Appalachian Figures
Walk through Knoxville National Cemetery and near the front you will see a plain government headstone with the inscription for Joseph Alexander Cooper, Brigadier General, United States Volunteers. His story begins not in Tennessee but just over the line at Cumberland Falls in Whitley County, Kentucky, and runs through some of the hardest questions the Civil War and Reconstruction ever put to the Appalachian borderlands.
Born in 1823, Cooper grew up in a world where family, farm, and church life tied southeastern Kentucky to the hills of East Tennessee. He would become a Mexican War volunteer, an East Tennessee Unionist, a hard-fighting Union general, and later the controversial but crucial commander of Tennessee’s State Guard during the violent years when the Ku Klux Klan tried to roll back emancipation. In old age he finished his life as a Kansas farmer, but in death his body came home to Knoxville, and modern genealogists still trace him back to that Whitley County farm above the Cumberland.
Near Cumberland Falls: Whitley And Campbell County Roots
According to census and compiled biographical records, Joseph Alexander Cooper was born on November 25, 1823, on a small farm in Whitley County, Kentucky, near Cumberland Falls. His parents were John Cooper, a veteran of the War of 1812, and Hester (or Hester Sage) Cooper.
When Joseph was still an infant the family moved a short distance south into Campbell County, Tennessee, settling along Cove Creek a few miles below Jacksboro. The move was typical of the period. Families in this corner of Appalachia treated the Kentucky-Tennessee line as a political boundary more than a hard border, following kin networks and farmland from one side to the other. Later genealogical work on Cooper and his children, as well as local Campbell County sketches, emphasizes this back-and-forth between Whitley County roots and Tennessee life.
As a teenager Cooper joined Longfield Baptist Church and was ordained a deacon while still in his teens, a reminder that he came from the kind of small-farm, church-centered community that would send both Unionists and Confederates into the war. In April 1846 he married Mary J. Hutson; over the coming decades they raised a large family that shows up repeatedly in Tennessee and Kansas records.
Mexican War Veteran And Border-State Unionist
Like many young men of his generation Cooper left the farm when the United States went to war with Mexico. In September 1847 he enlisted as a private in the 4th Tennessee Infantry. Muster rolls and later summaries agree that he spent several months on occupation duty near Mexico City before mustering out in August 1848 and returning to Campbell County.
In the 1850s Cooper’s farm and personal property grew enough that later biographers could point to a threefold increase in his estate between 1850 and 1860. He never became a major planter, but he moved solidly into the ranks of middling Appalachian farmers who had something to lose if war tore up their communities.
Politically Cooper followed the old Whig and Constitutional Union line. In 1860 he backed John Bell for president and, when secession split Tennessee, aligned himself with the Unionists of East Tennessee. He attended both sessions of the East Tennessee Convention at Knoxville and Greeneville, where delegates denounced secession and talked seriously about breaking East Tennessee away as a loyalist state if Nashville would not protect them. Temple’s Notable Men of Tennessee and Dallas Bogan’s TNGenWeb article describe Cooper as an active delegate who at first supported more militant resolutions, then shifted toward the more cautious course urged by Knoxville attorney Oliver P. Temple.
Out of those convention debates came a quieter, more practical decision. Cooper and several other Unionist leaders agreed to go home and quietly raise companies for a future Union army. Later biographical sketches, including a detailed description that accompanies a Mathew Brady carte de visite of the general, describe him farming by day and recruiting by night until he had several hundred men ready to slip north when the time came.
Captain To Colonel: War In Kentucky And Tennessee
In the summer of 1861 Confederate forces moved in on East Tennessee, and Cooper led his recruits across the line into Kentucky. On August 4 he was mustered in as captain of Company A, 1st Tennessee Infantry (Union), a regiment composed largely of East Tennesseans who had fled through the mountain passes.
With the 1st Tennessee he took part in the operations around Cumberland Gap and the Battle of Mill Springs in January 1862, one of the first significant Union victories in the western theater. That winter and spring the 1st Tennessee and other loyal Appalachian units helped secure the upper Cumberland Valley and open the road into East Tennessee.
In May 1862 Cooper was promoted to colonel and given command of the newly organized 6th Tennessee Infantry, another Union regiment drawn from the hill counties. The 6th Tennessee served first in central Tennessee and then in the campaigns around Chattanooga and Knoxville. At Stones River in early 1863 his regiment was assigned to escort a supply train from Nashville to the front. When Confederate cavalry under Joseph Wheeler tried to cut off the wagons, Cooper’s men fought them back and saved the train, a feat noted in both regimental histories and later biographies.
