carolina. As Todd Groce points out, the railroad bound East Tennessee much more closely to the lower South, which was in need of the region's wheat, corn, beef, and pork. Likewise, Kenneth W. Noe argues that this same railroad through Southwest Virginia would link that region politically and economically to the rest of Virginia and the South.

Interestingly, Dr. Ramsey favored all commercial development but frowned on industrialization; for other Knoxville railroad advocates, such as William G. Brownlow, who saw the railroads as an avenue to industrialization, he had only contempt. Indeed, Parson Brownlow would become Dr. Ramsey's major antagonist long before the Civil War. ...

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