TENNESSEE

TENNESSEE. Since its founding, Tennessee has traditionally been divided into three sections: East Tennessee, Middle Tennessee, and West Tennessee. East Tennessee includes part of the Appalachian Mountains, which stretch from Alabama and Georgia northward through East Tennessee to New England; the Great Valley, which is to the west of the Appalachians, slanting north-eastward from Georgia through Tennessee into Virginia; and the Cumberland Plateau, which is to the west of the Great Valley, slanting from northeastern Alabama through Tennessee into southeastern Kentucky. The people of East Tennessee are often called "Overhills," because Tennessee was once part of North Carolina and was west over the mountains from the rest of North Carolina. Both the Cumberland Plateau and the Great Valley are fertile and ideal for growing many different crops; the Great Valley is well watered. The Tennessee Appalachian Mountains are rugged, with numerous small valleys occupied by small farms. The people of East Tennessee were from their first settlement an independent-minded group who valued hard work and self-reliance.

Middle Tennessee extends from the Cumberland Plateau westward to the Highland Rim. The people who live on the Highland Rim are often called "Highlanders." The lowlands include the Nashville Basin, are well watered, and are noted for their agriculture, especially for cotton and tobacco. The Highland Rim features many natural wonders, including many caves and underground streams.

Situated between East Tennessee and West Tennessee, Middle Tennessee has sometimes seemed to be a divided culture. Before the Civil War, it had more slaves than East Tennessee, but fewer than West Tennessee, and it tended to favor the small farm tradition of the east rather than the plantation system of the west. It was divided on its support for outlawing slavery, but after Reconstruction its politics were controlled by a political spoils system run by Democrats who controlled Tennessee until the 1970s.

West Tennessee lies in the Gulf Coastal Plain, a region that stretches northward from the Gulf of Mexico to Illinois along the Mississippi River. It was in this region that many local Native Americans made their last efforts to retain their remaining lands by petitioning the federal government for help. Land speculators of the early 1800s created towns and plantations throughout the area, and they brought with them the slave culture of North Carolina. Historians differ on the exact numbers, but between 40 percent and 60 percent of the people who lived in West Tennessee were slaves during the antebellum period. The plantations were notoriously cruel.

Tennessee is nicknamed the "Big Bend State" because of the unusual course of the Tennessee River. It flows southwest from the Appalachian Mountains through the Great Valley into Alabama. There, it bends north-westward, reenters Tennessee at Pickwick Lake, and flows north along the western edge of the Highland Rim into Kentucky, eventually joining the Ohio River. During the 1930s, the United States government established the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a project to provide jobs for people who had lost their jobs during the Great Depression and intended to control flooding and to provide hydroelectricity to Tennessee and its neighbors. It was controversial, with many criticizing it as a waste of money, and others insisting that it was destroying Tennessee's environment. The TVA built dams on the Tennessee River and the Cumberland River, creating new lakes and reservoirs, as well as a system of over 650 miles of waterways that boats used to ship products around the state.

Tennessee is bordered on the north by Kentucky; along its northeastern border is Virginia. Its eastern boundary is along the western border of North Carolina. Its southern border extends along the northern borders of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Its western border is met by Arkansas in the south and Missouri in the north.

Prehistory

Tennessee has a complex ancient past; there is evidence throughout the state of numerous cultures that have come and passed in the regions now within its borders. Over 100,000 years ago, people crossed into North America from northeastern Asia. Traces of these earliest peoples are hard to find, partly because the glaciers of an ice age about 11,000 years ago would have destroyed their remains. Tennessee offers tantalizing hints as to what some of these migrants were like, because in some of Tennessee's caves are the remains of ancient cave dwellers. In West Tennessee there are caves that hold evidence of ancient fishermen. This evidence may represent several different

cultures, but each seems to have practiced a religion. Their cave dwellings contain spearheads as well as fishhooks, and they may have hunted the big game of the Great Plains such as mammoths, camels, and giant bison.

About 9000 b.c., nomadic peoples known as Paleo-Indians began crossing North America. They were primarily hunters; in the Great Plains they hunted the large land mammals that roved in herds across grasslands. In Tennessee they would have hunted the same animals until the great forests covered much of Tennessee around 7000 b.c. They likely hunted bison and deer in these forests. Their spear points suggest that several different cultural groups of Paleo-Indians crossed the Mississippi into and through Tennessee.

