According to an early-20th-century estimate found in the Lawrence ‘Democrat,’ around 1,600 Lawrence County men volunteered to serve in the Confederate army in “home organizations” in 1861.

In addition to the young men who marched off to war from Lawrence County to serve in the regular Confederate Army, this number probably also included older men who volunteered to serve in the militia-style home guard groups of “minutemen” which were organized in each civil district in the first months after Tennessee’s secession from the Union.

These home guard units were generally manned by men whose age or infirmity prohibited them from serving in the regular army. They were like paramilitary neighborhood watch organizations. While it is possible that they may have drilled once or twice, they probably saw very little combat, if any, and most home guard units probably dissolved after Union forces gained control of Tennessee in early 1862.

While the newspaper excerpt in question cites no source for its estimate–and it appears in an advertisement urging young men to join the Army during World War I as their fathers had joined the Confederate army in 1861–I calculated what percentage of Lawrence County’s 1860 population would have been in service to the Confederacy during that first year of war if the number was accurate.

Regardless of the type of unit volunteered for, that number indicates that at least 17% of Lawrence County’s total population and a whopping 40% of its white male population was in uniform at the outset of the Civil War. While we are not given an estimate of the ages of those volunteers, if that number is accurate, it would account for 92% of Lawrence County’s men aged 15-50.

If that same proportion of men were to volunteer for military service today, it would mean that more than 7,100 men from Lawrence County would be in uniform.