Mountain barriers were an impediment to economic development in East Tennessee throughout the first half of the 19th century, and as early as the 1830s, Knoxville's leaders considered the railroad a solution to this isolation.
East Tennessee and Georgia president Campbell Wallace, an ardent Confederate, accused the pro-Union Knoxville Whig editor William "Parson" Brownlow of instigating the November 1861 bridge-burning conspiracy, and demanded he be hanged [REF].