Around 5000 b.c., another group of people, who archaeologists call Archaic Indians, may have begun migrating into Tennessee. The first Archaic Indians of the Midwest made a significant technological advance over the Paleo-Indians by developing the atlatl, a handheld device with a groove in which to hold a spear. It enabled a person to throw a spear with far greater force and accuracy than by throwing a spear with a bare hand. Archaeological remains from about 2000 b.c. show signs of people settling throughout Tennessee. They began making pottery that increased in sophistication over the next few thousand years.

Homes were made of log posts with walls of clay. Communities enlarged and engaged in public works projects to clear land, plant crops, and build places of worship. Pottery was commonplace and was used for cooking, carrying, and storage.

These ancient peoples began a practice that has puzzled and fascinated archaeologists: they built mounds, sometimes seven stories high. Few of the mounds that survive have been explored by scientists, but those that have reveal people to have been buried in them, sometimes just one, sometimes many. They have been mummified and have carved animals and people, as well as food, placed around them, indicating a belief in an afterlife in which game and food would be wanted, at least symbolically. That the different cultures who built these mounds had priests is clear, and clear also is that they had a highly developed government that would have included many villages and towns.

By about a.d. 800, maize had become a crop, probably brought to Tennessee from central Mexico. By this time, the people in Tennessee were ancestors of modern Native Americans. They continued the mound-building tradition and were farmers. They lived in villages consisting of people related by blood, but they may have insisted that people marry outside their villages much as the Native Americans did when the first Europeans explored Tennessee. Their governments probably consisted of federations of villages, governed by a high chief.

When Hernando de Soto explored southern and western Tennessee in 1540, the peoples had undergone much turmoil for more than a century. The Mound Builders had been driven away, exterminated, or absorbed into invading tribes. Three language groups were represented in the area: Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Muskogean. Among the Iroquoian group were the Cherokees, who had probably migrated from the north into Tennessee. They had a settled society that claimed East and Middle Tennessee as their territory. The Iroquois Confederacy to the north claimed the Cherokees' territory, but the Cherokees resisted them. The Muskogean cultural tribes, Creeks and Chickasaws, claimed the rest of Tennessee, with the Creeks contesting the Cherokees for some of Middle Tennessee. The Chickasaws of western Tennessee were very well organized, with strong leadership and excellent military skills. The capital of the Cherokees was Echota (aka Chota), a city that was declared "bloodless," meaning no fighting was allowed. Weapons were not allowed either. It was a place created by the Native Americans to settle their disputes through diplomacy, and in the Cherokee and Creek tribes, in particular, skilled diplomats were awarded honors equal to those of skilled warriors.

Each village had a main house ("town house") where religious ceremonies took place. Villages consisted of clay houses, usually gathered around the main house. By the late 1600s, the Native Americans had horses, cattle, pigs, and chickens, imports from Europe. They farmed their lands and hunted wild game in their forests, but the Cherokees were fast developing livestock farming. Some of the Shawnees, of the Algonquian language group, had moved into the Cumberland Valley to escape the Iroquois Confederacy. The Cherokees and Creeks viewed them as interlopers, but the Shawnees had little choice; the Iroquois Confederacy sometimes settled its differences with its neighbors with genocide. In 1714, the Cherokee, Creek, and Iroquois Confederates drove the Shawnees out; the Shawnees sought sanctuary in the Ohio Valley. War with the Iroquois Confederacy often seemed imminent for the Cherokees, Creeks, and Chickasaws, but during the 1700s new threats came to preoccupy those Native Americans.

Land

By 1673, the French were trading to the north of Tennessee and had antagonized the Chickasaws to the point that the Chickasaws killed Frenchmen on sight. That year, a Virginian, Abraham Wood, commissioned explorer John Needham to visit the Cherokees west of the Appalachian Mountains in what is now Tennessee. John Needham visited the Cherokees twice, and he was murdered by them. His servant Gabriel Arthur faced being burned alive so bravely that his captors let him live.

In 1730, Alexander Cuming of North Carolina led an expedition across the Appalachians to make the acquaintance with the Cherokees of the Great Valley. He impressed the Native Americans with his boldness and eloquence, as well as his numerous weapons, and the chiefs agreed to affiliate themselves with England. Cuming took Cherokee representatives to England, where they were well treated. Among them was Attakullakulla (meaning "Little Carpenter"), who, upon returning home, became a great diplomat who several times prevented bloodshed.

