Has the government ever conducted a mass-confiscation of guns in Tennessee?

You might be surprised to learn that the answer is yes. But what might surprise you even more is that the government responsible for this mass-confiscation was not the United States government at all.

As it turns out, President Jeff Davis, in a manner of speaking, was the one “coming after their guns” in Tennessee at the beginning of the Civil War.

During the American Civil War, most of southern Wayne County and parts of southwestern Lawrence County formed a hive of Unionist sympathy. Indeed, Wayne County harbored so many pro-Union men that a majority of the voters there voted to remain in the Union when Tennessee seceded in the spring of 1861, and hundreds of Wayne County men joined the Union army when the war began.

Why such an enclave of southern-born Union sympathizers existed in that area at that time is not an easy question to answer. It stems from a complex web of reasons including terrain, wealth, proximity to the Tennessee River, family allegiances, and even religious affiliation.

In the fall of 1861, the Tennessee General Assembly passed legislation entitled “An Act to Establish an Ordnance Bureau and For Other Purposes,” Section 18 of which required all citizens of the state to surrender their firearms to the captain of the local militia company for use of the Confederate war effort. An independent board of three local men was set up to determine the value of each firearm, and each gun owner was then supposed to be given a receipt for that value and paid by the state. If anyone were caught with a firearm that had not been turned over for confiscation, they could be fined between $25 and $50.

Confederate authorities began this confiscation process soon after the bill was passed. Thomas J. Cypert, a prolific Wayne County Unionist and later a celebrated Civil War hero, wrote of this confiscation in his book “Tried Men and True, or Union Life in Dixie.”

According to Cypert, “In my own county, we [the Unionists] at first determined to resist [the confiscation of arms], but our old men advised us against resistance, saying that such a course would bring immediate destruction on ourselves, our families, and the country. The result was that very soon the Confederates had possession of all the arms in our county of any value, and had them locked up in a room at Waynesboro, the county seat of Wayne.”

The confiscation of their arms seemed to particularly infuriate local Unionists, and it can be argued that such drastic measures by the state government helped to turn a great many moderate Unionists into Union soldiers, as it did Cypert.