Land Speculation, Popular Democracy and Political Transformation

on the Tennessee Frontier, 1780-1800

By Kristofer Ray

      The article below is written by Kristofer Ray, a doctoral candidate in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was the recipient of the Wills Research Fellowship for 2001, awarded by the Tennessee Historical Society for research in the society's collections. This article is a product of that research.

[ Despite the region's distance from the American capital and the violence of Indian attacks, land speculators claimed much of the Cumberland area by the late 1780s. Surveyor David McGavock created this sketch of his family's holdings at Nashville in 1786. (From History of Davidson County, Tennessee, 1880) ]

            Washington administration agent I. H. Williamson was rather optimistic in the summer of 1789. Clearly relieved that American government had stabilized under the new Constitution, Williamson informed frontier leader James Robertson that North Carolina’s Cumberland District problems were about to dissipate. The new Indian Commissioner General Benjamin Lincoln, he wrote,

will impress the Southern Indians with an idea that trifling is at an end, and that they must seriously treat and faithfully abide by what they promise. It is possible that the troops will be left as a barrier on the frontier to see that neither parties [sic] break the treaty. This I believe is the beginning of general Peace and security against the Indians.^[1]

He added, “If you have seen any News Papers you may have observed that Congress Have established a Post on the Ohio, not with much hope as you must be assured, of collecting many Duties on Goods brought up the Mississippi, but to part fair and let Spain see that the new Government is resolved to maintain its Claim to the Navigation of that River.”^[2]

            Williamson’s faith in a burgeoning frontier/government relationship would prove premature. Due to a group of influential land speculators, the transition from North Carolina frontier to federal territory and ultimately into the state of Tennessee would be difficult.  Taking advantage of both the lenient statutes of North Carolina and an unstable Confederation government, speculators in the 1770s and 1780s established frontier stations, fortified settlements, as focal points from which to survey contested lands. The stations, in turn, increasingly concerned local Indian tribes, who grew to believe “what was told some years ago by the Kings people i.e. if our elder brothers here overcome them, they would at last take all our hunting grounds and bring us to nothing.”^[3] By the late 1770s, white encroachment led to confrontation between Cherokees and the eastern Watauga settlements, and after 1780, between the Chickasaws and the new group of settlers led by Robertson, Richard Henderson, and John Donelson in the Cumberland basin.^[4]

            As early as 1783, Spain received reports of armed Cumberland-to-Mississippi River expeditions and became convinced that, as nineteenth century historian John Haywood noted, “settlers on the western waters were of the warlike character as already to manifest an inordinate ambition and vast projects for conquering all the countries on the eastern shore of the Mississippi.”^[5] Hoping to establish a buffer zone between themselves and this American threat, Spanish ministers thus closed river navigation and signed treaties of friendship with the Cherokee and Creek Nations.

            Such ongoing intimidation severely affected the economic and social stability of white settlers and led them to demand aid both from North Carolina and the Confederation government. When neither proved willing to help, settlers and speculators looked for an alternate solution: a powerful central authority that would stabilize the economy, protect personnel and stations, stimulate immigration, and ensure that Spain would allow settlers access to the port of New Orleans.^[6] Their attempts at procuring these ends generally fell into three categories. First, as James Robertson made clear, there was always the possibility of looking abroad:

In all probability we cannot long remain in our present state, and if the British or any commercial nation who may be in possession of the mouth of the Mississippi would furnish us with trade, and receive our produce there cannot be a doubt but that the people on the west side [of] the Apalachian [sic] mountains will open their eyes to their real interest.^[7]

More often, the region’s leadership employed extralegal means of support, the results of which were governing authorities such as the Watauga Association, Cumberland Compact, and the state of Franklin. After 1788 a third option won out, however; leading speculators found that the new American government could provide the authority they were seeking, as well as the stability necessary to establish themselves as the political leaders of the Southwest.^[8] Given that several already maintained ties to (or were in their own right) influential Federalists, it comes as no surprise that they easily transferred their support to the new government.

            This partnership would end by the early 1790s when the Washington administration and its eastern political allies realized that aggressive land speculation was costing the government millions of dollars in revenue, and was leading to a frightful escalation in settler-Indian warfare by pushing white settlers onto contested land in the Cumberland basin. Their conclusion -- that Southwestern conflagration grew out of a land-grab impulse that left Indian tribes more in need of protection than white settlers -- came at a moment when the cash-poor government was looking for ways to exploit western resources and begin lowering the country’s sizeable debt. Seeing that better opportunities for federal control lay in the land rich northwest, they implemented a defensive Southwestern policy that effectively alienated not only the otherwise supportive territorial elite but also the region’s growing population.^[9] The end result was that Federalist interests gave way to a new, powerful “Jeffersonian” political culture that offered nascent but growing democratic institutions and that would not falter until well into the nineteenth century.

