TNTennessee History

Tennessee is the only state that legally divides itself into thirds. East, Middle and West are Grand Divisions written into the constitution and the code, with seats apportioned on state boards and a supreme court that must sit in Knoxville, Nashville and Jackson. The three stars on the flag are those divisions. The arrangement is not decoration. The mountains, the Cumberland basin and the Mississippi bottomland were settled by different people at different times for different reasons, and in 1861 they voted in opposite directions.

Chickasaw country, Cherokee towns, and the mounds before both

Mississippian farmers built platform mound towns along the Cumberland, Duck and Mississippi rivers, and most of those centers had emptied before any European saw them. When contact came, the Chickasaw held the western bluffs and the hunting grounds behind them, the Overhill Cherokee lived in towns on the Little Tennessee including Chota and Tanasi, the village whose name the state carries, and Shawnee and Yuchi bands used the Cumberland valley. Hernando de Soto's column crossed the southeast in 1540 and reached the Mississippi near the Chickasaw Bluffs in 1541, leaving disease behind and little else. The British built Fort Loudoun in 1756 far inside Cherokee country as a wartime ally's outpost. Relations collapsed, the Cherokee besieged it, and the garrison surrendered in August 1760.

Watauga, Franklin, and the state Congress turned down

Settlers who crossed the mountains into the Holston and Watauga valleys in the early 1770s were outside any colony's working government, so in 1772 they wrote the Watauga Association compact and leased their land directly from the Cherokee. That habit of self-organization produced something stranger a decade later. In 1784 North Carolina ceded its western counties to Congress and then repealed the cession. The residents, unwilling to be handed back and forth, declared the State of Franklin with John Sevier as governor. Congress voted on admission in 1785 and fell short of the two thirds required. Franklin ran courts, collected taxes in tobacco and whiskey, and dissolved in 1788. Congress organized the Southwest Territory in 1790 under Governor William Blount, a census showed enough people, and on June 1, 1796 Tennessee entered as the 16th state, the first ever made out of federal territory rather than an existing colony. Sevier became its first governor.

Volunteers, removal, and cotton

The nickname came from the militia. Tennesseans turned out in numbers for the War of 1812 and marched to New Orleans under Andrew Jackson, and when the Mexican War call went out in 1846 the state's quota of 2,800 drew roughly 30,000 offers. Expansion had a second face. The 1818 purchase negotiated with the Chickasaw opened the western third of the state, Memphis was laid out on the bluff in 1819, and cotton and slavery moved in behind. The Cherokee Nation, pushed out of Georgia, held its council at Red Clay in southeastern Tennessee from 1832. After the disputed Treaty of New Echota in 1835, the Army concentrated some 16,000 Cherokee at Fort Cass near Charleston, Tennessee, and marched them west in 1838 on the route now called the Trail of Tears.

Last out, first back

Tennessee's voters rejected a secession convention in February 1861 and then, after Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for troops, approved separation in a June 8 referendum. It was the last state to leave. East Tennessee voted against it by about two to one, sent delegates to a Greeneville convention asking to split off as a separate state, and was refused. Andrew Johnson of Greeneville was the only senator from a seceding state who kept his seat. The war then came to Tennessee harder than to any state but Virginia. Fort Donelson fell in February 1862, Nashville was occupied for the rest of the war, Shiloh cost some 23,000 casualties in two April days, and Stones River, Chattanooga, Franklin and Nashville followed. Because a Unionist government was already functioning, Tennessee was readmitted on July 24, 1866, the first Confederate state back and the only one that escaped military Reconstruction. That same year, in Pulaski, six former Confederate officers founded the Ku Klux Klan.

One vote in Nashville, 1920

Thirty five states had ratified the Nineteenth Amendment and one more was needed. Tennessee's Senate agreed quickly; the House deadlocked at 48 to 48 on August 18, 1920. Harry Burn, 24 years old and the youngest member, was wearing a red anti-suffrage rose when he voted yes, having read a letter from his mother Febb telling him to help Mrs. Catt. The amendment was certified eight days later, and American women had the vote because of a roll call in Nashville.

TVA, Oak Ridge and the Lorraine Motel

The Tennessee Valley Authority, created on May 18, 1933, was the first major New Deal agency and the most transformative thing that ever happened to the state's countryside, damming the river system for flood control and selling public power into farmhouses that had none. Nine years later the same qualities that attracted the dams, cheap electricity and empty ridges, attracted the Manhattan Project. The Army bought 59,000 acres in Anderson and Roane counties in 1942 and built Oak Ridge, a city of roughly 75,000 people that appeared on no map, where the K-25 and Y-12 plants separated the uranium used at Hiroshima. Postwar Tennessee produced the Nashville sit-ins of spring 1960, trained in James Lawson's nonviolence workshops and led by students including Diane Nash and John Lewis, which made Nashville the first major southern city to desegregate its downtown lunch counters. On April 4, 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where he had come to support striking sanitation workers; the building is now the National Civil Rights Museum. Federal Express began flying packages out of Memphis in 1973 and Nissan chose Smyrna for its first American plant in 1980, the start of the auto corridor that now runs the length of Middle Tennessee. Three men reached the presidency from Tennessee, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk and Andrew Johnson, and not one of the three was born in it.

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