DeKalb County differed from surrounding counties during the Civil War era, as a sizeable minority opposed secession and voted against it in the June 8, 1861 referendum. Their champion was slave owner and Congressman William B. Stokes, while the majority followed former Congressman and Smithville attorney John H. Savage, who had lost to Stokes in the 1859 election. The war intensified the already bitter rivalry between the two men, who became colonels on opposite sides, with Savage commanding the 16th Tennessee Infantry (CS) and Stokes leading the 5th Tennessee Cavalry (US). To secessionists, Stokes’s followers became “scalawags,” and Col. John F. Goodner of the 7th Tennessee Infantry (CS) denounced the county’s Unionists as “thieves headed by the scum of all creation, Stokes’ arabs.” After the Confederate Army of Tennessee withdrew from the county in the spring of 1863, Stokes and his Union cavalry played a large role in subduing local Confederate guerrilla activity. Frank Marchbanks, a young lawyer of Sparta, was chased down by Union troops near Sligo ferry and killed, and his tombstone, erected by John H. Savage, reads “Murdered by Stokes Cavalry.” After the war, Stokes was reelected to Congress and supported Republican Reconstruction policies, which former Confederates hated. In 1869, Stokes ran for governor as a Republican but failed to carry DeKalb County. Savage did not return there but reestablished his law practice in McMinnville, where he became a vocal Democratic defender of the Confederate Lost Cause in the Tennessee General Assembly in the 1870s. Bitter feeling persisted among many DeKalb County residents for years after the war, and every election brought renewed conflict.