William Gannaway "Parson" Brownlow (August 29, 1805 – April 29, 1877) was an American newspaper editor, minister, and politician who served as Governor of the state of Tennessee from 1865 to 1869 and as a United States Senator from Tennessee from 1869 to 1875. Brownlow's uncompromising and radical viewpoints and his relentless vindectives against his opponents made him one of the most divisive figures in Tennessee political history and one of the most controversial politicians of the Reconstruction-era South. His gubernatorial policies, which have been described as both autocratic and progressive, helped Tennessee become the first former Confederate state to be readmitted to the Union after the U.S. Civil War, and at the same time his policies of disenfranchisement of former Confederates drove his opponents to create organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan.^[1]