Hanging of Fry and Hensie near the Railroad, by Colonel Leadbetter

  • Creator: Richardson and Cox, engravers
  • Title: Hanging of Fry and Hensie near the Railroad, by Colonel Leadbetter
  • Date: 1862
  • Description: Two men clad in shirts and trousers hang by ropes from tree branches. They are taunted by a man with a cane standing on a train platform next to a rail car while people watch from the platform and peer out of the rail car windows.
  • Historical Note: Henry Fry and Jacob M. Hensie (Hinshaw) were among a group of Union loyalists in East Tennessee who attempted to disrupt Confederate troop movements by destroying bridges along the East Tennessee & Virginia and East Tennessee & Georgia railroad lines on the night of November 8-9, 1861. The "bridge burners," believed they had the support of the Lincoln administration and that the United States Army was about to sweep into East Tennessee and liberate it from Confederate authorities. When that did not happen, five of the men were capture and executed for their actions. Hensie was possibly Jacob W. Hinshaw, a local potter and son of William Henshaw who was listed in the 1860 Greene County census as a potter. Master potter Christopher A. Haun, who was also among their number, was hanged in Knoxville on 10 December 1861.
  • Publisher: Philadelphia: George W. Childs, Applegate & Co
  • Rights: Wikimedia Commons from William G. Brownlow, Sketches of the Rise, Progress, and Decline of Secession; with a Narrative of Personal Adventures Among the Rebels (Philadelphia: George W. Childs, Applegate & Co., 1862), p. 301.
  • Digital Publisher: Digital Initiatives, James E. Walker Library, Middle Tennessee State University
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