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“Mere Supplicants At The Gate”: Northeast Tennessee Politics In The Antebellum Era, O.J. Early

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Antebellum political historians have long studied the era between Andrew Jackson’s election and the secession crisis through the colored knowledge of the Civil War. This project is an effort to reverse that trend. It explores northeast Tennessee’s political culture from the late 1830s through the start of the Civil War. It reveals that the Second American Party System, a wave of new enfranchised voters, and the area’s demographics mixed together to lay a foundation for the aggressive and populist political style that permeated the region from the 1830s through the 1850s. At the heart of these issues was the transition …