In 1736, the French, having nearly wiped out the Natchez tribe, invaded West Tennessee with intention of eradicating the Chickasaws. The Chickasaws were fore-warned by English traders and decisively defeated the French invaders. The French built Fort Assumption where Memphis now stands, as part of their effort to control the Chickasaws. They failed. In another war in 1752, the Chickasaws again beat the French. These victories of the Chickasaws were important for all the Native Americans in Tennessee, because a 1738 epidemic had killed about 50 percent of the Cherokees, leaving them too weak to guarantee the safety of their neighbors. From that time on, Cherokee politics were chaotic, with different chiefs gaining ascendancy with very different views at various times, making Cherokee policies wildly swing from one view to another.

During the Revolutionary War (1775–1783), some Cherokees allied themselves with Shawnees, Creeks, and white outlaws, and tried to retake East Tennessee. They were defeated by American forces under the command of Colonel Evan Shelby, who drove them into West Tennessee. In 1794, the Native Americans of Tennessee united in a war against the United States and were utterly defeated; they became subject to American rule. These battles had been over possession of land, and in 1794, the land belonged to the United States. On 1 July 1796, Tennessee became the sixteenth state of the United States, taking its name from Tenasie, the name of a Cherokee village.

Civil War

In the 1850s, the matter of slavery was a source of much conflict in Tennessee. The settlers in the east wanted it outlawed. Slave owners ignored laws regulating slavery and turned West Tennessee into a vast land of plantations worked by African American slaves. Literacy was forbidden to the slaves, and they were not even allowed to worship God, although they often did in secret. Newspapers and politicians campaigned against slavery in Tennessee, but others defended slavery with passion.

On 9 February 1861, Tennessee held a plebiscite on the matter of secession, with the results favoring remaining in the Union 69,387 to 57,798. The governor of Tennessee, Isham G. Harris, refused to accept the results and committed Tennessee to the Confederacy. He organized another plebiscite on whether Tennessee should become an independent state, with independence winning 104,913 to 47,238. He declared that the result meant Tennessee should join the Confederacy. The Confederacy made its intentions clear by executing people accused of sympathizing with the Union. Over 135,000 Tennesseans joined the Confederate army; over 70,000 joined the Union army, with 20,000 free blacks and escaped slaves. The surprise attack at Shiloh on 6–7 April 1862 seemed to give the Confederacy the upper hand in Tennessee, but the Union troops outfought their attackers. After the Stone's River Battle (near Murfreesboro) from 31 December 1862–2 January 1863, the Union dominated Tennessee. Over 400 battles were fought in Tennessee during the Civil War. The lands of Middle and West Tennessee were scourged. Fields became massive grounds of corpses, farms were destroyed, trees were denuded, and Tennessean refugees clogged roads by the thousands.

On 24 July 1866, Tennessee, which had been the last state to join the Confederacy, became the first former Confederate state to rejoin the United States. Prior to readmission, on 25 February 1865, Tennessee passed an amendment to its constitution outlawing slavery. Schools were soon accepting African Americans as well as whites and Native Americans, but in December 1866, the Ku Klux Klan was founded at Pulaski, Tennessee. Directed by "Grand Cyclops" Nathan Bedford Forrest, it murdered African Americans and white people who were sympathetic to them, raped white female schoolteachers for teaching African Americans, burned schools, and terrified voters, in resistance to Reconstruction.

Segregated Society

By 1900, Tennessee had a population of 2,020,616. It was racially segregated. In a decades-long effort to deny education to African Americans, the state managed to create an illiteracy rate among whites and blacks that was the third worst in the nation. Under the direction of Governor Malcolm R. Patterson (1907–1911), in 1909, the state enacted a general education bill.

When the United States entered World War I (1914–1918), thousands of Tennesseans volunteered, and Tennessee contributed the greatest American hero of the war, Sergeant Alvin York from Fentress County in northern Middle Tennessee. In 1918, the soft-spoken farmer and his small squad captured 223 Germans in the Argonne Forest; the sight of a few Americans leading hundreds of captured Germans to American lines was said to have been astonishing.

