took part in the battles of Belmont, Shiloh, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, and the Siege of Atlanta. After the war, Porter returned to his law practice in Paris. In 1870, he was a delegate to the state's constitutional convention, which wrote the current Tennessee State Constitution, and served on the convention's judiciary committee. Following the convention, he was elected judge of the state's 12th circuit. Originally a Whig, he joined the Democratic Party after the Civil War, which was the party of the majority of southern whites. Governor Porter received the Democratic nomination for governor in 1874. He easily defeated his Republican opponent, Horace Maynard, by a 105,061 to 55,847 vote later that year. In 1876, he was reelected by a similarly lopsided margin over several candidates, among them moderate Democrat Dorsey B. Thomas and Republican William F. Yardley, the latter being the state's first African-American candidate for governor. Like his predecessor, John C. Brown, Porter spent much of his gubernatorial tenure managing the state's out-of-control debt. After the state defaulted on its bonded debt in 1875, Porter continued to argue that the state should pay off the bonds in full to protect its credit. The Panic of 1873 had greatly reduced tax revenues, however, and full repayment proved unfeasible. His successors sought only a partial repayment. Porter was a strong supporter of public education. When the Peabody Fund announced it was going to establish a school for teachers in Nashville, Porter used his influence to have the school attached to the University of Nashville. During his tenure, but independent of the state, the South's first medical school for African Americans, the privately supported Meharry Medical College, was founded in Nashville as part of Central Tennessee College, a historically black college founded by the northern Methodist Church. Porter signed the so-called "Four Mile Law," an early, backdoor form of Prohibition that forbade alcoholic beverages within four miles (6.4 km) of any school. Given the small size of most of the schools of the era, they were built in nearly every community, even many of the smallest ones. The law effectively outlawed alcohol in all but the least-populated areas of the state. Later endeavors In his book Appalachian Aspirations, Professor John Benhart describes Porter (and ex-Governor John C. Brown) as "typical of the New South Conservatives who dominated Tennessee politics during the two decades following Reconstruction, mixing the mores of the Old