Tennesse Officially Secedes

Isham Harris, governor of Tennessee

Today Tennessee ratified its secession from the United States. They had already passed it a few weeks ago, but it was not official until there was a popular vote. The vote was 104,913 to 47,238. While that is over a 2-to-1 majority, it still shows that there were large portions of the state that were pro-Union. East Tennessee was mostly anti-secession, and West Tennessee was strongly pro-secession. The eastern counties attempted to secede from the state, as West Virginia ended up doing, but the state government sent troops to occupy the area. With this official recognition of Tennessee’s secession, they became the last state to join the Confederacy. Tennessee was a site of many of the war's largest battles in the east, and it furnished large numbers of troops for the South, and some for the North as well.