Greeneville Union Convention

Greeneville was the second choice. The East Tennessee Convention first met in Knoxville in May 1861, but after threats against Unionists there, its president, T. A. R. Nelson, called it back together at the Greene County courthouse. About 285 delegates came, fewer than the 469 who had gathered in Knoxville. They asked the legislature to let East Tennessee form a separate state, while a Louisiana regiment passing through harassed them, taking their breakfast and cutting down a flag. Many delegates later served in the Union army. The convention met once more, in April 1864, and slavery split it bitterly.

What the plaque says

Greeneville Union Convention On June 17, 1861, delegates from every East Tennessee county except Rhea convened here for four days. The purpose was to keep East Tennessee in the Union after secession of the state. Leaders of the movement were Thomas D. Arnold, William G. Brownlow, William B. Carter, Andrew Johnson, Horace Maynard, Thomas A. R. Nelson, and Connolly F. Trigg. Tennessee's reply was the occupation of East Tennessee with Confederate troops under the command of General Felix Zollicoffer.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Andrew Johnson National Historic Site — steps away
  The tailor shop, homestead and grave of the seventeenth president in Greeneville, where the people he enslaved are named and where the Eighth of August emancipation celebration took root.
• Rogersville Historic District — 19 mi
  Tennessee's first newspaper was printed in this Hawkins County seat in 1791, and Swift Memorial College, founded in 1883, educated Black students after the state's 1901 law forced Maryville College to expel them.
• Jonesborough Historic District — 22 mi
  Tennessee's oldest town, chartered in 1779, where Elihu Embree printed The Emancipator in 1820 and a hay wagon by the courthouse started the National Storytelling Festival in 1973.
• Unicoi County Heritage Museum and the Erwin Rail Yard — 25 mi
  A museum in the old fish hatchery superintendent's house in Erwin, a Clinchfield railroad town where the elephant Mary was hanged in 1916 and Black residents were driven out in 1918.

More markers nearby

• Sgt. Elbert L. Kinser — steps away
• Death of John Morgan September 4, 1864 — steps away
• Benjamin Lundy — steps away
• Ellen "Nelly" VanVactor Free Black Female Landowner — steps away