Reference
- Tennessee: HistoryEarly History
W Tennessee abounds with artifacts of the prehistoric Mound Builders, who were the earliest inhabitants of the area. Cherokee, Chickasaw, Shawnee, and Creek were in the region when it was first visited by a European expedition under De Soto in 1540. French explorers came down the Mississippi River, claiming both sides for France, and c.1682 La Salle built Fort Prudhomme, possibly on the site of present-day Memphis. The French established additional trading posts in the area, but they suffered continual harassment from the Chickasaw. Meanwhile, English fur traders and long hunters (frontiersmen who spent long periods hunting in this area) came over the mountains from the Carolinas and Virginia, prevailed over the Cherokee, and made ineffectual the French claims to the area, which in any event was lost (1763) by the French in the French and Indian Wars.
The first permanent settlement was made (1769) in the Watauga River valley of E Tennessee by Virginians; they were soon joined by North Carolinians, including perhaps a few refugees of the Regulator movement. In 1772 these hardy settlers living beyond the frontier formed the Watauga Association, the first attempt at government in Tennessee, and in 1777, at their request, North Carolina organized those settlements into Washington co.; Jonesboro, the county seat and oldest town in Tennessee, was founded two years later.
The American Revolution and Statehood
In the American Revolution, John Sevier was among the notable Tennesseans who served with distinction. When, after the war, North Carolina ceded its western lands to the federal government, the E Tennessee settlers, incensed at being transferred without their consent, formed a short-lived independent government (1784–88) under Sevier (see Franklin, State of). The cession was reenacted in 1789, and in 1790 the federal government created the Territory of the United States South of the River Ohio (Southwest Territory), with William Blount as governor. This act disposed of various schemes to place the area under the control of Spanish Louisiana. In 1796 Tennessee, with substantially its present boundaries, was admitted to the Union as a slave state, with its capital at Knoxville. It was the first state to be carved out of national territory.
Tennessee's constitution, which provided for universal male suffrage (that is, including free blacks), was described by Thomas Jefferson as “the least imperfect and most republican” of any state. Armed with land grants awarded for service in the American Revolution, veterans and speculators (who had acquired the grants from veterans, sometimes fraudulently) swarmed in from the Carolinas, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and even from New England via such overland routes as the Wilderness Road and Cumberland Gap. Others poled keelboats from the Ohio up the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers...
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Credo Reference is an easy-to-use tool for starting research. Gather background information on your topic from hundreds of full-text encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, quotations, and subject-specific titles, as well as 500,000+ images and audio files and over 1,000 videos.
Perspectives
The Tennessee Brigade
The Tennessee Brigade fought in several well-known Civil War battles, such as Seven Pines, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, and experienced the first casualty at Gettysburg. Through previously unpublished diary entries, photographs, and extensively researched information, readers are provided a firsthand look at this Confederate unit.
Votes for Women! The Woman suffrage Movement in Tennessee, the South, and the Nation
A unique collection of scholarly essays and primary documents, Votes for Women! brings into sharp focus the suffrage battles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not only does the book examine the struggle at the national level but it looks in depth at how the drama played out in the South and in Tennessee, which in 1920 became the pivotal thirty-sixth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment - thereby making woman suffrage the law of the land.
Tennessee Slave Narratives
The view that slavery could best be described by those who had themselves experienced it personally has found expression in several thousand commentaries, autobiographies, narratives, and interviews with those who "endured." Although most of these accounts appeared before the Civil War, more than one-third are the result of the ambitious efforts of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to interview surviving ex-slaves during the 1930s. The result of these efforts was the Slave Narrative Collection, a group of autobiographical accounts of former slaves that today stands as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA. Compiled in seventeen states during the years 1936-38, the collection consists of more than two thousand interviews with former slaves, most of them first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents' own reactions to bondage. The interviews afforded aged ex-slaves an unparalleled opportunity to give their personal accounts of life under the "peculiar institution," to describe in their own words what it felt like to be a slave in the United States. Norman R. Yetman, American Memory, Library of Congress This paperback edition of all of the Tennessee narratives is reprinted in facsimile from the typewritten pages of the interviewers, just as they were originally typed.
A Forty-Niner from Tennessee
When Hugh Brown Heiskell set out from Tennessee for the California gold fields in 1849, he was one of thousands traveling west in search of fortune. Hugh and his cousin Tyler joined a wagon train from St. Louis and made their way across a continent that most people of the time could only imagine. What distinguishes him from other Forty-niners, however, is the captivating record he kept of that journey. This young Knoxville lawyer had a farm boy's curiosity for new vistas and wildlife, and he described what we saw with keen perception and insight. This unique book includes not only Heiskell's journal but also numerous letters to family back home. Although many Forty-niners kept diaries, Heiskell wrote in great detail to provide a more complete sense of life on the trail and the difficulties of the journey. Averaging just sixteen miles each day, his party faced challenges such as the three-day crossing of the Forty-mile Desert where they lost more than half of their oxen and wagons. Heiskell's accounts of camp life, of people encountered along the way, and of the treacherous crossing of the mountains through Carson Pass are all richly compelling. Of special interest are Heiskell's observations about Native Americans, their customs, their clothing, and their shelters. And, finally, readers will be deeply moved by the fate of the adventurers once they reached their destination. Edward M. Steel has integrated other sources with Heiskell's story to provide a broader overview of the gold rush days...
Tennessee Religious/Political History-The Scopes Monkey Trial
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Defense lawyer Clarence Darrow also made history defending high-school teacher John Scopes at 1925's famous "Monkey" Trial. Discover how the case that put the theory of evolution on trial brought to Tennessee a three-time presidential candidate, a flock of international reporters, and the battle for 1920s social mores.
Online Resources
- Tennessee-BritannicaThe earliest inhabitants of Tennessee are believed to have been Ice Age peoples descended from Asians who crossed the former Bering Strait land bridge more than 20,000 years ago...
- Tennessee-History ChannelTennessee became the 16th state of the union in 1796. It is just 112 miles wide, but stretches 432 miles from the Appalachian Mountains boundary with North Carolina in the east to the Mississippi River borders with Missouri and Arkansas in the west...
- Tennessee Blue Book: A History of TennesseeTennessee has a great variety of rivers, landforms, climate regions, and plant and animal species. Numerous groups of people have settled in Tennessee beginning with Native Americans about 12,000 years ago...
- Tennessee Historical SocietyWebsite of the Tennessee Historical Society.
Tennessee Civil War History-Shiloh and Corinth
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowEarly 1862 saw breathtaking Union successes in the West. Ulysses S. Grant took Forts Henry and Donelson and moved south down the Tennessee River, while Don Carlos Buell marched from Nashville. Aiming to crush Grant before Buell arrived, A. S. Johnston struck the unwary Federals near Shiloh Church on April 6, 1862.
Historical Timeline
- Historical TimelineView AtoZ The USA's historical timeline for Tennessee as a state. Note important events in history for the state.
Tennessee History of Women's Suffrage-Perfect 36: When Women Won the Vote
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowOf all the battles waged on Nashville's doorstep, the final throes for the passage of the 19th Amendment were among the most heated, controversial and colorful. In July of 1920, all eyes were on the Tennessee capital as anti- and pro-suffragists each fought for their vision of a socially evolving United States.