Appalachian Figures
On the ridge between Monticello, Kentucky and Livingston, Tennessee, the Cullom name keeps showing up in courthouse minutes, church rolls, and cemetery stones. In a previous story I followed William Cullom from Elk Spring Valley to the halls of Congress as a Whig who fought the Kansas Nebraska bill and clung to the Union even while he owned enslaved people. His older brother Alvan walked a different path.
Born in Monticello in 1797 and buried in a Methodist cemetery outside Livingston in 1877, Judge Alvan Cullom tied the upper Cumberland to the national crisis over slavery and Union in ways that still echo from Bethlehem Cemetery. Christian Advocate death notices and federal biographical directories agree that he was a Kentucky born lawyer who settled in Overton County, served in the Tennessee House of Representatives, sat in the United States House as a Democrat from the Fourth District, held a circuit judgeship, and traveled to Washington in 1861 as part of the last ditch Peace Conference.
Modern genealogical work adds important details that official sketches leave out. It portrays him as a slaveholder, a long time Methodist class leader, and a “fire eating” secessionist who helped push his corner of the Cumberland Plateau toward disunion even while his brother William and their Illinois kin backed Abraham Lincoln.
Elk Spring Valley and the Cullom clan
As with William, Alvan’s story begins in Elk Spring Valley near Monticello. Augusta Phillips Johnson’s A Century of Wayne County, Kentucky, along with Coffey family genealogies, traces the arrival of Reuben and Lewis Russell Coffey at Elk Spring around 1800 and follows their descendants into a network of Coffey, Jones, and Cullom households around the new county seat.
A later study in the Middle Tennessee Journal of Genealogy and History reconstructs the Cullom family from both ends of the border. William and Elizabeth Northcraft Cullom, Maryland natives, migrated to Wayne County, raised eleven children, and then sent several of their sons south toward the Overton County courts. The journal identifies three brothers in particular Richard Northcraft, Alvan, and William who would shape politics from Tennessee to Illinois.
According to that reconstruction, Alvan was born 4 September 1797, the fourth child in the family. His boyhood world straddled the line between small farms and rising courthouse towns. By the time he came of age, Wayne County had already produced a state senator in Edward Cullom and seen its county seat formally incorporated through legislation pushed by local representatives.
The obituary printed in the Nashville Christian Advocate, preserved today through Tennessee GenWeb transcriptions, confirms that the boy from Monticello grew into a lawyer. It records that “Judge Alvan Cullom” was born on that September date in 1797 and died near Livingston on 20 July 1877, describing him simply as a lawyer who had risen to serve as a circuit judge.
From Monroe to the House of Representatives
Sometime in the early 1820s, Alvan followed the family stream southward into the Tennessee highlands. The official Biographical Directory of the United States Congress notes that he “received a liberal schooling,” studied law, and by 1823 had been admitted to the bar and commenced practice in Monroe, an Overton County village near present day Livingston.
There he joined the tight fraternity of mountain lawyers who rode the circuits from county seat to county seat. The Overton County Address, delivered in the late nineteenth century and preserved in a local historical pamphlet, remembers those early years and later achievements with some pride. Its author lists “our venerable and honored fellow citizen, Judge Alvan Cullom” among the county’s great men and credits him with training at least five celebrated lawyers, including three future judges and one attorney general in Missouri.
By the mid 1830s Cullom had stepped into formal politics. Tennessee legislative records and later reference works place him in the state House of Representatives during the 1835–36 General Assembly, representing his mountain district.
In 1843 voters in Tennessee’s Fourth District sent him to Washington as a Democrat. He served two terms in the Twenty eighth and Twenty ninth Congresses. The Biographical Directory and Infoplease summary agree on the outline of this service, while the House Journal and Congressional Globe fill in the texture
Those printed volumes show “Mr. Cullom” presenting petitions from Tennessee citizens, reporting from the Committee on Invalid Pensions, and debating measures large and small. In one instance the Globe records him bringing forward pension claims on behalf of widows and veterans of earlier wars. In another he joins other members in handling petitions related to post roads and local improvements.