The 6th Tennessee went on to serve in the Knoxville Campaign and then marched with Major General John Schofield’s XXIII Corps during Sherman’s push into Georgia. At Resaca in May 1864 Cooper’s brigade took heavy casualties in head-on fighting, losing roughly a third of its men in one engagement. He continued to lead brigade and sometimes divisional formations through the Atlanta campaign, including fighting at Utoy Creek and Jonesborough where East Tennessee troops helped pressure the Confederate defenses around the city.
On July 30, 1864, Cooper received promotion to brigadier general of volunteers. He commanded a brigade in the 2nd Division, XXIII Corps through the Franklin-Nashville campaign that fall. At Nashville in December 1864 his men participated in the attacks that shattered John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee, and contemporary accounts credited Cooper’s brigade with capturing artillery and prisoners during the pursuit. For his overall service he received the brevet rank of major general in March 1865. The XXIII Corps then shifted to North Carolina, where Cooper’s division fought at Bentonville in one of the last large battles of the war. He was mustered out of the army in January 1866.
Brady, Photographs, And A Public Face
During or shortly after the war Cooper sat for Mathew Brady, whose Washington studio turned Union generals into public figures for the northern home front. The surviving carte de visite shows Cooper in a double-breasted frock coat with brigadier’s shoulder straps, standing beside a column with his cap on the plinth. The Horse Soldier catalog description of this photograph, which draws on standard biographical sources, has become one of the more detailed accessible summaries of his wartime career and postwar appointments.
A later portrait made in Stafford County, Kansas, around 1906 and preserved through the local historical society shows an elderly Cooper with white hair and trimmed beard. The image, now available through the Stafford County Museum collection and Wikimedia Commons, visually links the Kentucky-born Unionist general to his adopted Kansas farming community.
These photographs matter because they frame how later generations have imagined Cooper. Genealogical websites, online Civil War forums, and public history pieces about moonshiners and Reconstruction almost always illustrate him with one of these Brady-derived or Stafford County portraits, reinforcing the image of a stern but respectable Union officer who carried his wartime authority into peacetime struggles.
Brownlow’s General: The Tennessee State Guard And Reconstruction Violence
After the war Cooper moved into Knox County politics. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1865, finishing well behind Horace Maynard in a crowded Unionist field. He declined later suggestions that he stand for the state legislature, but he did not stay away from public life.
Governor William G. “Parson” Brownlow, a radical Unionist minister turned politician, fought to keep former Confederates from regaining power and pushed hard for Black suffrage. As ex-Confederate militias and the Ku Klux Klan began targeting freedpeople and white Unionists, Brownlow sought a force that would answer to Nashville rather than to local sheriffs or suspicious federal commanders. In 1867 the legislature authorized a Tennessee State Guard. Brownlow appointed Cooper as commander with the rank of brigadier general on June 7, 1867.
Cooper organized roughly nineteen hundred men into two regiments, structured so that each included companies from all three grand divisions of the state. Many officers were former Union volunteers, and the Guard included Black soldiers at a time when most southern state militias remained whites-only. He worked to secure weapons, uniforms, and pay, then deployed companies to Middle and West Tennessee counties where Klan violence and ex-Confederate intimidation were worst. By late July he reported that the Guard was ready to protect the August elections.
Newspapers across the region followed the experiment closely. Reconstruction critics described Brownlow and Cooper’s Guard as little better than a partisan army, and hostile editorials compared it to Cromwell’s New Model Army. Contemporary dispatches published in papers such as the Weekly Atlanta Intelligencer printed orders from “Headquarters Tennessee State Guards” that show how far Brownlow was willing to go, including instructions to help enforce martial law in contested areas and to support Nashville’s Republican city government. Those orders, preserved through newspaper and manuscript collections at the Tennessee State Library and Archives, are among our best primary windows into Cooper’s Reconstruction role.
Violence did not stop. By early 1869 Brownlow and the legislature again turned to the State Guard after renewed Klan activity. Cooper was reappointed and sent units into nine counties under martial law. He publicly warned that captured Klansmen could be hanged and that any county that refused to aid the Guard might see martial law imposed there as well. Brownlow’s successor, Governor D. C. Senter, soon pulled back from this hard line and began demobilizing the Guard. Cooper handed over his command for the final time in May 1869.
