This collection includes seven campaign pamphlets for Senator Edward W. Carmack’s run for reelection to the United States Senate in 1906. The pamphlets include pencil notations throughout that appear to be intended edits. Three of the pamphlets are stamped with a note to “Read and Hand to Your Neighbor.”
Click here for the Guide to the campaign papers of Senator Edward Ward Carmack, Circa 1905-1906, mpa.211 / ms.2952. Collection location: row 11, box 5.
Edward Ward Carmack was born on November 5, 1858, near Castalian Springs in Sumner County, Tennessee. He attended Webb’s School in Culleoka, Tennessee and Jacinto Academy in Mississippi. He studied law at Cumberland University and was admitted to the bar in 1879.
Carmack held the position of city attorney for Columbia, Tennessee. He was elected to the Tennessee state legislature in 1884.
He was a member of the editorial staff of Nashville, Tennessee’s “American” from 1886-1888. He also founded the Nashville “Democrat” in 1888, which later merged with the “American.” He became editor-in-chief after the merger. In 1892, he became editor of Memphis, Tennessee’s “Commercial,” but resigned in 1896 in order to serve as delegate-at-large for Tennessee at the Democratic National Convention.
Carmack represented the tenth district of Tennessee in the Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth Congresses from 1897-1901 before serving in the United States Senate from 1901 through 1907 where he earned the reputation of a reformer and opposed monopolies and American imperialism. His re-election bid in 1906 was unsuccessful partially due to his becoming a proponent of temperance, so he resumed his law practice and also made an unsuccessful bid for governor of Tennessee in 1908 but lost the Democratic primary to Malcolm R. Patterson.
Carmack soon returned to journalism by resuming his editorship of the Nashville “American”, renamed by then the Nashville “Tennessean” and known for being a prohibitionist daily newspaper. Unfortunately, this resulted in his untimely death. Because of an editorial in the “Tennessean” allegedly belittling Duncan Brown Cooper, Carmack was killed in a gunfight in Nashville, Tennessee on November 9, 1908 by Cooper’s son Robin. This event incited a great debate across Tennessee about temperance that resulted in the banning of alcohol within a few months.
Carmack was ultimately seen as a martyr for prohibition and had a statue erected of him at the capitol in Nashville, Tennessee.