William Gannaway "Parson" Brownlow was an American newspaper publisher, Methodist minister, book author, prisoner of war, lecturer, and politician who served as the 17th governor of Tennessee from 1865 to 1869 and as a United States Senator from Tennessee from 1869 to 1875. Brownlow rose to prominence in the late 1830s and early 1840s as editor of the Whig, a polemical newspaper in East Tennessee that promoted Whig Party ideals and opposed secession in the years leading up to the American Civil War. Brownlow's uncompromising and radical viewpoints made him one of the most divisive figures in Tennessee political history and one of the most controversial Reconstruction Era politicians of the United States.
Parson Brownlow
Engraving from Brownlow's book The Great Iron Wheel Examined, showing a Baptist minister changing clothes in front of horrified women after administering a baptism by immersion.
Ad in an 1848 issue of the Jonesborough Whig, attacking presidential candidate Lewis Cass
Brownlow as he appeared on the frontispiece of his 1856 book, The Great Iron Wheel Examined
The Whig was a polemical American newspaper published and edited by William G. "Parson" Brownlow (1805–1877) in the mid-nineteenth century. As its name implies, the paper's primary purpose was the promotion and defense of Whig Party political figures and ideals. In the years leading up to the Civil War, the Whig became the mouthpiece for East Tennessee's anti-secessionist movement. The Whig was published under several names throughout its existence, namely the Tennessee Whig, the Elizabethton Whig. the Jonesborough Whig, the Knoxville Whig, and similar variations.
The front page of the October 2, 1867, edition of Brownlow's Knoxville Whig.
"Office Brownlow's Knoxville Whig" detail from The War in Tennessee by Theodore R. Davis (Harper's Weekly, April 9, 1864)
An 1865 edition of the Whig with the subtitle The Rebel Ventilator
Heading for "F.A. Ross' Corner," a series in the Jonesborough Whig that attacked Presbyterian minister Frederick Augustus Ross