By 1920, the state population was 2,337,885. On 18 August of that year Tennessee ratified the Twenty-First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, which gave women the vote. In 1923, Governor Austin Peay reorganized state government, eliminating hundreds of patronage positions, while consolidating government enterprises into eight departments. In 1925, the infamous Scopes "Monkey Trial" was held in Dayton, Tennessee. A new state law said that evolution could not be taught in Tennessee schools, but John Scopes taught it anyway and was charged with violating the law. Two outsiders came to try the case, atheist Clarence Darrow for the defense and three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryant for the prosecution. The trial was broadcast to the rest of the country by radio, and when Scopes was convicted and fined, the impression left was that Tennessee was home to ignorance and bigotry enforced by law, an image it had not completely escaped even at the turn of the twenty-first century. A man who did much to counter the image was statesman Cordell Hull, from Overton County, west of Fentress, in northern Middle Tennessee. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate and was Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of state. He helped create the "Good Neighbor Policy" that helped unify the nations of the New World, and he was important to the development of the United Nations. He received the 1945 Nobel Peace Prize for his work.

Civil Rights

By 1950, Tennessee's population was 55 percent urban. The cities controlled most of the state's politics, and they were becoming more cosmopolitan. Getting a bit of a head start in desegregating schools, the University of Tennessee admitted four African Americans to its graduate school in 1952. On the other hand, Frank Clement was elected governor on the "race platform," insisting that there would be no racial integration in Tennessee. Many other politicians would "play the race card" during the 1950s and 1960s, and many of these politicians would change their minds as Clement would as the civil rights movement changed the way politics were conducted. Memphis State University began desegregating in 1955, after the United States Supreme Court ruling in 1954 that segregating the races was unconstitutional. In 1956, Clement called out the National Guard to enforce desegregation of schools in Clinton. Even so, schools elsewhere here bombed or forced to close by white supremacists.

By 1959, African Americans were staging well-organized nonviolent protests in Nashville in an effort to have stores and restaurants desegregate. Meanwhile, the U.S. government, under a 1957 civil rights law, sued Democratic Party local organizations for their exclusion of African Americans from voting and holding office. Slowly, desegregation took hold in Tennessee; it took until 1965 for Jackson to begin desegregating its restaurants. In 1968, in Memphis, sanitation workers went on strike and Martin Luther King Jr., the preeminent figure in the civil rights movement, came to the city to help with negotiations. On 4 April 1968, King was shot to death by James Earl Ray.

Modern Era

In the 1970s, Tennessee made a remarkable turnaround in its image. With the election of Winfield Dunn as governor in 1971, the state for the first time since Reconstruction had a Republican governor and two Republican senators. This notable shift in political fortunes marked the coming of the two-party system to Tennessee, which had a positive effect on the politics and society of the state. If Democrats were to hold on to power, they needed African Americans as new allies. In 1974, the state's first African American congressman, Harold Ford of Memphis, was elected. The Democrats remained dominant in the state, but the competition with Republicans was lively and encouraged the participation of even those who had been disenfranchised, poor whites as well as African Americans, as recently as 1965.

Among the most notable politicians of the 1980s and 1990s was Albert Gore Jr., son of a powerful United States Senator, and widely expected to be a powerful politician himself. In 1988 and 1992, he ran for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, and he served from 1993–2001 as vice president of the United States under his longtime friend President Bill Clinton. His cosmopolitan views and his work for environmental causes helped to change how outsiders viewed Tennesseans.

By 2000, Tennessee's population was just under 5,500,000, an increase from 1990's 4,896,641. Although the urban population was larger than the rural one, there were 89,000 farms in Tennessee. The TVA had doubled the amount of open water in Tennessee from 1930 to 1960, and the several artificial lakes and streams became prime attractions for recreation in the 1990s; the state also had some of the most beautiful woodlands in the world. Memphis became a regional center for the arts, as well as a prime retail center for northern Mississippi, in addition to Tennessee; Nashville developed the potential for its music industry to be a magnet for tourists, and by the 1990s many a young musician or composer yearned to live there.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alderson, William T., and Robert H. White. A Guide to the Study and Reading of Tennessee History. Nashville: Tennessee Historical Commission, 1959.

Corlew, Robert E. Revised by Stanley J. Folmsbee and Enoch Mitchell. Tennessee: A Short History. 2d edition Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981.

Dykeman, Wilma. Tennessee: A Bicentennial History. New York: Norton, 1975.

