Judge of the Supreme Court of the State. He was one of the best lawyers and one of the most eloquent and accomplished public speakers the State has produced.
When the Civil War broke out, East Tennessee, not being a slaveholding section, and being the Whig stronghold, was overwhelmingly for the Union. The Union leaders were Johnson, Maynard, Brownlow and many others of almost equal ability. Knoxville was the capital of East Tennessee. It had grown principally by the increase of the original population, and the kinships of its people, especially of the more prominent families, were exceptionally extensive and intricate. A majority of these well-to-do people went with the South, but a large minority was loyal, and the common people, as a rule, held to the Union.
The first encounter of hostile forces at Knoxville was on the 20th of June, 1863, when Colonel Saunders with a force of fifteen hundred Federal soldiers on a raid through East Tennessee, halted in front of the town. A brief artillery duel ensued, in the course of which Captain Pleasant McClung of Knoxville, a conspicuously gallant Confederate officer, was