This was not the high profile oratory of Henry Clay. It was the work of a border district representative keeping up with routine business while the slavery question simmered in the background. Yet it fixed his name in the printed record and connected a small Tennessee mountain county to the national legislative process.
When his second term ended in 1847 he returned home, resuming his law practice and waiting for the next call. That call came soon.
Judge, enumerator, and slaveholder
In 1850 Tennessee officials appointed Alvan Cullom as judge of the Fourth Judicial Circuit. The same reference works that outline his congressional career list his service on the state bench from 1850 through 1852.
That year he also took on another federal responsibility. Transcriptions of the 1850 Overton County population census identify “Alvan Cullom” as the enumerator. He rode the ridges and creek bottoms of the Cumberland Plateau, visiting households and filling out the new style census forms that asked about age, occupation, literacy, and birthplace.
The work did not stop with the free population schedule. A separate slave schedule required him to list enslaved people by age, sex, and color. A project of the Tennessee GenWeb “People of Color in Tennessee” initiative, which transcribes the Overton County slave census, shows how this looked on the page. Under the heading “Cullom, Alvan,” the schedule lists nine enslaved people in District 11: a forty five year old woman, a forty four year old man, a forty three year old man, a young man in his twenties, three young women and girls in their teens, and a girl of ten, all recorded as Black.
Genealogist Thomas K. Potter, writing in the Middle Tennessee Journal of Genealogy and History, sums up that combination of roles bluntly. He calls Judge Alvan “the patriarch of the Tennessee Cullom clan,” a large and rugged but refined man who was at once prominent attorney, legislator, circuit judge, slaveholder, and Methodist class leader for nearly half a century.
Those overlapping identities matter. As a judge, he sat in authority over white and Black residents alike. As census taker, he shaped the official statistical portrait of his neighbors, reducing the people he enslaved to numbers in a federal table. As Methodist class leader and benefactor, he cultivated a public image of piety and generosity that local Methodists would remember long after his death.
Fire eater in a divided family
Potter’s study also emphasizes the political divide within the extended Cullom clan. In the same pages where he traces the brothers back to Wayne County, he labels Alvan “the fire eating secessionist who actively promoted Tennessee’s withdrawal from the Union.” By contrast, he describes William as a Unionist Whig who opposed the Kansas Nebraska Act in Congress and later became what he calls a “reluctant rebel” only after Tennessee actually seceded. Their older brother Richard left Tennessee entirely, settling in Illinois, where his son Shelby Moore Cullom rose as a Republican ally of Abraham Lincoln.
Potter and related local sources sketch Alvan’s secessionist activity in some detail. They report that he joined other elite families in the Upper Cumberland the Goodbars, Gardenhires, Marchbanks, and Murrays in stirring up pro Confederate sentiment in the “Mountain District.” These intertwined households were slaveholding, wealthy, and well represented in law and politics. Between them they provided judges, legislators, and Confederate officers.
In June 1861, during Tennessee’s second referendum on secession, witnesses later told federal investigators that Judge Cullom and a son in law intimidated Union men at the polling place in Livingston, threatening them as they tried to cast votes against separation. Potter writes that he took the stump at secessionist rallies in Overton and Putnam Counties and at Cookeville, where observers reported that he and other speakers denounced Union supporters as enemies who ought to be driven out or hanged.
Seen from the mountain courthouse, this was fiery local politics. Seen from Washington, it was part of a broader sectional crisis in which border state leaders tried to decide whether their loyalties lay with the old Union or with the new Confederate project.
A peace delegate from a war making county
The most striking twist in Alvan Cullom’s public life came in February 1861, just before shots were fired at Fort Sumter. That month he left the hills of the Upper Cumberland and traveled to the Willard Hotel in Washington City as part of Tennessee’s delegation to the Peace Conference of 1861.
