Tennessee

Hey, remember that Origin of the U.S. States thing I was doing? I need to get back to that. So this is Part 16 of 50 in an occasional series.

 

These state origin stories are meant to be short things I can write in an hour or two that an interested person might take five or ten minutes to read. I try to include the big picture bits of each state's history, but there's no way I can be comprehensive, so a lot of stuff gets simplified or left out. And one of the things I've been consistent about leaving out is the history of all those folks who were here before the Englishmen hopped off the boats and poured into the woods. But Tennessee's a good place for me to change that up and take a look at things from the other side. If you know anything about the history of white America's treatment of the people who got here first, you'll understand why.

 

Nobody's sure exactly who the first people were to get to Tennessee, though the anthropologists suggest people have been living someplace in the state for at least 12,000 years. The first ten millennia or so of that are little more than a misty cloud of things long forgotten, but about 2,000 years ago, the early Tennesseans decided to get in on one of the early mound-building crazes that had started sweeping through the Mississippi Valley and eventually would center on Cahokia in Illinois. By about 1000 AD, a network of walled towns built around mounds and surrounded by developed agriculture lined the river systems of the American Southeast, including Tennessee.

 

Cahokia died out around the year 1300, though, and the sprawl of Mississippian mound builders splintered into smaller groups. In Tennessee, the network linking all the little towns fell apart, and many of the villages were abandoned. Then the pendulum swung yet again, and by 1400 a group of descendants of the mound builders in eastern Tennessee and northern Georgia gathered together in a sort of mini-empire of linked city-states called the Chiefdom of Coosa. These were the people who were hanging around Tennessee when the first European ambled through in 1540, a Spanish conquistador named Hernando de Soto.

 

I'll talk more about Hernando de Soto when I do Mississippi's story, probably, but it pays to know that he was kind of a jerk. Fortunately, he hadn't yet hit on the idea of burning the native villages when he met the Coosa. Like every other Spanish conquistador, though, de Soto was only looking for two things, gold to steal and souls to save. He didn't find much of the former, but he sent word back to Spain that there were enough of the latter to justify sending in the priests. They spent about 30 years building forts and missions before the natives drove them off in 1569, and the Spanish forgot Tennessee was ever a thing.

 

Something happened to the Coosa between the moment the Spanish left and the next batch of Europeans arrived, and nobody's sure just what it was. I think it's likely that the Spaniards left that same stew of diseases that always seemed accompany the Europeans' first contact with native people, and that a mass die-off resulted in social upheaval and collapse, but the real explanation can't be known. The upshot is that by the start of the 18th century, what had been the Coosa Chiefdom had transformed into the collection of separate tribes whose names we know, people like the Muskogean-speaking Choctaw and Chickasaw in western and central Tennessee, and the Iroquoian and Cherokee people in the Appalachians. The separate groups of Appalachian Mountain people and Mississippi Plateau people grew to be enemies, with each group competing for territory at the Appalachian margins.

 

This competition grew all the more fierce as the European settlers expanded farther and farther into western Virginia and North Carolina. At the dawn of European settlement, the bulk of the Cherokee people had lived in the mountains of far western Virginia. As the Virginia plantation men grabbed more and more land to cover larger and larger debts, the Cherokee were pushed west across the mountains, and were forced to make incursions into the Muskogean-speaking territory. This only led to more conflict that strained the resources of both native groups, leaving them all weaker and less able to resist the rising tide. By 1750, the Cherokee were entrenched in the Smoky Mountains--the region all around the spot in Cades Cove where I took this picture--but their hold was tenuous, and they could be shaken off the land by anyone who wanted to try.

 

And of course, there were white folks who wanted to try. The Europeans were filling up the land east of the Appalachians, and though King George III tried keeping his gang on one side of the mountains with his Royal Proclamation of 1763, the gang wasn't having it. In the 1760s, farmers--including the people who gave me my name--started ignoring Colonial law and seeping through the mountains into the Nolichucky and French Broad River Valleys. The Crown's Colonial Powers-That-Were (for the moment) tried ordering the settlers out. The settlers responded by saying, "Screw you. Oh, and by the way, we're our own government, and we make our own rules." In 1772, they formed a sort of independent consortium they called the Watauga Association, named after another river in the region, and set about writing a code of legal conduct and establishing themselves as a political presence. Historians are conflicted over whether this actually translates to an early form of declared independence, but at the very least, it was a statement that British Crown rules held no more sway over the white men of Appalachia.

