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Tennessee is an American state and a constituent
part of the
United States of America. It was admitted to the
Union on June 1,
1796.
Ancient history
The area
now known as Tennessee was first settled by
Paleo-Indians nearly 11,000
years ago. The names of the cultural groups that inhabited
the area between first settlement and the time of European
contact are unknown, but several distinct cultural phases
have been named by archaeologists, including
Archaic,
Woodland, and
Mississippian whose
chiefdoms were the cultural predecessors of the
Muscogee people who inhabited
the Tennessee River Valley
prior to Cherokee migration into the
river's headwaters.
European exploration and
settlement
Discovery and interaction with
native peoples
When
Spanish explorers first visited
the area, led by
Hernando de Soto in 1539–43, it was inhabited by tribes
of Muscogee and Yuchi people.
Possibly
because of European diseases devastating the Native tribes,
which would have left a population vacuum, and also from
expanding European settlement in the north, the Cherokee
moved south from the area now called
Virginia. As European colonists spread into the area,
the native populations were forcibly displaced to the south
and west, including all Muscogee and
Yuchi peoples, including the
Chickasaw and
Choctaw.
From 1838
to 1839, nearly 17,000 Cherokees were forced to march from
Eastern Tennessee to Indian
Territory west of Arkansas. This
came to be known as the Trail of
Tears, as an estimated 4,000 Cherokees died along the
way.
Government under North Carolina
In the days
before statehood, Tennesseans struggled to gain a political
voice and suffered for lack of the protection afforded by
organized government. Six counties—Washington,
Sullivan and
Greene in
East Tennessee and
Davidson,
Sumner, and
Tennessee in Middle Tennessee—had
been formed as western counties of
North Carolina between 1777 and 1788.
After the
American Revolution,
however, North Carolina did not want the trouble and expense
of maintaining such distant settlements, embroiled as they
were with hostile tribesmen and needing roads, forts and
open waterways. Nor could the far-flung settlers look to the
national government, for under the weak, loosely constituted
Articles of
Confederation, it was a government in name only.
State of Franklin
The
westerners' two main demands—protection from the Indians and
the right to navigate the
Mississippi River—went mainly unheeded during the 1780s.
North Carolina’s insensitivity led frustrated
East Tennesseans in 1784 to
form the breakaway State of
Franklin.
John Sevier was named governor,
and the fledgling state began operating as an independent,
though unrecognized, government. At the same time, leaders
of the Cumberland
settlements made overtures for an alliance with
Spain, which controlled the lower
Mississippi River and was held responsible for inciting the
Indian raids. In drawing up the Watauga and Cumberland
Compacts, early Tennesseans had already exercised some of
the rights of self-government and were prepared to take
political matters into their own hands.
Such
stirrings of independence caught the attention of North
Carolina, which quietly began to reassert control over its
western counties. These policies and internal divisions
among East Tennesseans doomed the short-lived State of
Franklin, which passed out of existence in 1788.
Southwest Territory
When North
Carolina finally ratified the
Constitution of
the United States in 1789, it also ceded its western
lands, the Tennessee country, to the Federal government.
North Carolina had used these lands as a means of rewarding
its Revolutionary soldiers, and in the Cession Act of 1789,
it reserved the right to satisfy further land claims in
Tennessee.
Congress designated
the area as the "Territory of the United States, South of
the River Ohio", more commonly known as the
Southwest Territory. The
territory was divided into three districts—two for
East Tennessee and one for the
Mero District on the Cumberland—each with its own courts,
militia and officeholders.
President
George Washington appointed
William Blount as territorial
governor. He was a prominent North Carolina politician with
extensive holdings in western lands.
Admission to the Union
In 1795, a
territorial census revealed a sufficient population for
statehood, and a referendum showed a three-to-one majority
in favor of joining the Union. Governor Blount called for a
constitutional convention to meet in
Knoxville, where
delegates from all the counties drew up a model state
constitution and
democratic bill of rights.
The voters
chose Sevier as governor, and the newly elected legislature
voted for Blount and William Cocke
as Senators, and
Andrew Jackson as
Representative.
Tennessee
leaders thereby converted the territory into a new state,
with organized government and constitution, before applying
to Congress for admission. Since the Southwest Territory was
the first Federal territory to present itself for admission
to the Union, there was some uncertainty about how to
proceed, and Congress was divided on the issue.
Nonetheless, in a close vote on June 1,
1796, Congress approved the admission of
Tennessee as the sixteenth state of the Union. Its borders
were drawn by extending the northern and southern borders of
North Carolina, with a few deviations, to the
Mississippi River,
Tennessee's western boundary.
