Our county government was founded on October 21, 1817 by the state legislature.

But did you know that it was re-founded 47 years later?

On February 13, 1864, a group of local Union sympathizers met at the courthouse in Lawrenceburg “to re-organize [county government], by the election of county officers, on the 1st Saturday in March 1864, as required by the Constitution and laws of the State.” Their purpose was to institute a new local government loyal to the Union cause.

When Tennessee seceded from the Union in 1861, new elections were held. In fact, less than three years before, local planter and attorney Lee M. Bentley had accepted the nomination to run for the Confederate House of Representatives in the same courthouse where local Unionists would meet in 1864 to restore loyal government to the county.

After the fall of Fort Donelson in February 1862, Nashville became the first Confederate capital to fall into Union hands. Just weeks later, Abraham Lincoln appointed Andrew Johnson as Military Governor of Tennessee. Although Confederate influence in the state would wax and wane depending on the fortunes of the Confederate army, Lawrence County’s local Confederate government would remain in place until at least September 1863, as evidenced by surviving court records.

On January 26, 1864, Johnson issued a proclamation ordering that elections be held across the state on the first Saturday in March 1864 to elect loyal “Justices of the Peace, Sheriffs, Constables, Trustees, Circuit and County Court Clerks, Registers and Tax Collectors.” To “secure the votes of [the Union’s] friends, and exclude those of its enemies,” Johnson required all voters to swear a long and complex oath claiming that they “ardently desire the suppression of the present insurrection and rebellion against the Government of the United States, the success of its armies and the defeat of all those who oppose them.”

The gathering of Unionists in Lawrenceburg on February 13, 1864, announced that they would obey Johnson’s proclamation to reestablish local government in the county by holding an election to “select proper persons to fill the offices of Clerk of the Circuit and county Courts, Sheriff, Register, Tax collector and County Trustee.”

The election was held on March 5, and the county’s new Unionist officers were in office by the beginning of April. Only 543 men took the oath and met Johnson’s criteria to vote in Lawrence County, compared to the nearly 1,200 who voted in June 1861 to secede from the Union.

It is important to note that the war was far from over when Lawrence County’s Unionist government was re-formed. Just four months after the election, Union troops would execute Andrew Blakemore in Lawrenceburg after accusing him of bushwhacking, and Hood’s Nashville Campaign that November would see hundreds of thousands of soldiers choking Lawrence County’s roads and fighting in her fields.