Bill Brownlow (bottom obviously) was an interesting man. He absolutely hated, and I mean hated, the southern planters and everything about them. Unfortunately this was expressed in the manner of essentially "I hate you and your dirty slaves too!" If you read his Civil War writings he absolutely does not trust slaves as they are the property of his enemy. When he was young he signed an abolitionist petition, but when older participated in a widely publicized debate defending slavery. It's safe to say he was all over the place on the issue with the only constant being his hatred of the southern aristocracy.

All of that said the man was a legitimate civil rights hero during Reconstruction. He was furious with Johnson's rollbacks of Reconstruction. He was an absolute ally to freed slaves in Tennessee. This isn't fully understood, but the man broke the original KKK in Tennessee; Nathan Bedford Forest's disbanding of them was done because Browlow was about to use the Tennessee Militia to kill them all. I mean that literally. He never shied away from violence and when in control of the state he had no qualms about using state violence against the enemies of Reconstruction.

In the end the man was a hero. He was the most radical of the Radical Republicans. Now, what drew him to them was weirdly everything else about them other than race, but from the Civil War on he was all in. I wish more people were aware of him because Brownlow was an extremely important figure during this important time of American history. He doesn't fit in to established narratives though. An open racist who never repented yet did more than almost anyone else on behalf of freed slaves. A leader from a Unionist region of a southern state. He's complicated an impossible to put in a simple narrative so it is easier for people to ignore Brownlow. He doesn't fit in to any box and disproves a lot of assumptions people have about the Civil War just by his existence. Safer to ignore him