The official printed journal of that conference lists “Alvan Cullom” among the Tennessee delegates, alongside Josiah M. Anderson, Robert L. Caruthers, George W. Jones, and others from the state’s political class.
The conference brought together 131 politicians from fourteen free states and seven slave states in a last attempt to craft a constitutional compromise that might keep the Upper South in the Union. They met in secret session, debated proposals to protect slavery where it already existed and extend some form of the Missouri Compromise line westward, and finally drafted an amendment package that Congress declined to adopt. Lucius Chittenden’s narrative of the proceedings and modern reconstructions by the Quill Project underscore how narrow and fragile the effort was.
For a man whom neighbors would later remember as one of the most aggressive advocates of disunion in his home region, this trip looks paradoxical. One way to read it is to see his presence at the Peace Conference as tactical rather than conciliatory. He had every incentive to press for safeguards that would protect slavery in Tennessee and give secessionists a stronger bargaining position. When those safeguards failed to materialize, he went back to Overton County ready to support the break with the Union.
Potter’s article concludes that he did exactly that, ranking him among the “most active advocates for disunion in the Upper Cumberland” in the months that followed.
Bethlehem Methodist Church and the Cullom cemetery
While Alvan fought his political battles, he also cultivated a religious and community legacy that would outlive him in visible stone.
Local Methodist tradition, summarized in both genealogical articles and a Bethlehem Methodist Church history, credits Judge Cullom with providing land for the Bethlehem church site and cemetery outside Livingston. Church historian Orpha Hassell, quoted in a Dead Confederates blog post and in Josephine’s Journal, notes that a Methodist congregation existed in the area as early as 1801, but that “Alvin” or Alvan Cullom later gave the tract on which the present church and its large cemetery stand.
The cemetery became a family ground for both white and Black Culloms. Find A Grave photographs show Judge Alvan’s tall stone marked “Judge Alvan Cullom” with his 1797–1877 dates, surrounded by the graves of his wife Susan Jones and several of their children, including Alvan J. and Elizabeth “Betsy” Cullom Keeton.
Genealogical writings describe him there as “patriarch of the Tennessee Cullom clan,” Methodist class leader for forty six years, and a man whose home at Monroe produced a line of lawyers and ministers that reached into neighboring states.
The Overton County Address, delivered late in his life, offers a contemporary mountain perspective. Its author pauses in a long catalogue of judges and lawyers to single out “our venerable and honored fellow citizen, Judge Alvan Cullom, now far receding toward the sunset of life,” praising his service on the bench and at the bar and noting his role in educating a generation of attorneys who went on to serve as judges and attorneys general across the South and Midwest.
After his death in July 1877, the Nashville Christian Advocate carried a brief notice confirming his Monticello birth, his Overton County residence, and his status as a serving circuit judge at the time of his death. A later article in a Williamson County historical journal recounts that a Methodist minister from that county traveled to Livingston to preach his funeral sermon and remembered him as “a man among men,” a phrase that captures how many white contemporaries chose to remember him.
Sam Cullom and the long shadow of slavery
Walk a little farther through Bethlehem Cemetery and the landscape of enslavement and its aftermath becomes more complicated. Among the burials there is Private Samuel W. “Sam” Cullom, a Black man whose life story is entangled with Judge Cullom’s household.
A pair of detailed posts on the Dead Confederates blog examine Sam’s life through his Tennessee “Colored Man’s Application for Pension” under the 1921 Confederate pension law, local interviews, and cemetery records. Sam told pension officials that he had been born in Maryland and brought to Tennessee as a child, where he became the property of the Cullom family. Overton County historian Ronald Dishman, quoted in the same pieces, suggests that Judge Alvan may have purchased him from Maryland relatives who were tobacco farmers.
According to this reconstruction, Sam accompanied one of the younger white Culloms, often identified as Jim, when he went off to war in a Confederate cavalry regiment. After emancipation, Sam took the Cullom surname, built up landholdings near Bethlehem, and eventually owned property where the Overton County fairgrounds now stand.
