why would brownlow -- his writing reveals he's a pretty racist guy. very harsh feelings about african-americans before the civil war. so why is he advocating african-american voting rights? >> if you think about it if 30% of the adult white male population is unionist that's the core of any support for his government, the only way for him to get control is to sort of indefinitely disqualify the vast majority of the white male population and the views of an awful lot of native tennesseans, that that renders state government illegitimate. so if you're going to bring more of that white male population back into the electorate you're going to lose control unless you put it in the hands of tennessee's black male population. so that's ultimately what it and we look at his speech. he is calling for equal rights and sufferage that is the right to vote. march 5th tennessee becomes the first state to actually other than maryland and missouri to actually abolish slavery and they abolished it on march 5th. just months after all of that activity by african-america

were they in front of brownlow over the following brownlow -- or were they following brownlow? and they were in front of brownlow on the suffrage issue. in 1864, 6 men returned from syracuse, new york, the national colored men's convention from west tennessee and middle tennessee -- convention, three were from west tennessee and three were from middle tennessee. one of the issues was abolishment of slavery. you had the emancipation proclamation, which didn't even pretend to free slaves in tennessee because lincoln exempt in tennessee like he did a couple of other states. so african-americans had taken in their own initiatives to push for constitutional emancipation. because remember, the proclamation, the next president can throw it out the door, it was just a proclamation by lincoln. it was nothing official or constitutional. so we knew that, african-americans, and in syracuse, new york that was one of the first goals they established, was the constitutional abolishment of slavery. secondly, if all of these african-americans, 33,000 of them, were going to die on the civil war