Early twentieth century writers, often sympathetic to former Confederates, repeated charges that the State Guard was simply Brownlow’s coercive machine. In his study Tennessee’s Radical Army, historian Ben H. Severance uses Guard records, newspaper accounts, and Brownlow papers to argue that the force under Cooper actually behaved with more discipline than its critics admitted and that it provided rare, if imperfect, protection for Black voters and white Unionists in a violent moment.
One small but telling Reconstruction document sits today at the University of Tennessee’s Betsey Creekmore Special Collections. In an 1871 letter, Frank Hyberger, private secretary to Governor DeWitt C. Senter, formally accepts Cooper’s resignation as a joint representative in the state General Assembly. The brief note shows a weary general stepping back from politics in a Tennessee where Radical power was already fading.
Revenue Man In The Mountains
Cooper did not retreat entirely to his farm. In May 1869 President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him collector of internal revenue for the Knoxville district. Federal internal revenue records and later recollections indicate that he held the office for roughly a decade, overseeing tax collection across a rugged region where whiskey stills were often hidden in hollows and laurel thickets.
A later Smokies Life article on the pursuit of a moonshiner named Amerine draws on court records and newspapers to describe how former General Cooper used his office. The piece notes that Cooper was placed in charge of federal efforts to locate and destroy illegal stills in East Tennessee. After several armed attacks on his officers, he essentially declared war on moonshining, sending raiding parties that smashed stills and arrested distillers throughout the mountains.
This revenue-collector period matters for Appalachian history because it links Civil War memory to later conflicts over federal power, taxes, and alcohol in the southern mountains. Local stories of “revenuers” climbing ridges and dynamiting stills sometimes feature Cooper by name, and a modern Civil War token featuring his image as a “KKK fighter” nods to both his State Guard and revenue roles.
Kansas Fields And A Knoxville Grave
By 1880 Cooper and his family had left Tennessee for the plains of Stafford County, Kansas. Federal census entries and a Stafford County biographical sketch show him farming near the town of St. John. A 1906 portrait from the Stafford County Museum collection captures him late in life, still upright and formal in his coat.
On May 20, 1910, Cooper died at his Kansas home. An obituary titled “General Cooper Dead” ran in the Barton County Democrat and has since been cited by biographers and TNGenWeb compilers. The notice emphasized his Union service, his State Guard command, and his respected place in the community. His body was brought back east and buried in Knoxville National Cemetery, where his headstone stands near the central monument among other Union officers and enlisted men.
Find A Grave volunteers and descendants continue to maintain his online memorial, usually identifying him as a Whitley County native and Southern Unionist. Genealogical profiles at FamilySearch, Geni, and WikiTree link his Whitley County birth to his moves through Campbell County, Knox County, and finally Stafford County, reflecting the way his life stitched together Appalachian borderlands and the Great Plains.
A Southern Yankee From Whitley County
For southeastern Kentucky and East Tennessee, Joseph Alexander Cooper embodies the contradictions of a border region in civil war. Born near Cumberland Falls, he was shaped by the same landscape that produced Confederate guerrillas, Union scouts, draft dodgers, and deserters. As a Union officer he commanded regiments filled with men who had slipped across the mountains from those same hollows. As Brownlow’s State Guard general and later as a federal revenue man he turned that authority against white supremacist terrorists and illegal distillers, becoming a symbol of federal power that many neighbors resented even while freedpeople and Unionists depended on him.
Modern scholarship has begun to pull these threads together. Works by Randy Bishop, Jack Welsh, Ben Severance, and William Edward Hardy place Cooper at the center of East Tennessee Unionism, Civil War high command, and the contested enforcement of Reconstruction. The popular biography Southern Yankee focuses squarely on his life story and his fight with the Klan, while Smokies Life and other public history outlets use his image to talk about moonshining and federal authority in the Great Smoky Mountains.
For Appalachian historians, the most striking thing may be that genealogists from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Kansas all claim him. Their trees and cemetery photographs quietly insist that this Union general and Reconstruction lightning rod was first of all a farm boy from Whitley County who carried the loyalties and fractures of his home region into some of the fiercest struggles of the nineteenth century.
