County of courthouse: Giles County
Location of courthouse: 1st St., Jefferson St., Madison St., & 2nd St., Pulaski
Location of county: dead center of southern border in state: crossroads of I-65, US-31 & US-64
Created: November 14, 1809
Elevation: 585 meters (1,919 feet)
Population: 29,401 (2017)
The Person:
"William Branch Giles (August 12, 1762 – December 4, 1830; the g is pronounced like a j) was an American statesman, long-term Senator from Virginia, and the 24th Governor of Virginia. He served in the House of Representatives from 1790 to 1798 and again from 1801 to 1803; in between, he was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, and was an Elector for Jefferson (and Aaron Burr) in 1800. He served as United States Senator from 1804 to 1815, and then served briefly in the House of Delegates again. After a time in private life, he joined the opposition to John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, in 1824; he ran for the Senate again in 1825, and was defeated, but appointed Governor for 3 one-year terms in 1827; he was succeeded by John Floyd, in the year of his death.
"He was born and died in Amelia County, where he built his home, The Wigwam. Giles attended Prince Edward Academy, now Hampden–Sydney College, and the College of New Jersey now Princeton University; he probably followed Samuel Stanhope Smith, who was teaching at Prince Edward Academy when he was appointed President of the College in 1779. He then went on to study law with Chancellor George Wythe and at the College of William and Mary; he was admitted to the bar in 1786. Giles supported the new Constitution during the ratification debates of 1788, but was not a member of the ratifying convention.
"Giles was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in a special election in 1790, taking the seat of Theodorick Bland, who had died in office on June 1; he is believed to be the first member of the United States Congress to be elected in a special election. He was to be re-elected three times; he resigned October 2, 1798, on the grounds of ill health, and in disgust at the Alien and Sedition Acts.
"During this first period in Congress, he fervently supported his fellow Virginians James Madison and Thomas Jefferson against Alexander Hamilton and his ideas for a national bank. He introduced three sets of resolutions in 1793, which criticized Hamilton's conduct as Secretary of the Treasury to the point of accusing him of misconduct in office; he opposed the first Bank of the United States and Jay's Treaty; he resisted naval appropriations during the Quasi-War of 1798. In the same year, he voted for the Virginia Resolutions in the House of Delegates.
"After another term in the House, from 1801 to 1803, Giles was appointed as a Senator from Virginia after the resignation of Wilson Cary Nicholas in 1804. Giles served in the US Senate, being reappointed in 1810 until he resigned on March 3, 1815. Giles strongly advocated the removal of Justice Samuel Chase after his impeachment, urging the Senate to consider it as a political decision (as to whether the people of the United States should have confidence in Chase) rather than as a trial.
"Giles was deeply disappointed by the acquittal of Chase. He supported the election of Madison as President in 1808, in preference to the Federalist's candidate Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. In fact, Giles was Madison's chief advocate in Virginia.
"After the election, however, he joined with Senator Samuel Smith of Maryland and his brother Robert Smith, the Secretary of State, in criticizing Madison; first as too weak on Britain and then, in 1812, as too precipitate in going to war; however, voted for the declaration of war. He particularly disliked Albert Gallatin, the Secretary of the Treasury, and was largely responsible for preventing his nomination as Secretary of State and for defeating Gallatin's bill of 1811 for a new Bank of the United States.
"Giles's refusal to accept the General Assembly's instructions led to his rejection at the next poll for a senator. (Senators in those days were elected by the state legislatures.) Giles served one relatively uneventful term in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1816–1817 and then retired from political office for a time. He, however, published opinion pieces and columns, chiefly in the Richmond, Virginia, Enquirer, in which he deplored the Era of Good Feelings as a false prosperity, given over to banks, tariffs, and fraudulent internal improvements; these would centralize and corrupt government, and ruin the farmers. He attacked John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay as he had attacked Hamilton, calling them corrupt Anglophiles.
"Giles also published a criticism of the Jeffersonian program for public education. As Giles explained, it was unjust to tax one man to educate another man's children, and the teachers that the government employed would constitute a special interest, always at the ready to vote for higher taxes and higher government spending. Besides, he said, giving every boy in Virginia three years of school would have limited practical utility, would deprive farm families of much-needed labor power, and would leave the typical "scholar" unfitted for the return to hard labor that awaited him.
"When James Barbour left the Senate in 1825, Giles attempted to persuade the legislature to appoint him as replacement; they appointed John Randolph instead. In 1826, Giles was again elected to the House of Delegates, and in 1827 he was elected Governor; Giles served as Governor of Virginia for three terms, from March 4, 1827 to March 4, 1830. From the governorship, Giles encouraged Virginia's Senator Littleton Waller Tazewell to organize a southern resistance to the American System of Henry Clay centered on a boycott on northern manufactures. Tazewell found little support for it among southern senators.
