Tennessee

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TENNESSEE

Tennessee, created out of land earlier held by North Carolina, joined the Union as the sixteenth state in 1796. Four major groups of Native Americans—Cherokee and Creek in the East, Shawnee in the Middle, and Chickasaw in the West—also claimed the territory. The Proclamation of 1763, England's attempt to prevent settlement west of the Appalachian crest, proved futile as hunters from Virginia and the Carolinas continued to pursue deer and beaver over the mountains. The first permanent white settlers crossed into northeast Tennessee by 1769. When British officials ordered them out, the colonists ignored the British orders, united as the Watauga Association, and negotiated with the Cherokee for land concessions.

Feeling exposed to the British and their Cherokee and Chickamauga allies at the start of the American Revolution, the Wataugans sought and received incorporation as Washington County, a part of North Carolina, in 1777. Frontier elites like William Blount, a delegate to the Continental Congress and later the territorial governor, supported the Revolution to secure their land claims, while the North Carolina government eagerly sought the Tennessee lands to offer as bounties to military enlistees and veterans. Despite, or perhaps because of, the disorder of war, settlers continued pouring into Tennessee during the Revolution and pushing west, establishing Nashborough (now Nashville) in 1779 along the Cumberland River. After the war, Blount urged North Carolina's cession of its Tennessee claims, a maneuver meant to decrease the state's federal taxes and increase the value of Tennessee lands with the prospect of federal military protection. When North Carolina delayed in ceding its territory, Tennessee settlers decided to create their own government. Naming themselves the state of Franklin, the settlers unsuccessfully petitioned the Continental Congress for admission as the fourteenth state.

North Carolina finally relented, and in 1790 Congress organized the Territory Southwest of the River Ohio, or the Southwest Territory, to be governed by the provisions of the Northwest Ordinance with the important exception of allowing slavery. The 1791 census revealed 35,691 residents, enough to call the territorial assembly to meet at Knoxville in 1794; population grew rapidly, and by 1795 the territory had more than enough residents to apply for statehood. Delegates framed a constitution in early 1796, but the state's admission to the Union, the first under the Northwest Ordinance rules, was nearly scuttled by Senate Federalists who did not want to admit likely Jefferson partisans in an election year.

The first decades of statehood saw political power divided between personal factions headed by John Sevier and William Blount. In national politics, however, the state was securely Jeffersonian. The most important political issues continued to center around land access and taxation. A three-way battle over public lands—between North Carolina, Tennessee, and the federal government—was not fully resolved until the 1840s. Native American land claimants, left with few military options since the 1790s, gradually negotiated land sales or exchanges; the 1818 Chickasaw Purchase included all of West Tennessee and opened the way for the eventual growth of Memphis after the 1820s.

Buoyed by immigrants coming west from the Carolinas or south from Pennsylvania and Virginia, population grew rapidly in the first years of state-hood, from 105,602 persons at the state's first census in 1800, to 261,727 in 1810, 422,813 in 1820, and 681,904 in 1830. These statewide figures mask some important trends, most notably the westward shift of population. By 1820 Middle Tennessee had more than two-thirds of the state's population and, after 1826, the state capital at Nashville.

Tennessee's early national economy was built on land, which was valuable for speculation and agriculture. In addition to cotton and tobacco, the farmers grew corn, as much as half of which was distilled into whisky, and hogs for local consumption or export to the Deep South. The state also produced iron; mid-state entrepreneur Montgomery Bell owned several furnaces, which he staffed with free and bound workers. Slave labor would be more prevalent, however, in agriculture. Although the 1791 territorial census tallied 3,417, the slave population had grown to 13,584 by 1800 and 44,535 in 1810, topped 80,000 in 1820, and climbed over 141,600 in 1830. Revolutionary-era antislavery sentiments held on more in the East but were overshadowed as slave-based agriculture grew in Middle and West Tennessee.

Although few Tennesseans had been directly affected by British actions leading to the War of 1812, large numbers of them volunteered for military service. An ambitious Andrew Jackson had already served Tennessee as both a U.S. representative and senator but gained national attention for defeating the British at New Orleans and battling Indians throughout the Southeast. The Tennessee legislature returned him to the Senate in 1823, and state voters strongly supported his presidential runs in 1824 and 1828 and his reelection in 1832.

bibliography

Aron, Stephen. How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Finger, John R. Tennessee Frontiers: Three Regions in Transition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Remini, Robert V. Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

Charles A. Israel

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation