On a wintery evening in January 1861, a train rolled into Chattanooga’s Union Depot. On board was Jefferson Davis. He had resigned from the U.S. Senate and was making his way home to Mississippi as the nation drifted toward war. He would break his journey for the night at Chattanooga, a city hotly divided on the momentous question of disunion.¹

David M. Key (1824-1900).

 

Chattanooga’s Secessionists selected a tall, muscular young lawyer named David Key to greet Davis and escort the future Confederate president across the street to the Crutchfield House, the town’s finest hotel. It was hoped Key could persuade Davis to speak to the crowd waiting in the lobby.²

 

Davis reluctantly spoke and extolled the virtues of leaving the Union. But as he finished, ugly insults were shouted by Unionists and shots were fired into the crystal chandelier above. Unintimidated, Davis jumped onto the hotel desk declaring his willingness to fight his detractors. Fortunately, order was soon restored, and dinner was served in the dining room.³

Jefferson Davis (1808-1889), president of the Confederate States of America from 1861 to 1865.

Controversial Confederate

David McKendree Key, the son of a Methodist circuit-riding minister, was a Jacksonian Democrat born in Greene County in 1824 and raised in Monroe County. After graduating from Hiwassee College in 1850, he studied law and practiced briefly in Madisonville and Kingston before settling in Chattanooga in 1853.⁴ He possessed the traits to woo Hamilton County juries: a melodious voice, a quick wit and a gift for telling a good story.⁵ And he had an interest in politics, becoming a protégé of Democratic Governor Andrew Johnson, whom he visited often in Greeneville.⁶

Yet despite their bond, Key aligned himself with the Confederacy and Johnson with the Union. Rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel while organizing and outfitting Confederate companies in the Chattanooga area and giving stump speeches for “the Cause,” Key, nonetheless, remained a lawyer through and through.⁷ When a Unionist attorney was jailed in Knoxville without trial and sent to a Tuscaloosa prison, Key alleged false imprisonment and advocated fiercely for the fellow lawyer in Richmond, the Confederate capital, and by spearheading a petition drive. The lawyer died in prison before Key could win his freedom.⁸

Key made it into the fighting and led a regiment at Vicksburg, where he was severely wounded and captured, almost dying from his injuries and malaria. He was paroled and eventually gained the strength to return to Tennessee. His wife only recognized the muddy, skeletal figure at the door when he uttered her name.⁹

With war’s end, Chattanooga was under Unionist control and on the verge of becoming an industrial boomtown because of Northern investment. Key, as an ex-Confederate soldier, was not considered a citizen and was barred from practicing law. To earn a living, he grudgingly wrote to his old mentor, now president, Andrew Johnson to request a pardon.¹⁰ It was swiftly granted. From his father-in-law’s desolate Loudon County plantation, Key then wrote to a prominent Unionist friend in Chattanooga to ask if he should return. He was advised that he would be welcomed and helped by his fellow Chattanoogans.¹¹

Andrew Johnson (1808-1875). President of the United States from 1865 to 1869.

Controversial Conciliator

Back in Chattanooga, Republicans provided the Democrat Key with legal business, and in 1867 he visited President Johnson at the White House. His interest in politics was rekindled. He was elected a delegate to the 1870 state constitutional convention and in the same year was elected chancellor. In 1872, without his consent, he was nominated by the Democrats for Congress. Finally relenting, Key campaigned and spoke in favor of Northern investment in Chattanooga and improvement of the condition of Black Tennesseans. He was defeated by the Republican, the very friend who urged him to return to Chattanooga.¹²

Soon thereafter, Chancellor Key, while speaking at a ceremony at Chattanooga’s Confederate Cemetery, voiced his conciliatory attitude toward his former enemies. He argued both sides had “consistency, integrity and devotion to principle.”¹³ He said Chattanoogans must recognize that we are of “one flag and one country, knowing neither North nor South,” a people of a “common destiny.”¹⁴

Upon the death of Senator Andrew Johnson in 1875, Governor James Porter appointed Key to the U.S. Senate to serve until the General Assembly elected a replacement.¹⁵ Key was popular with his fellow senators in Washington and worked well with Republicans.¹⁶ He sought economic subsidies for the South and praised the achievements of Black citizens.¹⁷ Becoming a leading voice of Southern moderation, Key said any Southerner who “stirs in the hearts of his people the fires of hate and disloyalty is a much worse enemy of his section and of his people than he who rails at them from a Northern standpoint.”¹⁸

Senator Key supported a peaceful resolution of the disputed 1876 presidential election through a commission that ultimately awarded the presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Key also opposed Tennessee’s Democratic “machine” commanded by former Governor Isham G. Harris of Memphis.¹⁹ He argued Harris and his ilk fanned the flames of racism, sectionalism and extremism for political gain.²⁰

Key also believed one-party rule and Black political, educational and economic oppression thwarted the South’s attraction of Northern investment needed for industrialization.²¹ Key hoped to see the reemergence of a two-party Tennessee and South, along with “peace and prosperity” and “the color line in Southern politics broken.”²² Consequently, after a bitter battle in 1877, Harris’s forces blocked Key’s election by the legislature to a full term in the Senate.²³

Key’s political foe, former Gov. Isham G. Harris (1818-1897).