In the early twenty first century, Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy chapters helped place a stone for “Pvt. Sam Cullom” at Bethlehem and publicized his story as that of a “Black Confederate” soldier. Josephine’s Journal and local newspapers covered the ceremony, emphasizing his later success as a landowner and the presence of his granddaughters at the grave marking.
Civil War historians have urged caution in interpreting such cases. Sam’s pension file and contemporary Confederate records suggest that he served primarily as an enslaved body servant and laborer attached to a cavalry unit rather than as a formally enlisted soldier. Writer Kevin Levin, for example, has used Sam’s story to show how later communities sometimes recast enslaved camp servants as Confederate soldiers in order to soften the history of slavery.
What matters for Judge Cullom’s story is that the cemetery where he lies became a shared ground for the people he enslaved and their descendants. The same Methodist congregation that he helped endow became the spiritual home of Black landowners whose freedom and property were shaped, in part, by the war he had advocated and the system of slavery he had upheld.
Judge Cullom in Appalachian memory
Taken together, these sources leave us with a complicated portrait.
The Monticello boy raised in a Maryland born family of Coffey and Cullom kin became, in middle age, one of the most prominent lawyers in the Tennessee highlands. He read law at Monroe, practiced in the small courthouses of the Cumberland Plateau, and rose to sit on the state bench. The Overton County Address remembers him as a teacher of younger lawyers and a pillar of the local bar.
At the same time, federal census schedules and the Political Graveyard’s prosopographical notes remind us that he was a slaveholder whose household in 1850 included at least nine enslaved men, women, and children, and whose extended family held dozens more across the region. Genealogical studies on both the Cullom and Gardenhire families emphasize that this elite world of lawyers, judges, and merchants rested on enslaved labor.
As a politician, he moved within a divided kin network. Alvan threw his weight behind secession, spoke at rallies that threatened Union men, and supported separation from the United States. William fought the Kansas Nebraska bill and argued for Union in the House, while Richard and Shelby Moore Cullom tied the family name to Lincoln and to Republican politics in Illinois.
As a delegate to the Washington Peace Conference, he tried to secure constitutional guarantees that would protect slavery and perhaps keep Tennessee in a strengthened Union. When that effort failed, he returned to an Upper Cumberland where his words and actions helped to push communities toward the Confederate cause.
And as a Methodist class leader and benefactor, he helped to shape a rural congregation whose church and cemetery still anchor a crossroads outside Livingston. The stones at Bethlehem Methodist Church Cemetery the judge’s obelisk, his children’s markers, the smaller stone for Sam Cullom and the unmarked spots where other Black Culloms may lie tell a story of power, bondage, faith, and survival in one Appalachian community.
For Appalachian history, Judge Alvan Cullom’s life shows how deeply the mountain borderlands were woven into national struggles over slavery and Union. He was at once a local “man among men” in white Methodist memory, a congressman whose voice sounded in the House chamber, a jurist whose decisions reached across counties, and a slaveholder whose name appears at the top of a slave schedule page in which nine Black lives are reduced to age, sex, and color. To understand the Upper Cumberland in the nineteenth century, we have to keep all of those Alvans in view.
