In August 1852, a war of words between John L. Marling (1825–1856), editor of the Nashville Union, and Gen. Felix K. Zollicoffer (1812–1862), editor of the Republican Banner, culminated in bullets and bloodshed. Marling’s paper supported New Englander Franklin Pierce (1804–1869) in the upcoming presidential election, judging (correctly) that he would side with Southern slaveholders despite his northern origins. Zollicoffer, meanwhile, bashed Pierce at every turn.
President Franklin Pierce, 1852 (Portrait by Southworth & Hawes, National Portrait Gallery)
On August 20, 1852, things got personal. Marling accused the Banner of behaving dishonorably toward Pierce: “It has tried to identify him with the abolitionism of New Hampshire, with which he had no sympathy and against which he constantly struggled,” Marling wrote. “It has even cast slurs upon his personal courage. Now, we say this is belying General Pierce. We use the word in all its length and breadth.” Zollicoffer found the editorial “personally insulting,” and he sent word that he would publicly “denounce” Marling.
That morning, the two journalists met, standing across Cherry Street (today’s 4th Avenue North) in front of the Union office. Upon being denounced, Marling fired his pistol. Zollicoffer returned fire, and the bullet struck Marling’s cheekbone, lodging behind his ear. Marling got off another shot, grazing Zollicoffer’s hand. Both editors survived the “unfortunate affray,” as the Union characterized it, while defiantly reprinting the offending article the next day. Marling went on to serve as U.S. Minister to Guatemala under the Pierce administration. Zollicoffer would die in battle as a Confederate general. Both are buried in Nashville City Cemetery.
Brigadier General Felix Kirk Zollicoffer, 1812-1862 (courtesy of Tennessee State Library and Archives, ID #31585, created by Brady’s National Photographic Portrait Galleries)
Sources:
Nashville Union, August 20, 1852, “The Banner…”
Republican Banner, August 24, 1852, “On Friday morning last…”
16. Braid Electric Company (1879) – sold to Rexel, a French electrical equipment distributor, in 2004; now called Rexel-Braid Electric Co.; no website.
Note to readers: This list is nearly 25 years old, and some of the data is no longer correct. Follow the links for the updates we have located. If you have more recent information about these businesses, we’d love to have your input – you can leave any comments below.
Renowned Tennessee newsman Elbridge Gerry Eastman was born in Bridgewater, New Hampshire, on February 27, 1813,1 to Timothy and Abigail Eastman. As a young man, he learned the printing trade,2 which would support him throughout his life.
E. G. Eastman’s gravesite in Mt. Olivet cemetery, Nashville, Tennessee.
Young Eastman moved to Boston and then, by 1838, to Washington, D. C., where he worked at the Washington Globe and became a trusted confidant of House Speaker James K. Polk.3 In 1839 Polk brought Eastman and his new wife, Lucy Ann Carr, back to Tennessee, to install the young publisher as editor of the Knoxville Argus.4 Eastman’s incisive writing helped Polk win the governorship that October, while establishing his own reputation as “the leading Democratic editor of East Tennessee”5 – quite a political shift for Eastman, who had published The Abolitionist in New Hampshire only four years earlier.6
While in Knoxville, he also encouraged and published the writings of humorist George Washington Harris, whose works would influence Twain and Faulkner. Harris dedicated Sut Lovingood, Yarns (1867) to Eastman, “the friend whose kindly voice first inspired my timid pen with hope.”7
When Polk became the eleventh U. S. President in 1845, Eastman followed him to Washington.8 However, he was quickly called back to Tennessee by Democratic party leaders, who put him in charge of the Nashville Union (1847).9 Eastman’s newspaper not only showed Polk in the best possible light but also supported other Democratic candidates, including Andrew Johnson, then facing a difficult Congressional reelection campaign. “Take high ground on the slavery question,” Johnson wrote to Eastman in 1849.10
In 1850 the Union changed its name to The Nashville American, with E. G. Eastman and Thomas Boyers as editors. In 1853, in “one of the most important newspaper mergers in the antebellum history of the state,”11 the newspaper became The Nashville Union and American. Eastman was elected clerk of Tennessee’s Democratic House (1849)12 and Senate (1853).13 When Andrew Johnson became governor in 1853, he appointed Eastman to the State Agricultural Bureau. As bureau secretary,14 Eastman instituted Tennessee’s first county, regional, and state fairs.15 Meanwhile, his firm, E. G. Eastman & Co., Public Printers, produced many of the state’s publications, including the House and Senate journals.
