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.