Sources and further reading
Death notice for Judge Alvan Cullom in the Nashville Christian Advocate, transcribed in TNGenWeb’s Death Notices from the Christian Advocate, which confirms his birth at Monticello on 4 September 1797, his death near Livingston on 20 July 1877, and his status as a lawyer and circuit judge. TNGenWeb
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, “CULLOM, Alvan (C000972),” along with derivative summaries at Infoplease and Wikipedia, for his admission to the bar in 1823, practice at Monroe in Overton County, service in the Tennessee House (1835–36), terms in the U.S. House (1843–47), circuit judgeship (1850–52), Peace Conference delegation, and burial at Bethlehem Cemetery. Wikipedia+3Bioguide+3InfoPlease+3
Journal of the House of Representatives and the Congressional Globe for the Twenty eighth and Twenty ninth Congresses, which record petitions presented “by Mr. Cullom,” reports from the Committee on Invalid Pensions, and other routine legislative business that fleshes out his work as a Democratic representative from Tennessee. UNT Digital Library+3Congress.gov+3UNT Digital Library+3
Official Journal of the Conference Convention held at Washington in February 1861, Lucius E. Chittenden’s Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention, the Quill Project’s “Peace Conference of 1861” reconstruction, and modern summaries such as the Peace Conference of 1861 article, for documentation of the conference, its aims, and Tennessee’s delegation including Alvan Cullom. Quill Project+4Gilder Lehrman Institute+4Project Gutenberg+4
Moses Fisk’s Overton County Address, preserved in A. J. Lambert’s Nuggets of Putnam County History collection, for contemporary praise of “our venerable and honored fellow citizen, Judge Alvan Cullom” and for its discussion of his influence as a teacher of younger lawyers and as one of Overton County’s leading public men. Aj Lambert+1
Middle Tennessee Journal of Genealogy and History, especially Thomas K. Potter Jr.’s “Five Families for Secession” (vol. 16, no. 2) and “My Brother, My Enemy: Fire Eaters, Lincolnites and a Reluctant Rebel” (vol. 17, no. 1), which trace the interconnected Cullom, Goodbar, Gardenhire, Marchbanks, and Murray families, label Judge Alvan the “fire eating secessionist” of the Cullom clan, describe his slaveholding and Methodist class leadership, and narrate his role in intimidating Union voters and speaking at secession rallies. Middle Tennessee Genealogical Society+2Middle Tennessee Genealogical Society+2
Transcriptions of the 1850 Overton County federal population census and 1850 slave schedule, especially the TNGenWeb “People of Color in Tennessee History” presentation of the slave census, together with genealogical sites that note he was the enumerator. These show his dual role as census taker and slaveholder and list nine enslaved people in his household in District 11. Wikipedia+5TNGenWeb+5TNGenWeb+5
Political Graveyard’s entries on the Cullom family and the related Papers of Abraham Lincoln biography for William and Richard Cullom and Shelby Moore Cullom, which together outline the broader family network and the contrasting Union and Republican commitments of Alvan’s brothers and nephew. Appalachianhistorian.org+3Political Graveyard+3Political Graveyard+3
Dead Confederates blog posts “Research Exercise: ‘Sam Cullom, Black Confederate’” and “More on Sam Cullom,” along with the scanned Tennessee Colored Man’s Application for Pension and related coverage in Kevin Levin’s writing and local newspapers, for the story of Samuel W. Cullom, his enslavement by the Cullom family, his wartime service as a servant attached to a Confederate cavalry regiment, his postwar landownership near Bethlehem, and the later heritage debate over his status as a “Black Confederate.” Student of the American Civil War+5Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog+5Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog+5
History of Bethlehem Methodist Church at Josephine’s Journal, and related notes compiled in Overton and Fentress County projects, for the story of the Bethlehem congregation, Judge Cullom’s gift of land for the church and cemetery, and the cemetery’s significance as a resting place for white and Black members of the Cullom community. Josephine’s Journal+2TNGenWeb+2
Find A Grave memorials for Judge Alvan Cullom and members of his family, along with those for Sam and Mack Cullom, for photographs of their stones at Bethlehem Methodist Church Cemetery and basic confirmation of dates and relationships. Find A Grave+3Find A Grave+3Find a Grave+3
Augusta Phillips Johnson’s A Century of Wayne County, Kentucky, 1800–1900, together with Genealogy Trails transcriptions of its chapters on Elk Spring Valley and early county politics, for background on the Coffey and Cullom families in Wayne County, their role in local government, and the migration corridor that carried them into the Tennessee highlands. genealogy.com+4Seeking My Roots+4Genealogy Trails+4