Civil War
The
American Civil War, to a
large extent, was fought in cities and farms of
Tennessee—only Virginia had more battles.
Secession
Most
Tennesseans initially showed little enthusiasm for breaking
away from a nation whose struggles it had shared for so
long. There were small exceptions such as
Franklin County,
which borders Alabama in southern Middle Tennessee; Franklin
County formally threatened to secede from Tennessee and join
Alabama if Tennessee did not leave the Union. Franklin
County withdrew this threat when Tennessee did eventually
secede. In 1860, Tennesseans had voted by a slim margin for
the Constitutional
Unionist John Bell, a native
son and moderate who continued to search for a way out of
the crisis.
In February
1861, fifty-four percent of the state’s voters voted against
sending delegates to a secession convention. With the attack
on Fort Sumter in April, however,
followed by President Abraham
Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers to coerce the
seceded states back into line, public sentiment turned
dramatically against the Union.
Thus
historian Daniel Crofts reports:
-
Unionists of all descriptions, both those who became
Confederates and those who did not, considered the
proclamation calling for seventy-five thousand troops
"disastrous." Having consulted personally with Lincoln
in March, Congressman Horace Maynard, the unconditional
Unionist and future Republican from East Tennessee, felt
assured that the administration would pursue a peaceful
policy. Soon after April 15, a dismayed Maynard reported
that "the President's extraordinary proclamation" had
unleashed "a tornado of excitement that seems likely to
sweep us all away." Men who had "heretofore been cool,
firm and Union loving" had become "perfectly wild" and
were "aroused to a phrenzy of passion." For what
purpose, they asked, could such an army be wanted "but
to invade, overrun and subjugate the Southern states."
The growing war spirit in the North further convinced
southerners that they would have to "fight for our
hearthstones and the security of home."
Governor
Isham Harris began military
mobilization, submitted an ordinance of
secession to the
General Assembly,
and made direct overtures to the
Confederate
government.
In a
June 8, 1861,
referendum, East Tennessee held firm against separation,
while West Tennessee returned
an equally heavy majority in favor. The deciding vote came
in Middle Tennessee, which
went from 51 percent against secession in February to 88
percent in favor in June.
Having
ratified by popular vote its connection with the fledgling
Confederacy,
Tennessee became the last state to withdraw from the Union.
People in
East Tennessee were firmly against Tennessee's move to leave
the Union; as were many in other parts of the Union,
particularly in historically Whig portions of West
Tennessee. Tennesseans representing twenty-six East
Tennessee counties met twice in Greenville and Knoxville and
agreed to secede from Tennessee. They petitioned the state
legislature in Nashville, which denied their request to
secede and sent Confederate troops under
Felix Zollicofer
to occupy East Tennessee and prevent secession. Many East
Tenneseans engaged in guerrilla warfare against state
authorities by burning bridges, cutting telegraph wires, and
spying.
Battles
Many
battles were fought in the state—most of them Union
victories. Ulysses S. Grant
and the United States Navy
captured control of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers in
February 1862 and held off the
Confederate
counterattack at Shiloh in
April of the same year.
Capture of
Memphis and
Nashville gave the Union
control of the Western and Middle
sections. Control
was confirmed at the
Battle of Stones River at
Murfreesboro in early
January 1863.
After
Nashville was captured (the first Confederate state capital
to fall) Andrew Johnson, an
East Tennessean from
Greeneville, was appointed military governor of the
state by Lincoln. During this time, the military government
abolished slavery.
The
Confederates continued to hold East Tennessee despite the
strength of Unionist sentiment there, with the exception of
pro-Confederate
Sullivan County.
The
Confederates besieged
Chattanooga in early fall 1863 but were driven off by
Grant in November. Many of the Confederate defeats can be
attributed to the poor strategic vision of General
Braxton Bragg, who led the
Army of Tennessee
from Shiloh to Confederate
defeat at Chattanooga.
The last
major battles came when the Confederates invaded in November
1864 and were checked at
Franklin, then totally destroyed by
George Thomas at
Nashville in December.
Reconstruction
After the
war, Tennessee adopted a constitutional amendment forbidding
property in men February 22,
1865; ratified the
Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
on July 18, 1866;
and was the first state readmitted to the Union on
July 24, 1866.
Because it
ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, Tennessee was the only
state that seceded from the Union that did not have a
military governor during
Reconstruction.
The
Nashville
Republican Banner on January 4,
1868, published an editorial calling for
a revolutionary movement of white Southerners to unseat the
one-party state rule of the
Republican Party
and restore the racial subjugation of the region's blacks.
