 The 3rd District is on the dividing line between counties and towns that favored or opposed Southern secession in the Civil War.George Washington Bridges was elected as a Unionist (the name used by a coalition of Republicans, northern Democrats and anti-Confederate Southern Democrats) to the Thirty-seventh Congress, but he was arrested by Confederate troops while en route to Washington, D.C. and taken back to Tennessee.Bridges was held prisoner for more than a year before he escaped and went to Washington, D.C., and assumed his duties on February 23, 1863; serving until March 3, 1863.