Appalachian Figures
On a modern map, Elk Spring Valley in Wayne County, Kentucky looks like one more fold in the Appalachian foothills. In the early nineteenth century it was a busy crossroads, a place where Virginia and North Carolina families filtered into Kentucky, then followed the rivers and roads south into Tennessee. Among those families were the Culloms, whose son William would leave that valley, carry its borderland politics to Washington City, and find himself at the center of the struggle over slavery in the 1850s.
By the time he died in 1896, William Cullom had been frontier boy, Whig congressman, Clerk of the U.S. House, accused mismanager of federal funds, Confederate-era “reluctant rebel,” and Reconstruction-era judge. His story begins in Elk Spring but it never really leaves the upper Cumberland world that binds Wayne County, Kentucky to middle Tennessee.
Elk Spring Valley and the Cullom network
Most modern biographical notes on William Cullom begin the same way. He was born 4 June 1810 in Elk Spring Valley, near Monticello in Wayne County, Kentucky, the son of William and Elizabeth Northcraft (often rendered Northcroft) Cullom. Both parents were Maryland natives who had joined the stream of migrants pushing into southern Kentucky in the early republic. Goodspeed’s nineteenth century history of Tennessee remembered the elder Cullom simply as “a farmer,” but in Wayne County the family name carried more weight.
Augusta Phillips Johnson’s A Century of Wayne County, Kentucky, 1800–1900 traces a dense web of Coffey, Jones, and Cullom kin who settled around Elk Spring and Monticello, then spilled down what she called the “great Indian route to the South” into middle Tennessee. She notes Edward N. Cullom in the state senate and on county tax lists, and remarks that “some of the Cullom … families” passed on into Tennessee along with other Wayne County names. William grew up in that milieu, a child of a family already accustomed to public life and political responsibility.
The Papers of Abraham Lincoln project, which reconstructs the lives of Lincoln’s associates and contemporaries, confirms this Wayne County origin story. Its biographical sketch places William’s birth in Elk Spring Valley and notes that he remained near Monticello long enough to gain his early schooling before looking southward.
From Monticello to the Tennessee bar
During the winter holidays of 1830, according to the Goodspeed history, the younger William left Kentucky for Overton County, Tennessee, where he read law with an older brother. He soon went back across the Cumberland Plateau to Lexington and enrolled in the law department at Transylvania University, one of the leading law schools in the region. After two years of study he was admitted to the bar on his twenty-fourth birthday, 4 June 1834, licensed by Tennessee judges Abraham Caruthers and Robert L. Caruthers.
Cullom opened his first law office at Gainesboro in Jackson County, Tennessee. There he practiced in the county and circuit courts of both Tennessee and his native Kentucky, an early sign that his professional world, like his family’s, ignored the state line. By 1840 he had relocated west to Carthage in Smith County, on the Cumberland River.
Carthage is still dominated by the big brick house on a hill known as the Cullum Mansion. National Register documents describe it as a Greek Revival structure completed in 1848, built for the rising attorney and politician William Cullom. From its veranda he could look down on the small town whose courts and politics supplied his livelihood.
Goodspeed’s sketch records that the Tennessee legislature elected him attorney general of his judicial circuit in 1834–35 and that he held the post for six years. After leaving that office he remained a prominent figure at the bar in Carthage and the surrounding counties.
Family life tied him back to Wayne County. In September 1838, county marriage records there show a marriage between “William Cullom” and Virginia A. Ingram, a match later cited by the Papers of Abraham Lincoln biography.
Whig on the national stage
Cullom entered state politics as a Whig, the party that drew many border-state lawyers and professionals who favored economic development and legislative compromise. Tennessee records list him as a state senator in the 25th and 26th General Assemblies, serving from 1843 to 1847. In 1848 he served as a presidential elector on the Whig ticket of Zachary Taylor, a fact repeated proudly in Goodspeed’s sketch, which notes that he was the last surviving elector from that slate.
In 1851 voters in Tennessee’s Eighth District sent him to Washington as a Whig representative in the Thirty-second Congress. After a round of redistricting he won reelection from the Fourth District in 1853 and served through the Thirty-third Congress as well.
In Washington he quickly made himself heard on the slavery controversy. In May 1852 he delivered a speech that was printed as a campaign pamphlet titled The compromise-presidency. In it he defended the Compromise of 1850 and argued that the nation needed a president committed to preserving that fragile sectional peace rather than reopening the conflict.
Two years later he faced an even more volatile issue when Senator Stephen Douglas introduced the Kansas–Nebraska bill, which would repeal the Missouri Compromise’s ban on slavery north of 36°30ʹ and open the new territories to slavery under “popular sovereignty.”
On 11 April 1854 Cullom rose in the House to speak against the bill. The pamphlet version of his address, printed at the Congressional Globe office, survives in several collections, including the Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Pamphlet Collection and microfilm sets of congressional debates.
A modern historian of the Kansas–Nebraska Act summarized Cullom’s argument from that speech. He warned that the measure was the “work of politicians … to strangle the legitimate legislation of the country” and insisted that repealing the Missouri line would shatter trust between sections that had lived under that compromise for a generation. He reminded colleagues that he came from Kentucky stock and that border-state Whigs like himself saw the bill as a dangerous scheme that threatened both Union and peace.