Base of E. G. Eastman’s gravestone in Mt. Olivet Cemetery, Nashville.
On November 23, 1859, five days after Union and American editor George Poindexter was shot to death by rival editor Allen A. Hall of the Nashville Daily News,16 Elbridge G. Eastman died suddenly at his home from a paralyzing stroke.17 “The most influential political writer in the State,”18 he was only 56. Governor Isham Harris later wrote a friend that he believed Poindexter had been killed deliberately in an effort to break Eastman’s spirit.19 Both houses of the Tennessee General Assembly adjourned that day “in token respect to the memory of E. G. Eastman, the public printer.”20
Lucy Eastman was left with nine children, ages one to eighteenteen.21 She eventually sold her interest in the Union and American to Thomas S. Marr and Leon Trousdale. When the Confederates evacuated Nashville in early 1862, the operations of the paper were suspended. (2014)
SOURCES:
1 Ancestry.com. New Hampshire, Births and Christenings Index, 1714-1904 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011. Accessed January 13, 2014.
2 Clayton, W. W. History of Davidson County, Tennessee. Philadelphia: J. W. Lewis & Co., 1880, 385.
3 Burt, Jesse C. The Most Tremendous Democrat: The Editing, Publishing & Public Service Career of Elbridge Gerry Eastman in Tennessee, 1839-1859. Bound, unpaged manuscript in Jesse C. Burt, Jr., Papers, 1920-1981, chapter 1. VI-L-1-2. Tennessee State Library and Archives.
4 Guild, Josephus Conn. Old Times in Tennessee : with Historical, Personal, and Political Scraps and Sketches. Nashville: Tavel, Eastman & Howell, 1878, 142-143.
5 Clayton, 385.
6 Moore, Jacob B. “History of Newspapers in New Hampshire,” in Edwards, B. B., and W. Cogswell, eds. The American Quarterly Register, Vol. XII. Boston: The American Education Society, 1840.
7 Harris, George Washington. High Times and Hard Times: Sketches and Tales. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967.
8 Clayton, 385.
9 Clayton, 385.
10 Graf, LeRoy P., and Ralph W. Haskins, eds. The Papers of Andrew Johnson: Volume 1, 1822-1851. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1967.
11 Burt, Introduction.
12 House Journal (Tennessee), 1849, 8.
13 Senate Journal (Tennessee, 1853-1854, 19.
14Biennial Report of the State Agricultural Bureau of Tennessee to the Legislature of 1855-56, prepared by E. G. Eastman, Secretary of the Bureau. Nashville: G. C. Torbeit & Co, 1856.
17 Ancestry.com. U.S. Federal Census Mortality Schedules, 1850-1885 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010. Accessed January 13, 2014.
18Second Report of the Board of Health to the Honorable City Council of the City of Nashville, for the Year ending July 4, 1877. Nashville: Tavel, Eastman & Howell, 1877.
19 Burt, Introduction.
20 House Journal (Tennessee), November 23, 1859, 280; Senate Journal (Tennessee), November 23, 1859, 170.
21 Ancestry.com 1860 United States Federal Census [database online]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2009. Accessed January 14, 2014.
SUGGESTED READING:
Clayton, W. W. History of Davidson County, Tennessee. Philadelphia: J. W. Lewis & Co., 1880.
Harris, George Washington. High Times and Hard Times: Sketches and Tales. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967.
In the 1920s Nashville’s Union Street was called the “Wall Street of the South” because of the many banks and brokerage houses had located there. The most famous of these was Caldwell & Company, founded by Rogers Clark Caldwell in 1917 to help Southern municipalities sell bonds. By the time of the Great Crash in 1929, Caldwell & Company was a regional investment banking powerhouse doing $100,000,000 a year in securities sales alone.
