Representative Samuel Mayes Arnell

Samuel Mayes Arnell (May 3, 1833 – July 20, 1903) was an American lawyer and politician who represented the 6th congressional district of Tennessee in the United States House of Representatives. A staunch Unionist and Republican, he played a notable role in Tennessee’s Civil War–era and Reconstruction politics. Although he later became an advocate for expanding voting rights to formerly enslaved people, he himself had owned slaves. Over the course of his public career he served as a state legislator, constitutional convention delegate, congressman, school superintendent, and postmaster, and in later life he wrote a memoir reflecting on the tumultuous decade of war and Reconstruction in his home state.

Arnell was born on May 3, 1833, at the Zion Settlement near Columbia, in Maury County, Tennessee. He grew up in a slaveholding society that would later be at the center of his political and legal work. He attended Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, an experience that exposed him to New England intellectual and political currents in the years leading up to the Civil War. After his studies he returned to Tennessee, read law, was admitted to the bar, and commenced the practice of law in Columbia. In 1859 he diversified his professional interests by starting a leather manufacturing business, combining commercial activity with his legal practice. During this period he owned slaves, a fact that underscored the complexity and contradictions of his later Unionist and Reconstruction-era positions.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Arnell emerged as an active and outspoken supporter of the Union in a region deeply divided in its loyalties. His Unionist stance placed him at personal risk in Confederate-dominated Middle Tennessee. He suffered physical injury, repeated threats to his life, and damage to his property at the hands of Confederate forces and sympathizers. These experiences reinforced his commitment to the Union cause and shaped his subsequent political career, particularly his advocacy for restructuring Tennessee’s political order after the war and redefining the rights of former slaves and former Confederates.

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Arnell became a significant figure in Tennessee’s Reconstruction politics. He served as a member of the Tennessee state constitutional convention in 1865, which met to revise the state’s fundamental law in light of secession and emancipation. That same year he was elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives, serving in 1865 and 1866. In the state legislature he authored a series of bills designed to expand voting rights to formerly enslaved African Americans, while at the same time seeking to curtail the political influence of those who had supported the Confederacy. His measures attempted, though ultimately unsuccessfully, to strip the voting rights of former Confederate soldiers for five years and former Confederate officials for fifteen years. Historians have noted that the legal definitions he employed to extend rights to Black Tennesseans also helped establish an early version of the “one-drop” rule in Tennessee law, embedding a rigid racial classification system into the state’s statutes.

Upon the readmission of Tennessee to representation in Congress, Arnell was elected as an Unconditional Unionist to the Thirty-ninth Congress and subsequently re-elected as a Republican to the Fortieth and Forty-first Congresses. He represented Tennessee’s 6th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives from July 24, 1866, to March 3, 1871, serving three consecutive terms during a critical phase of national Reconstruction. As a member of the Republican Party in Congress, he contributed to the legislative process at a time when questions of civil rights, readmission of former Confederate states, and the redefinition of American citizenship dominated the national agenda. During the Forty-first Congress he held important committee assignments, serving as chairman of the Committee on Expenditures in the Department of State and as chairman of the United States House Committee on Education and Labor, positions that placed him at the center of debates over federal administration, public education, and labor policy in the postwar era. He also participated in national party affairs as a delegate from Tennessee to the Republican National Convention in 1868. Arnell chose not to be a candidate for renomination in 1870, bringing his congressional service to a close in March 1871.

After leaving Congress, Arnell resumed the practice of law, initially in Washington, D.C., where he drew on his legislative experience and national contacts. He later returned to his hometown of Columbia, Tennessee, continuing his legal career while also engaging in local public service. From 1879 to 1885 he served as postmaster of Columbia, overseeing federal postal operations in the community. Following his tenure as postmaster, he became superintendent of public schools in Columbia, holding that position from 1885 to 1888. In this role he was responsible for the administration and oversight of the local school system, extending his long-standing interest in education that had been evident during his chairmanship of the House Committee on Education and Labor.

In his later years Arnell turned to writing to document the era in which he had lived and served. Drawing on his experiences as a Unionist in Confederate Tennessee, a Reconstruction legislator, and a member of Congress, he authored a memoir titled “Ten Years of Tennessee History” or “The War of Secession and Reconstruction in Tennessee, 1861–1871.” In this work he offered a contemporaneous account of the political and social upheavals that transformed Tennessee and the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, preserving his perspective on the conflicts over loyalty, race, and citizenship that had defined his public life.

Samuel Mayes Arnell died on July 20, 1903, in Johnson City, Washington County, Tennessee. He was interred in Monte Vista Cemetery. His career, spanning law, business, state and national politics, and educational administration, reflected the broader struggles of Tennessee and the United States as they moved from a slaveholding republic through civil war and into the contested terrain of Reconstruction and its aftermath.