Brownlow's views on slavery changed over time. While his pre-Civil War writings reveal a strong pro-slavery slant, his name appears on an 1834 abolitionist petition.Stephen Ash, Introduction to E. Merton Coulter's William G. Brownlow: Fighting Parson of the Southern Highlands (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). In the early 1840s, Brownlow supported the American Colonization Society, which sought to recolonize freed slaves in Liberia. In subsequent years, however, he shifted to a staunchly pro-slavery stance. Indeed he owned slaves himself. Brownlow's friend and colleague, Oliver Perry Temple, stated that social pressure in the 1830s pushed most abolitionist Southerners to adopt pro-slavery views. Historian Robert McKenzie, however, suggests that Brownlow's pro-slavery shift might have been rooted in the rivalry between Northern and Southern Methodists over the issue in the 1840s.Robert McKenzie, Lincolnites and Rebels: A Divided Town in the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
