By Bartee Haile

After 22 weeks in solitary confinement, a former U.S. Senator and member of the Confederate cabinet was released by his Yankee captors and allowed to go home to Texas.

John Henninger Reagan was born in 1818 in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains in eastern Tennessee. As a boy, he worked alongside his father at a tannery and on the family farm. After the death of his mother in 1831, what little time there had been for learning was taken up by the heavy burden of caring for fi...