Soon Caldwell was involved in investment banking, hotel and newspaper ownership, and the sale of municipal bonds. With the end of World War I the Federal government ceased monopolizing the bond market and the states were able to move in to the market. The South, meanwhile, enjoyed a boom not seen since before the Civil War. Agricultural prices increased every year from 1920 to 1927 and infrastructure that had been untouched for sixty years could now be improved. In short, for most of the “Roaring Twenties” Caldwell & Company enjoyed ideal conditions for profitable expansion. By 1925 most buyers of Southern bonds knew the House of Caldwell and its slogan, “We Bank on the South.”
The next expansion of Caldwell was into bank and industrial ownership. Two Nashville banks, the American National and the First and Fourth National, came under his control. Other banks in Knoxville, Little Rock, Memphis, and various small towns in Tennessee also came under the aegis of Caldwell.
Soon the House of Caldwell controlled department stores, manufacturing and mining companies, and a Nashville baseball team, among many other businesses. Two newspapers, The Commercial Appeal in Memphis and the Knoxville Journal, were under his ownership and an unsuccessful attempt was underway to gain control of the Atlanta Constitution.
The Nashville Tennessean was owned by Colonel Luke Lea, Caldwell’s partner in many of these deals. Lea was a colorful character who had been a U.S. Senator and a World War I colonel who had led an unauthorized attempt to capture Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, who was in exile in The Netherlands. He was instrumental in donating the land for Percy Warner Park, which is named for his father-in-law. In the 1930s Lea and his son were both jailed for fraud in connection with the failure of Caldwell & Co.
Long before the company’s collapse, there were many signs that all was not well. In 1925 the loosely managed accounting department was in trouble. Customers were complaining of not receiving bonds and payments, and a trial balance hadn’t been made in years. Timothy Donovan was hired to sort out the mess and by the time of its bankruptcy the Caldwell & Co. books were straight, but the business wasn’t.
In a short article, it is impossible to describe all the interlocking directorates and movement of money that went on. Thanks to Luke Lea and the demand for bond sales, the company had excellent political connections. In fact, when the failure came, the State of Tennessee lost about 50% of the money it had deposited in various Caldwell banks. Municipalities all over the South lost deposits and individual depositors faced serious losses in those days before the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
A good example of the chicanery that went on was the series of road contracts given to the Kentucky Rock Asphalt Company, known as Kyrock. Pressure was put on the state road commissioner to award the company contracts outside of the bidding process. When the commissioner refused, Lea was able to influence the governor to replace him with someone more amenable to seeing things Lea and Caldwell’s way. After that, Kyrock received many contracts for road construction without having to go through the inconvenience of bidding.
After the failure, reported in two Time magazine articles in November 1930, there were many cries for the impeachment of Governor Henry Horton (which did not happen) and jail time for Lea and Caldwell. As mentioned, Luke Lea did go to jail in North Carolina, but he was fully pardoned in 1937.
Caldwell had built a house called Brentwood Stables in 1928. Designed to look like The Hermitage, the building was owned by one of his companies. The State of Tennessee went to court to gain title to the house in partial payment for money Rogers Caldwell owed the state. The process took years of litigation, and it was not until 1945 that Caldwell finally relinquished his home. The State had intended to sell it, but, since the title was not clear, chose to keep it. The property is now the 207-acre Ellington Agricultural Center on Edmondson Pike.
Sorting out the various body parts of Caldwell & Co. and its related company, The Bank of Tennessee, was a long process not completed for nearly 20 years. Many of the related firms were salvaged and continue to exist today, though often as subsidiaries of other corporations. Caldwell & Co. was Tennessee’s first major financial bankruptcy, but it was certainly not to be its last.
Bibliography
McFerrin, John Berry. Caldwell and Company: A Southern Financial Empire. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press), 1969.
Time magazine: “More Aftermath,” November 17, 1930, and “Caldwell Crash,” November 24, 1930. From www.time.com
“Luke Lea (1879-1945). Wikipedia.
My personal recollections of conversations with John Donovan, Vice-President of First American National Bank in the 1970s. John, the son of Timothy Donovan, mentioned in the article, was also my boss at First American.
Two novels also touch on the Caldwell story. These are At Heaven’s Gate by Robert Penn Warren and A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor. I read both for background on this article. Peter Taylor’s father was Hillsman Taylor, an executive at Caldwell & Co.
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