The debate grew hot even by antebellum standards. During one exchange, Cullom clashed with fellow Tennessean William Churchwell. According to a later House historical sketch and a modern Roll Call article, Cullom leaped at Churchwell in anger; Churchwell drew a pistol before another member wrestled it away, preventing bloodshed on the House floor.
Cullom’s stand did not save his seat. In the 1854 elections he lost a close race, defeated by about seventy votes out of some fifteen thousand cast, as Tennessee’s Whig Party crumbled under sectional strain.
Slaveholder and border-state moderate
Like many upper Cumberland elites, William Cullom built his career on both law and slavery. Federal census and slave schedule data, compiled and interpreted in the Papers of Abraham Lincoln biography, show him as a householder in Smith County by 1840 and an attorney there by 1850. The 1850 slave schedule lists several enslaved people in his household. By 1860 the Smith County schedules record him as the owner of more than thirty enslaved men, women, and children, while the population census credits him with substantial real and personal property.
The Political Graveyard website, which aggregates political biographies, bluntly labels him a “slaveowner” and lists him among the Whig lawyers of Carthage who rose from Elk Spring Valley.
This combination of moderation in national debates and deep personal investment in human bondage was typical of many border-state Whigs. Cullom opposed reopening the slavery question when he thought that might imperil the Union or dishonor previous compromises. At the same time, he defended the constitutional protections that shielded slavery where it already existed and benefited directly from enslaved labor in his own household and on his property.
Clerk of the House and the question of integrity
After his defeat in 1854, Cullom did not immediately retreat from national politics. At the opening of the Thirty-fourth Congress in December 1855, members elected him Clerk of the House of Representatives, a powerful administrative post that controlled payrolls, printing contracts, and patronage. His signature appears on House reports to the Speaker and on detailed expense accounts in the U.S. Serial Set, where closing attestations read “Respectfully, William Cullom, Clerk of the House of Representatives.”
The Clerkship placed him at the center of another crisis. The Thirty-fourth Congress struggled through a chaotic battle over the speakership amid the rise of the Republican Party and the ongoing violence in Kansas. Ultimately, Northern opponents of the Kansas–Nebraska Act secured the chair for Nathaniel P. Banks. Cullom, a Southern Whig turned American Party man, tried to navigate these cross-currents while stewarding the House’s internal machinery.
His tenure did not end cleanly. In 1857 the House ordered an inquiry into “the official conduct and accounts of William Cullom,” focusing on alleged financial irregularities in his management of funds. The resulting report, printed in the Congressional Globe appendix and U.S. Serial Set, criticized his accounting practices.
The controversy did not end there. A contemporary pamphlet often titled A review of the report of Hon. Horace Maynard … answered the charges at length and devoted an entire section to “The premeditation of frauds and peculations, by Wm. Cullom,” assembling hostile testimony in order to paint him as a knowing wrongdoer. Whatever the motives behind that partisan attack, Cullom lost the Clerkship and returned to Tennessee with his reputation under a cloud.
War, Reconstruction, and the “reluctant rebel”
The coming of secession and civil war placed border-state Whigs in an impossible position. A modern essay by Thomas K. Potter Jr. on the Cullom and Gardenhire families describes William as a “reluctant rebel,” a man whose long Whig career inclined him toward the Union but whose identity and kinship ties pulled him toward his state once Tennessee left the Union.
Evidence from census records and later county histories suggests that Cullom spent the war years in Tennessee, his legal and political career interrupted but not destroyed. After the conflict he shifted his base eastward into the upper East Tennessee coal country.
By 1870 the federal census places him in Anderson County, living near Clinton. Goodspeed’s late nineteenth century biography picks up the thread from there. It reports that Governor John C. Brown appointed him attorney general for the Fourth Judicial Circuit soon after the war, and that he later resigned that office but remained an influential legal figure. The Papers of Abraham Lincoln biography adds that in the 1870s he served as attorney general and then judge for Tennessee’s Sixteenth Judicial Circuit, which covered parts of the upper Cumberland and East Tennessee.
In these years Cullom also rebuilt his personal life. The Wayne County marriage record of 1838 documents his first marriage to Virginia Ingram. After her death he married again in White County, Tennessee, wedding Mary Griffin in January 1869. Goodspeed, writing in 1887, notes that he and Mary Griffin had eight children and that the aging judge had moved from Clinton into the countryside, “one mile distant from that town,” where he devoted himself to farming.
Religiously, the Political Graveyard entry describes him as first a Methodist and later a Catholic, a shift that hints at personal and social transformations in the Reconstruction South but that surviving sources do not fully explain.
Death, burial, and memory
William Cullom died at Clinton in Anderson County on 6 December 1896, at the age of eighty-six. Obituaries in the Knoxville Tribune and the Chattanooga Daily Times praised his long public service, from the days of Zachary Taylor to the era of industrializing East Tennessee. The Papers of Abraham Lincoln biography notes that he was first buried in McAdoo Cemetery at Clinton, then reinterred in Mount Olivet Cemetery at Chattanooga, a city that had grown from Civil War crossroads to regional industrial center during his lifetime.