"In this
State," the paper argued, "reconstruction has perfected
itself and done its worst. It has organized a government
which is as complete a closed corporation as may be found;
it has placed the black man over the white as the agent and
prime-move of domination; it has constructed a system of
machinery by which all free guarantees, privileges and
opportunities are removed from the people.... The
impossibility of casting a free vote in Tennessee short of a
revolutionary movement ... is an undoubted fact."
The
Banner urged readers to ignore the presidential election
and instead put energies into building "a local movement
here at home" that would end Republican rule. [cited in
Harcourt 2005]
Centennial
In 1897,
the state celebrated its centennial
of statehood (albeit one year late) with a great
exposition in Nashville.
The
Tennessee Centennial Exposition was the ultimate expression
of the Gilded Age in the Upper
South—a showcase of industrial technology and exotic
papier-mâché versions of the world’s wonders. During its
six-month run at Centennial Park,
the Exposition drew nearly two million visitors to see its
dazzling monuments to the South’s recovery.
Governor
Robert Taylor observed, “Some
of them who saw our ruined country thirty years ago will
certainly appreciate the fact that we have wrought
miracles.”
Alvin C. York
Tennessee
provided the most celebrated American soldier of the
First World War:
Alvin C. York of
Fentress County,
Tennessee. York was a former
conscientious objector
who, in October 1918, subdued an entire
German machine gun regiment
in the Argonne Forest.
Besides
receiving the Medal of Honor
and assorted French decorations, York
became a powerful symbol of patriotism
in the press and Hollywood film.
Women's rights
Tennessee
became the focus of national attention during the campaign
for women’s voting rights.
Women’s suffrage, like the
temperance movement, was
an issue with its roots in middle-class reform efforts of
the late 1800s.
The
organized movement came of age with the founding of the
Tennessee Equal Suffrage Association in 1906. Despite a
determined (and mostly female) opposition, Tennessee
suffragists were moderate in their tactics and gained
limited voting rights before the national question arose.
In 1920,
Governor Albert Roberts called
a special session of the
General Assembly
to consider ratification of the
Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Leaders of
the rival groups flooded into Nashville to lobby the General
Assembly. In a close House vote, the suffrage amendment won
passage when an East Tennessee legislator, Harry Burn,
switched sides after receiving a telegram from his mother
encouraging him to support ratification.
Tennessee
thereby became the pivotal state that in approving the
Nineteenth Amendment.
Women
immediately made their presence felt by swinging Tennessee
to Warren Harding in the 1920
presidential election—the first time the state had voted for
a Republican
presidential candidate since 1868.
Monkey Trial
Further
national attention came Tennessee’s way during the trial of
John T. Scopes, the so-called
“Scopes Monkey Trial.”
In 1925,
the General Assembly, as part of a general education bill,
passed a law that forbade the teaching of
evolution in the public schools.
Some local boosters in Dayton,
Tennessee concocted a scheme to have Scopes, a high
school biology teacher, violate the law and stand trial as a
way of drawing publicity and visitors to the town.
Their plan
worked all too well, as the
Rhea County Courthouse
was turned into a circus of national and even international
media coverage. Thousands flocked to Dayton to witness the
high-powered legal counsel (William
Jennings Bryan for the prosecution, and
Clarence Darrow for the
defense, argue their case.
Tennessee
was ridiculed in the
northeast and
West Coast press as the “Monkey State,” even as a wave
of revivals defending religious fundamentalism swept the
state.
The legal
outcome of the trial was inconsequential: Scopes was
convicted and fined $100, a penalty later rescinded by the
state court of appeals (although the law itself remained on
the books until 1967). More important was the law’s symbolic
importance: it was an expression of the anxiety felt by
Tennessee’s rural people over the threat to their
traditional religious culture posed by modern science.
Country music birthplace
Ironically,
at the very time that Tennessee’s rural culture was under
attack by sophisticated, urban critics, its music found a
national audience.
In 1925,
WSM, a powerful Nashville radio station,
began broadcasting a weekly program of live music which soon
was dubbed the “Grand Ole Opry.”
Such music came in diverse forms: banjo-and-fiddle
string bands of Appalachia, family
gospel singing groups, and country vaudeville acts like that
of Murfreesboro native Uncle Dave Macon.
Still the
longest-running radio program in American history, the Opry
used the new technology of radio to tap into a huge market
for “old time” or “hillbilly”
music.
Two years
after the Opry’s opening, in a series of landmark sessions
at Bristol, Tennessee,
field scouts of the
Victor Company recorded Jimmie
Rodgers and the Carter Family
to produce the first nationally popular rural records.
