This work examines the lives of Rhea and Meigs Counties, Tennessee women and children during the Civil War. Several newspaper articles from The Athens Post are included, detailing county meetings and other significant events, as well as a collection of letters and diaries written by families of soldiers. An index to full-names, places and subjects adds to the value of this work. Rhea and Meigs Counties in lower east Tennessee were at one time all one county, even though the Tennessee River ran between the two halves. The people in both are closely related and families share both sides of the river. This collection of V. C. Allen's newspaper clippings about various events and persons in the Confederacy were collected first-hand by his own experience during the conflict. Included here are the rosters of the various units from these two counties and biographical sketches of many of the leaders of the units. Examples from this volume: Rev. G. W. Callahan entered the army as a private in Captain Darwin's company. He was a Methodist minister, belonging to the Holston Conference. He was a man of ability, and was appointed Chaplain of the Sixteenth Tennessee Battalion on the Staff of Colonel John R. Neal, and made an efficient officer, commanding the respect of the battalion, and was known as 'a fighting parson.' Rev. Callahan is still living [1908], and a minister of the Western North Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.

"Groce offers a gracefully written, impressively researched narrative account of the experience of East Tennessee Confederates during the Civil War era. His analysis raises provocative questions about the socioeconomic foundations of Civil War sympathies in the Mountain South."--Robert Tracy McKenzie, University of Washington "Scholars of Appalachia's Civil War have long awaited Todd Groce's study of East Tennessee secessionists. I am pleased to report that this ground-breaking study of Southern Mountain Confederates was worth the wait."--Kenneth Noe, State University of West Georgia A bastion of Union support during the Civil War, East Tennessee was also home to Confederate sympathizers who took up the Southern cause until the bitter end. Yet historians have viewed these mountain rebels as scarcely different from other Confederates or as an aberration in the region's Unionism. Often they are simply ignored. W. Todd Groce corrects this distorted view of East Tennessee's antebellum development and wartime struggle. He paints a clearer picture of the region's Confederates than has previously been available, examining why they chose secession over union and revealing why they have become so invisible to us today. Drawing extensively on primary sources--newspapers, diaries, government reports--Groce allows the voices of these mountain rebels finally to be heard. Groce explains the economic forces and the family and political ties to the Deep South that motivated the East Tennessee Confederates reluctantly to join the fight for Southern independence. Caught in a war they neither sought nor started, they were trapped between an unfriendly administration in Richmond and a hostile Union majority in their midst. When the fighting was over and they returned home to face their vengeful Unionist neighbors, many were forced to flee, contributing to the postwar economic decline of the region. Placing the story in a broad context, Groce provides an overview of the region's economy and explains the social origins of secessionist sympathies. He also presents a collective profile of one hundred high-ranking Confederate officers from East Tennessee to show how they were representative of the rising commercial and financial leadership in the region. Mountain Rebels intertwines economic, political, military, and social history to present a poignant tale of defeat, suffering, and banishment. By piecing together this previously untold story, it fills a void in Southern history, Civil War history, and Appalachian studies. The Author: W. Todd Groce is executive director of the Georgia Historical Society.

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