Sources & Further Reading
Brownlow, William G. Papers, 1865-1869, Tennessee State Library and Archives. Official correspondence and State Guard orders referencing Brigadier General Joseph A. Cooper’s command during Reconstruction, including martial law proclamations and election protection orders. Wikipedia+1
Frank Hyberger to General Joseph A. Cooper, July 1871, accepting Cooper’s resignation as joint representative in the Tennessee General Assembly, MS-1307, Betsey Creekmore Special Collections, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
“Headquarters Tennessee State Guards” orders as printed in contemporaneous newspapers such as the Weekly Atlanta Intelligencer, October 1867, available on microfilm and through Georgia Historic Newspapers, documenting State Guard deployments and election supervision.
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, series 1 and 3, especially volumes covering the East Tennessee campaigns, the Atlanta campaign, the Franklin-Nashville campaign, and operations in North Carolina, where Cooper appears in orders of battle and dispatches as colonel and later brigadier general of Tennessee units.
W. R. Carter, History of the First Regiment of Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry in the Great War of the Rebellion (Knoxville, 1902), along with its excerpted portrait and caption of “General Joseph A. Cooper” as reproduced in That D—-d Brownlow: Being a Saucy and Malicious Description of William Gannaway Brownlow (Internet Archive). Internet Archive+1
Mathew Brady studio portrait of General Joseph A. Cooper, described in “Three Quarter Standing View of General Joseph A. Cooper by Brady,” Horse Soldier catalog, with biographical summary of his service and postwar offices. Horse Soldier
William R. Gray, “Box 5, Neg. No. 1772: General Joseph A. Cooper,” Stafford County Museum Collection (Fort Hays State University Forsyth Library Digital Collections). Late-life portrait of Cooper taken in Stafford County, Kansas, 1906. scholars.fhsu.edu+1
“General Joseph A. Cooper Dies in St. John’s, Kan.,” Barton County Democrat, May 27, 1910, cited in Campbell County TNGenWeb biography “General Joseph Alexander Cooper,” which summarizes his life from Whitley County birth to Stafford County death and Knoxville burial. TNGenWeb+1
Find A Grave memorial 5561944, “Joseph Alexander Cooper,” Knoxville National Cemetery, with photographs of his headstone and compiled basic biographical data, including birth in Whitley County, Kentucky, and death near St. John, Stafford County, Kansas. Find A Grave+1
FamilySearch profile “Joseph Alexander Cooper (1823-1910)” and linked records; Geni and WikiTree entries for “Brevet Maj. Gen. Joseph Alexander Cooper,” which compile census, military, and family information tying his Whitley and Campbell County roots to his later life in Tennessee and Kansas. FamilySearch+2WikiTree+2
Ben H. Severance, Tennessee’s Radical Army: The State Guard and Its Role in Reconstruction (University of Tennessee Press, 2005), especially chapters on the Guard’s formation, deployments, and discipline under Cooper’s command. Google Books+1
William Edward Hardy, “‘Fare well to all Radicals’: Redeeming Tennessee, 1869-1870” (PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2013), which situates Cooper and the State Guard in the political struggle between Radical and Conservative forces during the end of Reconstruction. TRACE+1
Oliver Perry Temple and Mary Boyce Temple, “General Joseph A. Cooper,” in Notable Men of Tennessee for 1833 to 1875: Their Times and Their Contemporaries (Cosmopolitan Press, 1912), an early biographical sketch based in part on personal acquaintance and correspondence. Heritage Books, Inc.+1
Randy Bishop, “Joseph Alexander Cooper,” in Civil War Generals of Tennessee (Pelican, 2013), and Jack D. Welsh, “Joseph Alexander Cooper,” in Medical Histories of Union Generals (Kent State University Press, 2005), both of which synthesize his military career, health, and postwar life. Wikipedia+1
Ezra J. Warner, Generals in Blue: Lives of the Union Commanders (LSU Press, 1964); John H. and David J. Eicher, Civil War High Commands (Stanford University Press, 2001); and articles such as “Cooper, Joseph Alexander | Biographic Profiles” on CivilWarTalk, which summarize his rank progression and major campaigns. Civil War Wiki+2Ranker+2
Southern Yankee: The Civil War and Reconstruction Story of General Joseph A. Cooper, a modern book-length biography that follows his life from Whitley County through the war, the State Guard, and his Kansas years, with particular attention to his fight against the Ku Klux Klan. Amazon+1
Smokies Life, “The Pursuit of Amerine the Moonshiner: An Early Morning Raid,” which uses Cooper’s tenure as internal revenue collector to explore federal anti-moonshining campaigns in the Smokies and their legacy in regional memory. Smokies Life+1