During the war, the Henegar House reflected divided loyalties common in Tennessee, as owner Henry Benton Henegar supported the Union while his wife, Margaret Lea Henegar, supported secession. Whenever Confederates occupied Charleston, Benton Henegar left, but Margaret Henegar remained regardless of which army held the town, later saying she met only courteous treatment from both sides. At various times the house served as headquarters for Union generals William T. Sherman and Oliver O. Howard and Confederate generals Marcus J. Wright and Simon Bolivar Buckner. On November 30, 1863, assistant U.S. Secretary of War Charles A. Dana met in the parlor with Sherman and Brigadier General James H. Wilson, chief engineer of the Army of the Cumberland, and delivered an order from General Ulysses S. Grant directing Sherman to take command of the force going to relieve Union General Ambrose Burnside’s army in Knoxville, which was besieged by Confederate General James Longstreet. According to family tradition, Sherman advised Benton Henegar to take the family north for safety, but the next morning on the back porch Margaret Henegar asked why they should leave after enduring the war’s dangers and hardships so far, and Sherman is said to have replied, “Madam, when I get through with the Southland a bird can’t live here!.” The two-story Federal-style house was begun about 1849 on the site of General Winfield Scott’s headquarters at Fort Cass during the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of the Cherokee in the 1830s. In that same year Henry Benton Henegar married Margaret Lea, daughter of Luke Lea, who had served as a Tennessee representative from 1833 to 1837 and Tennessee secretary of state from 1837 to 1839. The house was completed in 1852 after the Henegars returned from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where they had lived with Luke Lea during his service as Indian agent from 1850 to 1851.