Controversial Cabinet Member

President Hayes desired to demonstrate his goodwill to the South and nurture the Republican Party there. He, accordingly, decided to appoint a Southerner to his cabinet, the first since the war. After a long interview on March 6, 1877, Hayes nominated Key for Postmaster General, a position carrying immense patronage power.²⁴

Radical Republicans opposed the appointment of an ex-Confederate and Democrat, and some Southerners called Key a Judas.²⁵ Nevertheless, he became one of America’s greatest postmasters general. Competency became more important in hiring and retention than politics. Key announced that “the post office is not a political institution.”²⁶ Furthermore, Key sped deliveries, opened more post offices and extended service in the West and to isolated regions of the South, believing a better mail system aided economic development and thus fostered the rise of a moderate Southern middle-class to counterbalance the extremists.²⁷

Rutherford B. Hayes (1822-1893) President of the United States from 1877 to 1881.

Yet Key repeatedly drew barbed criticism from Mark Twain, who objected to Key’s efficiencies, such as requiring street addresses on envelopes instead of just a name and city.28 These attacks were in furtherance of Twain’s lifelong and often comic feud with the postal service.

Key also became a close friend of President Hayes. He traveled with Hayes throughout the country and drew Southern criticism, for in Vermont he referred to cheering New Englanders’ “kindly feeling toward the erring brethren of the South.”²⁹

Later, President Hayes and Key came to Chattanooga and both spoke at a dinner attended by 300 at the Stanton House hotel. In his address, Key made amends for his controversial comment in Vermont.³⁰ However, he again enflamed his opponents when he wrote a public letter to the South attacking Southern machine politicians who caused the war and would like to do it again.³¹

Controversial Federal Judge

In August 1880, Key resigned from the cabinet for financial reasons to accept Hayes’s offer of the U.S. District Court judgeship for the Eastern and Middle Districts of Tennessee.³² “Big-hearted” Judge Key, “judging more by equity than precedent,” became famous for his leniency with moonshiners and for temporarily releasing them from prison to bring in the harvest so their families would not starve.³³ He proudly proclaimed that “not one of them had ever broken faith” by not returning.³⁴ He also admonished juries to be blind to color.³⁵

Controversial  Speech at Tennessee Bar Association Convention

Key created one last great controversy. In an electric moment, while speaking to the annual Tennessee Bar Association Convention in Nashville on July 2, 1885, Key denounced exclusion of African Americans from juries and racial discrimination in public accommodations like trains, hotels and restaurants. The intrepid judge declared a Black person’s dollar should have the same purchasing power as that of a white.³⁶

Moreover, Judge Key, the old Confederate veteran, exclaimed to the stunned gathering of Tennessee lawyers: “For the life of me, I cannot see what injury a neatly dressed, well-behaved colored person does me by riding in the same car …. I should prefer to sit by a genteel, well-bred Negro than a dirty, filthy, disgusting white man.”³⁷

The controversial David M. Key retired from the bench in 1894 and died in 1900 in his much-loved Chattanooga.³⁸ 

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RUSSELL FOWLER is director of litigation and advocacy at Legal Aid of East Tennessee (LAET), and since 1999 he has been adjunct professor of political science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He served as the law clerk to Chancellor C. Neal Small in Memphis and earned his law degree at the University of Memphis in 1987. Fowler has many publications on law and legal history, including many in this Journal.

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NOTES

1. David M. Abshire, The South Rejects a Prophet 8 (1967).
2. Id.
3. Id. at 12-14.
4. Kenneth E. Davison, The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes 100 (1972); Abshire at 7; Kenneth McKellar, Tennessee Senators 358 (1942); Biographical Directory of the United States Executive Branch 202 (Robert Sobel ed., 1977); James Crutchfield, Timeless Tennesseans 98 (1984).
5. See Abshire at 7-8.
6. Id. at 18.
7. Id. at 19-22.
8 .Id. at 27-28.
9. Id. at 48-53.
10. Id. at 58-59.
11. James W. Livingood, Hamilton County 53 (1981); Abshire at 59.
12. Abshire at 61-66.
13. Id. at 67.
14. Id.
15. Id. at 72; McKellar at 358.
16 See Abshire at 75.
17. Id. at 84, 117.
18. Id. at 85.
19. Id. at 143.
20. Id. at 129.
21. See id. at 4.
22. Id. at 156.
23. Id. at 131-39.
24. Davison at 100.
25. Abshire at 159-60.
26. Id. at 167.
27. Id. at 175-76, 178.
28. See, e.g., Mark Twain, Letter to the Editor, N.Y. Times, Nov. 26, 1879.
29. Abshire at 183.
30. Id. at 189-91.
31. See id. at 194-95.
32. Id. at 208; Davison at 101.
33. Davison at 101; Abshire at 221.
34. History of the Sixth Circuit: A Bicentennial Project 153 (Judicial Conference of the U.S., 1976).
35. Abshire at 216.
36. Id.
37. Id. at 217.
38. Biographical Directory of the United States Executive Branch at 203; Davison at 101.