Hull, Cordell, and Andrew H. T. Berding. The Memoirs of Cordell Hull. New York: Macmillan, 1948.

Kent, Deborah. Tennessee. New York: Grolier, 2001.

State of Tennessee home page. Available at http://www.state.tn.us.

Van West, Carroll. Tennessee History: The Land, the People, and the Culture. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998. A wealth of information and opinion.

Vanderwood, Paul J. Night Riders of Reelfoot Lake. Memphis, Tenn.: Memphis State University Press, 1969.

Kirk H.Beetz

See alsoAppalachia ; Cherokee ; Creek ; Cumberland Gap ; Iroquois ; Shawnee .

Tennessee , state in the south-central United States. It is bordered by Kentucky and Virginia (N), North Carolina (E), Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi (S), and, across the Mississippi R., Arkansas and Missouri (W).

Facts and Figures

Area, 42,244 sq mi (109,412 sq km). Pop. (2000) 5,689,283, a 16.7% increase since the 1990 census. Capital, Nashville. Largest city, Memphis. Statehood, June 1, 1796 (16th state). Highest pt., Clingmans Dome, 6,643 ft (2,026 m); lowest pt., Mississippi River, 182 ft (56 m). Nickname, Volunteer State. Motto, Agriculture and Commerce. State bird, mockingbird. State flower, iris. State tree, tulip poplar. Abbr., Tenn.; TN

Geography

The state has three sharply defined regions: East Tennessee, Middle Tennessee, and West Tennessee. In East Tennessee the Great Smoky Mts., Cumberland Plateau, and the narrow river valleys and heavily forested foothills generally restrict farming there to the subsistence level; but this region has two of the state's most industrialized cities, Chattanooga (fourth largest) and Knoxville (third largest). Middle Tennessee is hemmed in by the Tennessee River, which flows SW through East Tennessee into Alabama, looping back up into West Tennessee in its circuitous route to the Ohio. Gently rolling, fertile, bluegrass country, it is ideal for livestock raising and dairy farming. Middle Tennessee is still noted for its fine horses and mules, e.g., the Tennessee walking horse.

West Tennessee, with its rich river-bottom lands, on which most of the state's cotton is grown, lies between the Tennessee and the Mississippi rivers. The average annual rainfall ranges from 40 to 50 in. (101.6–127 cm), and the climate ranges from humid continental in the north of the state to humid subtropical in the south; the rigors of a northern winter usually affect only the most mountainous parts of East Tennessee.

Twenty-three state parks, covering some 132,000 acres (53,420 hectares) as well as parts of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Cherokee National Forest, and Cumberland Gap National Historical Park are in Tennessee. Sportsmen and visitors are attracted to Reelfoot Lake, originally formed by an earthquake; stumps and other remains of a once dense forest, together with the lotus bed covering the shallow waters, give the lake an eerie beauty.

The state also has many sites of historic interest, including the Hermitage, home of Andrew Jackson; the Andrew Johnson National Historic Site; Shiloh National Military Park; and Fort Donelson and Stones River national battlefields. Part of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park is also in Tennessee (see National Parks and Monuments , table). The Natchez Trace National Parkway generally follows the old Natchez Trace . Nashville is the capital and the second largest city. The largest city is Memphis .

Economy

Although Tennessee is now primarily industrial, with most of its people residing in urban areas, many Tennesseans still derive their livelihood from the land. The state's leading crops are cotton, soybeans, and tobacco; cattle, dairy products, and hogs are also principal farm commodities. Tennessee's leading mineral, in dollar value, is stone; zinc ranks second (Tennessee leads the nation in its production). Industry is being continually diversified; the state's leading manufactures are chemicals and related products, foods, electrical machinery, primary metals, automobiles, textiles and apparel, and stone, clay, and glass items. Aluminum production has been important since World War I.

Tennessee has long been a major tourist destination, owing largely to its beautiful scenery. Many lakes were built here by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Army Corps of Engineers. The TVA also developed the Land Between the Lakes, an enormous Kentucky-Tennessee recreation area. Visitors are also drawn by Tennessee's famed music capitals, the country-music mecca of Nashville and the blues and jazz hub of Memphis.