"In Giles's last term, he was a member of the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829–1830 where he strongly supported the existing apportionment of the House of Delegates giving the eastern counties of Virginia, with a minority of the voters, control of the legislature. He did favor reform of the suffrage requirements, however. Giles also opposed the movement in the Convention to strengthen his own office, the governorship. Strong governorships in other states, such as New York, were at the center of political machines kept together by patronage and corruption, he said, and the reason that Virginia had not suffered from those ills was that the governorship in his state was too weak to be worth fighting for. Rather than follow the example of New York, with its party machine, it was better for Virginia to retain George Mason's executive model. Giles lost to some extent: while the governor's term remained short and was still accountable to the General Assembly, the Constitution of 1830 abolished the privy council, thus making the governorship a bit more independent." ~ Wikipedia
The Place:
"The Tennessee General Assembly created Giles County in 1809 from land once part of North Carolina. Andrew Jackson suggested the name “Giles” to the legislature in recognition of the strong support Congressman William Branch Giles had given to Tennessee in the successful bid for statehood in 1796. Since Indian treaties had not been finalized, settlers were not permitted to move onto their land until 1806.
"Both Elkton and Prospect claim the designation of first settlement in the county; they were followed by Lynn Creek, Campbellsville, Pulaski, Bodenham, Crosswater, Aspen Hill, and Blooming Grove. Of these, Pulaski and Lynnville exist today as incorporated towns. Other incorporated towns are Minor Hill and Ardmore.
"Pulaski was designated the county seat and a courthouse erected on a square in the center of the county in 1811. The present neoclassical beauty, erected in 1909, has been placed in the National Register of Historic Places. Busts of three natives who served as governors of the state, Aaron V. Brown, Neill Smith Brown, and John C. Brown, were placed in the foyer as a bicentennial project.
"Aaron V. Brown (1795-1859) served in both houses of the Tennessee General Assembly and the U.S. House of Representatives before becoming governor of Tennessee (1845-47). In 1847 Brown, a Democrat, was defeated in the gubernatorial race by a fellow Giles Countian, Neill S. Brown, a Whig. Aaron Brown's political activities focused on national issues, particularly slavery, and he is credited with authorship of the “Tennessee Platform” in defense of national unity presented to the Nashville Convention of 1850.
"The location of Giles County on the Nashville and Decatur Railroad made it a center of activity during the Civil War. Though no major battle was fought within its boundaries, the county fell into Federal hands after the battle of Fort Donelson and was occupied by Union troops for several years. Grenville Dodge was in command in 1863 when Sam Davis, a young Confederate soldier and member of Coleman's Scouts, was condemned and executed for spying. A statue of Davis stands on the south side of the town square, a monument to the twenty-one-year-old soldier whose last words were immortalized by Confederate veterans: “If I had a thousand lives, I would lose them all here before I would betray my friend or the confidence of my informer.” The county contributed four generals to the Confederate cause: John C. Brown, G. W. Gordon, John Adams, and Preston Smith. More than two thousand soldiers from Giles County filled the Southern ranks.
"Pulaski was the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. Organized shortly after the war by John C. Lester, James R. Crowe, John Kennedy, Calvin Jones, Richard R. Reed, and Frank O. McCord, the secret society spread across the state as its reputation for violence and intimidation evolved. In recent years attempts to stage Klan activities in Pulaski have met stiff resistance from the community.
"Giles County was the birthplace of noted African American architect Moses McKissack, founder of McKissack and McKissack, one of the oldest African American architectural firms in the nation. The firm's Bridgeforth School was built with support from the Rosenwald Fund in 1927. Giles County has more than one hundred National Register properties including large downtown districts in Pulaski. Elkton boasts the Gardner House (ca. 1896), which belonged to Matt Gardner, a local minister, merchant, and community leader.
"Giles County is also the birthplace of two nationally known writers, Donald Davidson and John Crowe Ransom. Davidson and Ransom were associated with the group of poets at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s known as the Fugitives. These men and women have been credited with the literary flowering that emerged as the Southern Renascence. Davidson and Ransom were also involved in another famous literary group, the Agrarians, whose 1930 anthology I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition received widespread attention.
"From its inception, education has played an important role in the history of Giles County. Pulaski Academy, later known as Wurtenburg Academy, then Giles College, and chartered by the legislature when the county was organized, was the first of many academies, colleges, and private schools. Martin Methodist College, established in 1872, was a gift from Thomas Martin in honor of his daughter, Victoria, an advocate for female education. The four-year college is administered by the Tennessee Conference of the United Methodist Church.
"A county library, donated by the late C. A. Craig, a founder of the former National Life and Accident Insurance Company in memory of his wife, serves the public in a renovated building. The building also houses a county genealogy room and a museum containing artifacts brought to the county by the early settlers. The Sam Davis Museum, a Civil War museum organized by the United Daughters of the Confederacy is located on Sam Davis Avenue and is administered by the historical society.
"In the post-World War II era, a number of institutions including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, local banks, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Retail Merchants Association have developed a diversified economy to carry the county into the twenty-first century. The county’s 2000 population was 29,447." ~ Tennessee Encyclopedia