 

The Watauga Association turned out to be a short-lived affair--North Carolina annexed the Association into its territory as soon as the Declaration of Independence made the 1763 Proclamation moot--but it lasted long enough to focus on what a lot of new Tennesseans felt was their most important goal. They needed to get rid of all those Indians. Most importantly, they needed to get rid of the Cherokee still living around the mountains.

 

They started off nicely, negotiating a 10-year lease with one band of the Cherokee for a relatively small patch of land right around the Nolichucky and Watauga Valleys, territory just north of the modern Great Smoky Mountain National Park and east of the future city of Knoxville. In 1775, the Association went ahead and bought the land outright.

 

The British Crown said any kind of dealing with the Cherokee by independent colonists past the Proclamation Line was illegal, but to the Wataugans, that was just a bunch of nonbinding legalese. More significant to them was how the Cherokee felt about the whole thing, and the Cherokee were far from unified on the deal. One young chief named Dragging Canoe felt--correctly, it would turn out--that the whole thing was just a tactic to establish a beachhead, and that the Watauga and Nolichucky Rivers were just the beginning. When the American Revolution broke out in 1776, Dragging Canoe's band of Cherokee sided with the British against the Americans, and they all went to war. They staged fierce attacks against the Watauga settlers, raiding farms all across the mountains. But the Watagans fought back hard, costing the Cherokee as much as they gained.

 

But the Cherokee fought on, even after the British lost at Yorktown and vanished from Appalachia. They never gave the territory up for lost, and even managed to build alliances with their old enemies, the Choctaw and the Muskogee, that might have made some sort of difference, if the tide of white settlers hadn't been so overwhelming. But then Dragging Canoe died in 1792 while celebrating a particularly sweet victory, and Cherokee resistance fell apart. The tide rolled over them, and they were consumed.

 

The war won, the new Tennesseans focused on their grievances with their fellow Americans back across the mountains. They got into a fight with North Carolina over taxes to pay the war debt (of course), and for a while they declared themselves their own territory called the State of Franklin. Franklin didn't take, but once Vermont and Kentucky were given statehood, the Tennesseans figured out how to make things work. They wrote up their own constitution, and North Carolina washed their hands of the whole bunch. In 1796, Tennessee became the 16th state of the Union.

 

Meanwhile, the Cherokee tried to make peace with their new neighbors and began an initiative designed to democratize the tribe so that they could mesh with the growing American society. And this went okay for a while, but any time spent listening to country songs will tell you how good a Tennessean is at holding onto a grudge. They just had to wait for the right moment. That moment finally came when Tennessee's own Andrew Jackson was elected President of the United States in 1828. Like Hernando de Soto, Andrew Jackson was also a jerk, and he'd spent much of his extensive military career trying to kill off as many Indians as he could. In 1830, he pushed through the Indian Removal Act, giving himself the power to force eastern Indians off their land and onto reservations west of the Mississippi River.

 

He started with his old enemies, the Choctaw and Chicaksaw of Mississippi, and the Creek of Alabama. Some of the Cherokee in Georgia and Tennessee accepted relocation voluntarily. Most resisted. In the winter of 1838, those who remained in Tennessee, numbering about 13,000, were pushed off their ancestral lands at gunpoint and forced to march a thousand miles to the new reservation in Oklahoma. About 4,000 Cherokee would die along the road, which came to be called the Trail of Tears.

 

But none of this mattered to the typical Tennessean. Most were like Andrew Jackson, who by this time had retired to his plantation home northeast of Nashville. He could almost have watched the march from his window, but he probably didn't bother. He probably just kicked back with a bottle of whiskey and drank to the dawning of a new age for Tennessee.

Done