page_title: Brownlow's Whig
section_title: Knoxville
hierarchical_section_title: Brownlow's Whig / History / Knoxville
caption_attribution_description: English: The office of the Knoxville Whig in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA, as it appeared in 1866. The Whig was a weekly newspaper published by William G. "Parson" Brownlow.
context_page_description: The Whig was a polemical American newspaper published and edited by William G. "Parson" Brownlow 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 Whig was one of the most influential newspapers in nineteenth-century Tennessee, due mainly to Brownlow's editorials, which often included vindictive personal attacks and fierce diatribes. A Methodist circuit rider by trade, Brownlow partnered with publisher Mason R. Lyon under a one-year contract and launched the Whig on May 4, 1839 to counter rising Democratic sentiment in the region. He quickly made many enemies across the majority Democratic antebellum South.
context_section_description: By the time he relocated the Whig to Knoxville in May 1849, Brownlow was already well known in the city.  Brownlow had previously clashed with the Democratic Knoxville Standard, which he called a "filthy lying sheet," and blasted its editor, A. R. Crozier, as a "miserable mockery of a man."  Before he had settled into his new printing office on Gay Street, Brownlow had become embroiled in a war of words with Knoxville Register editor John Miller McKee that lasted until McKee's departure in 1855.
  Andrew Johnson's political ascent in the mid-1850s was a constant source of frustration for Brownlow.  The Whig rehashed claims that Johnson's relatives were criminals, and accused Johnson of being an atheist (Johnson never joined a church, but always insisted he was a Christian). After Johnson was reelected governor in 1855, Brownlow published a prayer in the Whig that begged God to forgive Tennessee for electing an "ungodly Governor."
  In 1857, the Whig quarrelled with the radical Southern Citizen, published by Knoxville businessman William G. Swan and Irish Patriot John Mitchel, and Brownlow spent at least one night parading in front of Swan's home while brandishing a revolver.  During the same period, Brownlow blasted the officers of the failed Bank of East Tennessee, namely William Churchwell, J. G. M. Ramsey, and John H. Crozier, and accused them of swindling money from low-level depositers to pay the bank's wealthy creditors.
caption: The Whig office in Knoxville
exif: {}