Today, most visible reminders of his life stand not in Washington but in the border counties of Kentucky and Tennessee. The Cullum Mansion still looks out over Carthage, its Greek Revival lines recalling the prosperous antebellum lawyer who built it. In Wayne County, genealogists tracing the Coffey and Cullom families still point to Elk Spring Valley as the cradle of a political clan that produced not only William but also his brother Alvan and his nephew, Illinois governor and U.S. senator Shelby M. Cullom.
For Appalachian historians, William’s life illustrates how deeply the region was entangled in national struggles over slavery, Union, and political honor. The boy who grew up among Elk Spring’s early settlers carried that borderland perspective into congressional debates over the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas–Nebraska Act. He fought, literally at times, to defend what he saw as the rights of his section and the integrity of long-standing compromises while holding dozens of enslaved people in his own name.
His story also reminds us that the Appalachian past is not only a tale of miners and mountaineers but of lawyers and legislators whose decisions in Nashville and Washington shaped the lives of people in remote hollows. William Cullom stands at the junction of those worlds, a man whose career rose from a Kentucky valley into the House chamber and then back again to the courthouses and hillsides of the upper Cumberland.
Sources and further reading
William Cullom, The compromise-presidency: Speech of Hon. Wm. Cullom, of Tennessee, on the compromise, &c., in the House of Representatives, May 17, 1852 (Washington: Gideon, Printers, 1852). Pamphlet campaign edition, with digitized copies accessible through Wikimedia Commons and the Internet Archive.Wikimedia Commons+1
William Cullom, Speech of Hon. Wm. Cullom, of Tennessee, on the Nebraska and Kansas bill, in the House of Representatives, April 11, 1854 (Washington: Congressional Globe Office, 1854). Preserved in the Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Pamphlet Collection and other libraries.en.onread.com+1
House administrative reports and expense accounts signed “William Cullom, Clerk of the House of Representatives,” printed in the Congressional Globe appendix and U.S. Serial Set during the Thirty-fourth Congress.The Library of Congress
Report on the Official Conduct and Accounts of William Cullom (U.S. House of Representatives, 1857), the investigative report that examined his performance as Clerk.The Library of Congress
A review of the report of Hon. Horace Maynard … (1850s pamphlet), a contemporary printed response that criticized Cullom’s management and presented evidence of alleged “frauds and peculations,” now digitized by the Library of Congress.The Library of Congress+1
Wayne County, Kentucky, marriage records documenting the 20 September 1838 marriage of William Cullom and Virginia A. Ingram.papersofabrahamlincoln.org
White County, Tennessee, marriage records for William Cullom and Mary Griffin, dated 18 January 1869.papersofabrahamlincoln.org
United States federal population censuses and slave schedules for Smith County (1840, 1850, 1860) and Overton and Anderson Counties (1870), which track Cullom’s moves, property, and slaveholding. These are cited and synthesized in the Papers of Abraham Lincoln biography.papersofabrahamlincoln.org
Obituaries and death notices in the Knoxville Tribune and Chattanooga Daily Times, 22 December 1896, announcing his death and summarizing his career.papersofabrahamlincoln.org
Grave and reinterment records from McAdoo Cemetery in Clinton and Mount Olivet Cemetery in Chattanooga, as compiled in the Political Graveyard and cemetery registries.politicalgraveyard.com
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, “Cullom, William (C000974),” official congressional biography summarizing his legislative service and Clerkship.Bioguide
U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives, “CULLOM, William,” with a concise biography and carefully curated bibliography of primary sources, including his Kansas–Nebraska speech and the House investigation.History, Art & Archives+1
Papers of Abraham Lincoln, “Cullom, William,” a modern scholarly biography that reconstructs his life from vital records, censuses, and contemporary press coverage, with attention to his slaveholding and religious affiliation.papersofabrahamlincoln.org
Goodspeed Publishing Company, History of Tennessee, Anderson County biographical section, “Cullom, William,” a late nineteenth century sketch that details his education, offices held, and later years near Clinton.Genealogy Trails
Augusta Phillips Johnson, A Century of Wayne County, Kentucky, 1800–1900, especially the chapters on Elk Spring Valley, the Coffey and Cullom families, and early Wayne County politics.Genealogy Trails+1
Thomas K. Potter Jr., “My Brother, My Enemy: Fire-Eaters, Lincolnites and a Reluctant Rebel,” Middle Tennessee Journal of Genealogy & History 17 (Summer 2003): 40–45, which analyzes the Cullom and Gardenhire families and characterizes William as a “reluctant rebel” in the secession crisis.MTGS
Political Graveyard, “Cullom family,” for concise prosopographical notes on William, his kin, his party, his religion, and his burial, with links to additional reference biographies.politicalgraveyard.com
Cullum Mansion National Register of Historic Places nomination and related local histories, which document the 1848 Carthage residence William Cullom built on the profits of his law practice and political career.Wikipedia+1