John Goff Ballentine

John Goff Ballentine (May 20, 1825 – November 23, 1915) was an American politician who served as a member of the United States House of Representatives for Tennessee’s 7th congressional district and a colonel in the Confederate army. A supporter of the Confederacy during the American Civil War, Ballentine was a slave owner and later a Democratic member of Congress during a significant period in American political history.

Ballentine was born on May 20, 1825, in Pulaski, Giles County, Tennessee, the son of Andrew Mitchell Ballentine and Mary Tuttle Goff Ballentine. Raised in a region that would become deeply entwined with the politics of slavery and secession, he received a formal education that prepared him for a professional and political career. He graduated from Wurtemberg Academy in 1841 and then attended the University of Nashville, from which he graduated in 1845. Seeking advanced legal training, he enrolled in the law department of Harvard University and completed his legal studies there in 1848, reflecting both his academic ambition and his preparation for a career in the law.

After his graduation from Harvard, Ballentine was briefly associated with legal education as a member of the faculty of Livingston Law School in New York. He subsequently returned to his native state and commenced the practice of law in Pulaski, Tennessee. About 1854 he moved to Panola County, Mississippi, where he continued the practice of law and engaged in extensive family agricultural pursuits, activities that in the antebellum South were closely connected to the institution of slavery. While in Mississippi he met and married Mary E. Laird, daughter of Dr. Henry Laird of Belmont. The couple had four children. In 1860 Ballentine settled in Memphis, Tennessee, a major commercial center on the Mississippi River, where he continued his professional and agricultural interests on the eve of the Civil War.

With the outbreak of the American Civil War, Ballentine aligned himself with the Confederacy. He served as a colonel in the Confederate Army, reflecting his support for the Confederate cause and the slaveholding social order of which he was a part. His military service placed him among the many Southern professionals who took up arms in defense of secession. Following the Confederacy’s defeat, Ballentine returned to Pulaski, Tennessee, where he resumed civilian life in a region undergoing Reconstruction and the long political and social adjustments that followed the war.

As a member of the Democratic Party representing Tennessee, Ballentine entered national politics in the post-Reconstruction era. He was elected as a Democrat to the Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth Congresses and served in the United States House of Representatives from March 4, 1883, to March 3, 1887, representing Tennessee’s 7th congressional district. His service in Congress occurred during a significant period in American history marked by debates over federal authority, economic policy, and the legacies of the Civil War and Reconstruction. In Washington, he participated in the legislative process and represented the interests of his constituents from Middle Tennessee, contributing to the work of the House during two consecutive terms. In 1886 he declined to be a candidate for renomination and retired from active public pursuits at the close of his second term.

In his later years, Ballentine lived in Pulaski, Tennessee, where he remained a figure associated with both the antebellum and postbellum eras of Southern political life. He died in Pulaski on November 23, 1915, at the age of 90 years and 187 days. John Goff Ballentine was interred at the New Pulaski Cemetery, closing a life that spanned from the Jacksonian era through the First World War and that reflected the complex and often troubling history of the nineteenth-century American South.