Government, Politics, and Higher Education

Tennessee has had three constitutions, drafted in 1796, 1834, and the present one in 1870. Its executive branch is headed by a governor, elected for a four-year term. The state's legislature has a senate with 33 members and a house with 99. The state elects 2 senators and 9 representatives to the U.S. Congress and has 11 electoral votes.

Democrats dominated Tennessee politics from the Civil War onward, but their power has declined in recent years. Republican Don Sundquist, elected governor in 1994, was reelected in 1998. In 2002 a Democrat, Phil Bredesen, was elected to the office; he was reelected in 2006. Republican Bill Haslam was elected governor in 2010.

Among the state's many institutions of higher learning are the Univ. of Tennessee, chiefly at Knoxville; East Tennessee State Univ., at Johnson City; Fisk Univ. and Vanderbilt Univ., at Nashville; Tennessee Technological Univ., at Cookeville; Univ. of Memphis, at Memphis; and the Univ. of the South, at Sewanee.

History

Early History

W Tennessee abounds with artifacts of the prehistoric Mound Builders , who were the earliest inhabitants of the area. Cherokee, Chickasaw, Shawnee, and Creek were in the region when it was first visited by a European expedition under De Soto in 1540. French explorers came down the Mississippi River, claiming both sides for France, and c.1682 La Salle built Fort Prudhomme, possibly on the site of present-day Memphis. The French established additional trading posts in the area, but they suffered continual harassment from the Chickasaw. Meanwhile, English fur traders and long hunters (frontiersmen who spent long periods hunting in this area) came over the mountains from the Carolinas and Virginia, prevailed over the Cherokee, and made ineffectual the French claims to the area, which in any event was lost (1763) by the French in the French and Indian Wars.

The first permanent settlement was made (1769) in the Watauga River valley of E Tennessee by Virginians; they were soon joined by North Carolinians, including perhaps a few refugees of the Regulator movement. In 1772 these hardy settlers living beyond the frontier formed the Watauga Association , the first attempt at government in Tennessee, and in 1777, at their request, North Carolina organized those settlements into Washington co.; Jonesboro, the county seat and oldest town in Tennessee, was founded two years later.

The American Revolution and Statehood

In the American Revolution, John Sevier was among the notable Tennesseans who served with distinction. When, after the war, North Carolina ceded its western lands to the federal government, the E Tennessee settlers, incensed at being transferred without their consent, formed a short-lived independent government (1784–88) under Sevier (see Franklin, State of ). The cession was reenacted in 1789, and in 1790 the federal government created the Territory of the United States South of the River Ohio (Southwest Territory), with William Blount as governor. This act disposed of various schemes to place the area under the control of Spanish Louisiana. In 1796 Tennessee, with substantially its present boundaries, was admitted to the Union as a slave state, with its capital at Knoxville. It was the first state to be carved out of national territory.

Tennessee's constitution, which provided for universal male suffrage (that is, including free blacks), was described by Thomas Jefferson as "the least imperfect and most republican" of any state. Armed with land grants awarded for service in the American Revolution, veterans and speculators (who had acquired the grants from veterans, sometimes fraudulently) swarmed in from the Carolinas, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and even from New England via such overland routes as the Wilderness Road and Cumberland Gap. Others poled keelboats from the Ohio up the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers.

The Early Nineteenth Century

For the most part a rough and ready people, numbering over 100,000 by 1800, the settlers of Tennessee were nevertheless strongly influenced by the Great Revival, a wave of religious hysteria that swept the state that year. The virtues and vices of their strongly egalitarian society were exemplified by Andrew Jackson, who was prominent in the faction-ridden politics of Tennessee. By 1829 when Jackson became president, the state was prospering. The first steamboat had reached Nashville in 1819, the year in which Memphis, soon to become the metropolis of a fast-growing cotton kingdom, was platted.

Internal improvement projects—canals and then railroads—were pushed, and a new, smaller wave of immigrants (predominantly Irish and German) arrived after the Cherokee and the Chickasaw were banished West in the late 1830s. Insatiable land hunger, the spirit of adventure, and personal considerations carried many white Tennesseans beyond the state; among them were Gov. Samuel Houston and David Crockett, both of whom had been conspicuous in the fight for Texan independence. A decade later the response of Tennessee to the request for volunteers to fight in the Mexican War was so overwhelming that it has since been known as the Volunteer State. Tennessee's James K. Polk, a Jackson protégé, was the President of the United States during that war.