            Although potentially profitable, land speculation had operated as a destructive force almost from its arrival in North Carolina’s “western district.” Indeed, prior to the 1760s the area was part of a wider European market that brought the Chickasaws in the west and Cherokees in the east together with white traders into what John R. Finger has called a middle ground -- a realm in which Southwestern Indians interacted with European cultures but were not dominated by them.^[10] This middle ground began to erode in the years after the Seven Years War, when white explorers and long hunters began to appear in significant numbers in the district. Personalities such as Daniel Boone captured the popular imagination with their extended hunting exploits, but his and his colleagues’ activities went beyond the mere harvesting of game animals. John Campbell, for example, “a very early pioneer of Southwestern Virginia,” managed to explore “the valley of the Holston as early as 1764, and purchase an ancient survey, where he and his father and his family afterwards settled.”^[11]

            Thousands of Virginians and North Carolinians, as well as Pennsylvanians and Marylanders soon would follow his lead. These people moved into the backcountry to start anew, and in many cases looked to the possibility that the seemingly endless supply of “empty” land might provide them with a consistent source of income. Despite the presence of increasingly unhappy Indian tribes, then, many leading western figures began to press for abrogation of the Royal Proclamation of 1763.^[12]

            Thus in the late 1760s the middle ground came under the withering attack of American expansion. Specifically, the 1768 Treaties of Fort Stanwix and Hard Labor gave expansionists access to vast ranges of the territory south of the Ohio River. It would only get worse. In 1775, for example, Richard Henderson’s Transylvania Company negotiated the sale of twenty-seven thousand square miles in central Kentucky and Tennessee away from the Cherokees.^[13] The problem with such a massive acquisition was that for local Indian tribes -- particularly the Cherokees -- notions of manhood and tribal order were closely connected to rites of hunting and thus to the large range of land that made up the Transylvania purchase.^[14]  When combined with the increasing number of white settlers moving into the eastern district, Henderson’s activity provided too serious a threat to Southwestern tribal traditions.

            In short order Virginia would reject the claim as destructive to the interests of the crown. Nevertheless, Henderson’s efforts and eastern encroachment led the Chickamaugas, a renegade group comprised of disgruntled Cherokees, runaway slaves and disparate white traders, and the main band of the Cherokees to fight in order to stave off encroachment.^[15]  Certainly white settlers understood the situation. As Franklin governor and land speculator John Sevier made clear in a 1785 letter to North Carolina Governor Alexander Martin:

You cannot be insensible that North Carolina in opening her land Office tolerated all the lands on the North side of the Tennessee as far up as the mouth of Holston’s river to be entered.  Have you been informed that within this limit there is several Indian Towns, and the greater part of all the corn plantations belonging to the Chickamoggy lie on the north side of the Tennessee, together with all the principal part of their hunting ground?  If not, I can assure your Excellency it is the case, and this alone I have sufficient reason to believe is the principal reason why the Indians commit hostilities.^[16]

            As Sevier intimated, North Carolina’s Revolutionary land statutes only reinforced tribal decisions to go on the offensive. Although “the old north state” officially frowned upon Henderson’s 1775 purchase, a solid faction of its political elite nevertheless provided golden opportunities for speculators who were willing to work within their legislative framework. In 1777, for example, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a land act that created boundaries for the “western district” that covered the entire area of modern Tennessee, even though only approximately 2,000 white immigrants were settled along a few eastern rivers.^[17] In 1782, moreover, the assembly, in response to British threats, offered Continental recruits a minimum of 640 acres and a slave in the Cumberland district. They based this action on the belief that settlers should have free access to the land surrounding the few stations that comprised the new settlements.^[18] The following year, legislators most effectively challenged Indian authority by opening all un-granted land in the region to settlement, an action which they justified by pointing out that North Carolina needed to repay war debts and that Indians (specifically, the Cherokee) had forfeited their claims by allying with the British.^[19]

            In passing this last “land grab” act the North Carolina General Assembly created an atmosphere that was particularly advantageous for a select few speculators. The reason, as historian Thomas Abernethy once noted, was simple: even if he could (and wanted to) hold on to war certificates, the average North Carolinian could only secure a warrant after a potential tract had had its boundaries located and marked.^[20] Without the means of getting to the military district, or for paying for the surveys, most veterans found that their certificates were meaningless. Faced with this reality, and with a need for real money in the post-war economic recession, many soldiers sold their claims to speculators for bargain prices. Those who kept them often were later swindled.^[21]