Tennessee
thus emerged as the heartland of traditional country
music—home to many of the performers as well as the place
from which it was broadcast to the nation.
The Great Depression and TVA
The need to
create work for the unemployed during the
Great Depression, the desire
for rural electrification, and the desire to control the
annual spring floods on the
Tennessee River drove the creation of the
Tennessee Valley
Authority, the nation's largest public utility, in 1933.
TVA had an
impact on the lives of nearly all Tennesseans. The agency
was created mainly through the persistence of a
Nebraska Senator
George Norris. Headquartered in
Knoxville, it was charged with the task of planning the
total development of the
Tennessee River Valley. TVA sought to do this primarily
by building hydroelectric dams (twenty between 1933 and
1951) and coal-fired power plants to produce electricity.
Inexpensive
and abundant electrical power was the main benefit that TVA
brought to Tennessee, particularly to rural areas that
previously did not have electrical service. TVA brought
electricity to about 60,000 farm households across the
state.
By 1945,
TVA was the largest electrical utility in the nation, a
supplier of vast amounts of power whose presence in
Tennessee attracted large industries to relocate near one of
its dams or steam plants.
World War II
World War
II brought relief to Tennessee by employing ten percent of
the state’s populace (308,199 men and women) in the armed
services. Most of those who remained on farms and in cities
worked on war-related production, since Tennessee received
war orders amounting to $1.25 billion.
Tennessee
military personnel served with distinction from
Pearl Harbor to the final,
bloody assaults at Iwo Jima and
Okinawa, and 7,000 died in combat
during the war. In 1942-43, Middle Tennessee residents
played host to 28 Army divisions that swarmed over the
countryside on maneuvers preparing for the
D-Day invasion.
Tennesseans
participated in all phases of the war—from combat to
civilian administration to military research.
Cordell Hull served twelve years
as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
Secretary of State and
became one of the chief architects of the
United Nations, for which he
received the Nobel Peace Prize.
Industrial expansion
War-based
industries hummed with the labor of a greatly enlarged
workforce. A giant shell-loading plant was built at
Milan, as well as the
Vultee Aircraft works in
Nashville; TVA projects also expanded in East Tennessee.
Approximately 33% of the state’s workers were female by the
end of the war.
Especially
significant for the war effort was Tennessee’s role in the
Manhattan Project, the
military’s top secret project to build an
atomic weapon. Research and
production work for the first A-bombs were conducted at the
huge scientific/industrial installation at
Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
The Oak Ridge community was entirely a creation of the war:
it grew from empty woods in 1941 to a city of 70,000
(Tennessee’s fifth largest) four years later.
Civil Rights Movement
Tennessee
played an important and prominent role in the struggle for
African-American civil rights. Many national civil rights
leaders, such as Rosa Parks and
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
received training in methods of nonviolent protest pioneered
by Gandhi at the
Highlander Folk School
in Monteagle, Tennessee.
After
decades of segregation, Tennessee's Jim
Crow laws were challenged in the spring of 1960 by an
organized group of Nashville college students from
Fisk University,
American
Baptist Theological Seminary, and
Vanderbilt University.
The students, led by Jim Farmer,
John Lewis, and
ministers of local African-American churches, mastered
methods of non-violent protest in anticipation of a planned
and concerted effort to desegregate Nashville's downtown
lunch counters through a series of sit-ins.
Although many were harassed and beaten by white vigilantes
and arrested by the Nashville police, none of the students
retaliated with violence.
The
Nashville sit-ins reached a
turning point when the house of a prominent African-American
attorney and leader was bombed. Although no one was killed,
thousands of protesters spontaneously marched to Nashville
city hall in order to confront Mayor Ben
West who to this point had only offered weak
half-measures and vacillation toward segregation. West met
the mass of protesters outside city hall and after
spontaneous debate, admitted that segregation was immoral.
The bombing, the march, and Mayor West's stunning statement
helped convince downtown lunch counters to desegregate.
Although segregation and Jim Crow were by no means over, the
episode served as not only one of the first successful means
of nonviolent protest, but as a significant example to the
rest of the nation as well.
By
contrast, the 1968 assassination of Dr. King while in
Memphis in support of the
black sanitary public works employees of
AFSCME Local 1733 was a public relations setback for the
state's image, even though the city quickly settled the
strike, on favorable terms, after the assassination.
Bicentennial
Tennessee
celebrated its bicentennial in 1996 after a yearlong
statewide celebration entitled "Tennessee 200" by opening a
new state park—the
Bicentennial Mall—at the foot of Capitol Hill in
Nashville.
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