William Brownlow, the Republican governor, called a special session of the Tennessee Legislature in Nashville to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. After some problems maintaining a quorum in the State House of Representatives, Tennessee became the third state to ratify. Brownlow's haste was met with an almost immediate reward when the grateful Republicans engineered the readmission of Tennessee to representation in the United States Congress on July 24, 1866. The Amendment itself formally became part of the U.S. Constitution on July 28, 1868. (By John Osborne)
Public Laws of the United States of America. Carefully Collated with the Originals at Washington (New York, Little, Brown & Company, 1868), xiii.
"Welcome Tennessee!," Harper's Weekly Magazine, August 11, 1866, 498-499.