The Civil War and Reconstruction

Although slaves were numerous in W Tennessee, and to a lesser extent in Middle Tennessee, and free blacks were subjected to a series of discriminatory regulations, the state was pro-Union; it voted in the presidential election of 1860 for its own John Bell, candidate of the moderate Constitutional Union party . Secession was rejected in a popular referendum on Feb. 9, 1861. However, after the firing on Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for troops, the pro-Confederate element, led by Gov. Isham G. Harris, canvassed the state, and on June 8, 1861, a second referendum approved secession by a two-thirds majority. The one third opposed represented mainly E Tennessee, where slavery was a negligible factor and where Andrew Johnson (then U.S. Senator) and William G. Brownlow had strengthened the natural Union loyalties of the people.

In the Civil War Tennessee was, after Virginia, the biggest and bloodiest battleground. The rivers served as Union invasion routes. Nashville was occupied by Gen. D. C. Buell in Feb., 1862, after the victories of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant on the lower Tennessee and Cumberland rivers (see Fort Henry and Fort Donelson ). In April one of the bloodiest battles of the war was fought near the Mississippi state line (see Shiloh, battle of ), and Memphis fell to a Union fleet in June. Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg, defeated at Perryville, Ky. in Oct., 1862, retreated further in Jan., 1863, after the battle of Murfreesboro , and Grant, successful in the Vicksburg campaign , completely routed him (Nov., 1863) in the Chattanooga campaign .

The Confederates did manage to hold on to Knoxville until Sept., 1863, and their cavalry, particularly the forces of Gen. N. B. Forrest and Gen. J. H. Morgan, remained active. An army under Gen. J. B. Hood made a last desperate attempt to regain the state late in 1864 but was defeated at Franklin (Nov. 30) and annihilated at Nashville (Dec. 15–16) by federal troops under G. H. Thomas. The Union military government that had been set up under Andrew Johnson in 1862 was succeeded in Apr., 1865, by a civil government headed by Brownlow. An amendment to the state constitution of 1834 freed the slaves, and, with ex-Confederates disfranchised and radical Republicans in control, the state was readmitted to the Union in Mar., 1866.

As the first Confederate state to be readmitted, Tennessee was spared the worst aspects of Congressional Reconstruction , but the postwar years were nonetheless bitter. The organization formed largely to reestablish "white supremacy" in the South, the Ku Klux Klan , was founded (1866) in Tennessee, at Pulaski. The situation improved after Brownlow left (1869) the governorship for the U.S. Senate, to which the state also returned (1875) Andrew Johnson in vindication of his record as Lincoln's successor in the presidency. Brownlow's successor, Gov. De Witt C. Senter, although nominally a Republican, encouraged the calling of a new state constitutional convention. In 1870 the delegates drew up a constitution that rejected the reforms of the radical Republicans; African-American suffrage was limited by means of the poll tax and former Confederates were reenfranchised.

Industrialization, Prohibition, and the Scopes Trial

Economically, the farm-tenancy system, which had replaced the plantation system, brought much misery; industry, however, made advances after the Civil War. The iron- and steelworks of E Tennessee were unable to meet the competition of Birmingham, Ala., but coal mining continued and textile production increased. The use of convict labor in the mines precipitated the state's first major labor disturbance (1891–92), but not until 1936 was the convict-leasing system abolished.

A statewide Prohibition bill (not repealed until 1939) was passed over a governor's veto in 1909, and this question so divided the Democratic party that in 1910 a Republican was elected governor for the first time since 1880. In World War I the thousands of Tennessean volunteers in the U.S. armed forces included Sgt. Alvin C. York, who became one of the nation's most highly publicized heroes. In 1925 the state attracted international attention with the famous Scopes trial at Dayton. The fact that the state law banning the teaching of evolution was not repealed until 1967 is indicative of the strong role that Protestant fundamentalism played in the lives of many Tennesseans. Its further influence was reflected in the passing of a 1973 bill prohibiting the teaching of evolution as a fact rather than a theory.

The TVA and an Expanded Economy

One of the most important events in Tennessee since the Civil War was the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in 1933. Although opposed by private power companies, the TVA succeeded in providing hydroelectric power cheaply and in abundance, bringing modern comforts to thousands. Over the years its programs expanded and were supplemented by other projects for water-resources development. Most important, the TVA was chiefly responsible for the basic change in the state's economy from agriculture to industry and for the significant growth and diversification of industry, especially during and after World War II. The TVA also came to be associated with atomic energy, for it provides the power for Oak Ridge , one of the sources of production of the constituents for the first atomic bombs.

Since the late 1970s there has been significant growth in the service, trade, and finance sectors of the state economy and Tennessee has been very aggressive in attracting new industry. Many of the firms that have been setting up new factories and distribution centers in Tennessee come from America's northern industrial states and from Japan.

Bibliography

See S. J. Folmsbee et al., History of Tennessee (1961, repr. 1969); J. Clark, Tennessee Hill Folk (1972); Federal Writers' Project, Tennessee: A Guide to the State (1939, repr. 1972); R. E. Corlew, Tennessee: A Short History (2d ed. 1981); J. Cimprich, Slavery's End in Tennessee, Eighteen Sixty-One to Eighteen Sixty-Five (1985); R. E. Corlew, Tennessee: The Volunteer State: An Illustrated History (1989).

TENNESSEE

Chattanooga . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 467

Knoxville . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 481

Memphis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 495

Nashville . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 509

The State in Brief

Nickname: Volunteer State

Motto: Agriculture and commerce

Flower: Iris

Bird: Mockingbird

Area: 42,143 square miles (2000; U.S. rank: 36th)

Elevation: Ranges from 178 feet to 6,643 feet above sea level

Climate: Continental; mild weather with abundant rainfall in the east; hot humid summers in the western region; severe winters in mountains

Admitted to Union: June 1, 1796

Capital: Nashville

Head Official: Governor Phil Bredesen (D) (until 2007)

Population

1980: 4,591,000

1990: 4,877,185

2000: 5,689,262

2004 estimate: 5,900,962

Percent change, 1990–2000: 3.7%

U.S. rank in 2004: 16th

Percent of residents born in state: 64.7% (2000)

Density: 138 people per square mile (2000)

2002 FBI Crime Index Total: 290,961

Racial and Ethnic Characteristics (2000)

White: 4,563,310

Black or African American: 932,809

American Indian and Alaska Native: 15,152

Asian: 56,662

Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander: 2,205

Hispanic or Latino (may be of any race): 123,838

Other: 56,036

Age Characteristics (2000)

Population under 5 years old: 374,880

Population 5 to 19 years old: 1,186,152

Percent of population 65 years and over: 12.4%

Median age: 35.9 years (2000)

Vital Statistics

Total number of births (2003): 78,811

Total number of deaths (2003): 56,909 (infant deaths, 717)

AIDS cases reported through 2003: 5,817

Economy

Major industries: Construction, chemicals, textiles, apparel, electrical machinery, furniture, leather goods, food processing, tobacco, leather, agriculture, automobiles, aluminum, tourism Unemployment rate: 5.2% (December 2004) Per capita income: $28,565 (2003; U.S. rank: 34th) Median household income: $37,529 (3-year average, 2001-2003)

Percentage of persons below poverty level: 14.3% (3-year average, 2001-2003)

Income tax rate: Limited to dividends and interest income

Sales tax rate: 7.0%

Tennessee State in se central USA between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. The capital is Nashville. Other cities include Memphis, Chattanooga, and Knoxville. In the e are the Great Smoky Mountains and the Cumberland Plateau. Central Tennessee is a bluegrass region famed for its horse breeding and livestock rearing; West Tennessee has fertile floodplains, drained by the Tennessee River, which produce cotton, tobacco, and soybeans. The first European discovery was by Hernando De Soto in 1540. The French followed a century later, but their claim was ceded to Britain in 1763, and the first permanent settlement was established in 1769. In 1796, Tennessee became the 16th State of the Union. Tennessee's enthusiastic response to the request for volunteers during the Mexican War (1846–48) earned it the nickname of the Volunteer State. During the American Civil War, the State was the site of some of the bloodiest battles, including Shiloh (1862) and Chattanooga (1863). In 1866, it became the first southern state to be readmitted to the Union. Christian fundamentalism exerts a powerful influence, and the teaching of evolution was banned from 1925 to 1967. Mineral deposits include zinc and coal. Industries: chemicals, electrical equipment, foods, tourism. Area: 109,411sq km (42,244sq mi). Pop. (2001) 5,740,021.

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