            Once in possession of the land warrants, speculators sent front men to the Cumberland district with orders to carry out the necessary surveys and run the all-important land office.^[22] Native Americans, of course, quickly came to view these settlers as a threat.^[23]  And what better response to land encroachment than to attack the settlements? If millions of tribal acres were grabbed and surveyed from the small station at Nashborough, then why not go after the source of the problem?^[24] Ultimately they did so -- and with such force that many settlers considered permanently leaving the region.

            Given that both the settlements’ future and their reputations as an influential elite depended on their ability to develop the region, frontier leaders appealed to North Carolina and the Confederation government for assistance. ^[25] They were quickly disappointed. For North Carolina, the issue was simple -- although it provided more than generous land laws and allowed for the seating of western district representatives, the assembly was not willing to offer anything more than token military and economic aid. To settlers the Confederation government seemed equally indifferent. The Treaty of Hopewell of 1785 provided a typical example: it left white settlers on the “wrong” side of new boundaries for the Watauga district and provided that the Cherokees could punish trespassers as they saw fit. Such an affront to their legitimacy led frontiersmen and speculators alike to believe that the government represented “an inhuman lack of concern for the plight of white settlers on the frontier.”^[26]

            This “lack of concern” seemed only to get worse in 1786 when John Jay, hoping to negotiate the opening of Spanish ports on the Iberian Peninsula, proposed that the United States agree to a twenty-five-to-thirty year closure of the Mississippi.To those with frontier interests this was absolute apostasy. Losing the river trade would not only minimize economic opportunities for the few settlers already on the Cumberland frontier, it would also severely limit immigration and thus future growth. Perhaps Daniel Smith made the point most clearly when he noted that Mississippi navigation was “as the light of the sun, a birth-right that cannot be alienated.”^[27]

            The response from frontier leaders was twofold. On the one hand, speculators quickly negated the limiting nature of Confederation Indian treaties by doing “the best we can to open the land office once more [so as to] Grant all the Western Country and leave Congress no further hopes of obtaining it from us to whom it justly belongs.”^[28] On the other hand, key frontier leaders moved towards the establishment of alternative sources of investment and settlement protection. Their efforts led to the scenario deemed most dangerous by Confederation and eastern leaders. ^[29] Following the example of James Wilkinson in Kentucky and led by Superintendent of Indian Affairs Dr. James White, Tennesseans offered their services to the Spanish government and “assured [them] that the western country would surely secede from the United States and unite with Spain and England in order to obtain access to the entire length of the Mississippi River.”^[30] As young Andrew Jackson later remarked, allying with the Spanish simply was “the only immediate way to obtain a peace with the savage.”^[31]

            In 1788 advocates of a stronger federal government hoped to bring order to this rather muddled environment. And, realizing that it could provide the centralized authority necessary to enhance land values and thus long-term investments, most speculators went along.^[32] The problem was convincing the rest of North Carolina that coming under the new government provided palpable short and long-term benefits -- no small task given that Anti-Federalist forces had already mobilized so effectively as to undermine ratification. In 1788, their advantage proved too strong for Federalist partisans, but after New York and Virginia approved the new government most North Carolinians accepted reality and endorsed the new Constitution. ^[33] At approximately the same time the legislature ceded to the new government the western district, with the stipulations that it guarantee all old land titles, protect the institution of slavery, and otherwise establish the new territory under the provisions of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Thus in 1790 the new federal government created the Territory of the United States South of the River Ohio.^[34] 

            In that year, the region was largely comprised of lands used by Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Chickamaugas, as well as scattered white settlements totaling 28,649 residents in the eastern district and 7,049 in the Cumberland.^[35] These settlers offered little opposition to the transfer of authority to the new federal government, despite lingering local perceptions of “shabby” treatment by the Confederation government.

            They did, however, draw from their early experiences to develop a relative level of popular democracy. Following the example created by the 1772 Watauga Association, the 1780 Cumberland Compact protected and fostered land distribution, and gave all freemen over the age of twenty-one the right to vote for a local twelve-man court.^[36] Throughout the 1780s, moreover, common Tennesseans used militia organizing and electioneering as a means of advancing “their views on local, state, national and international issues.”^[37] Militias in fact tended to serve as a political outlet unlike almost any other for the frontier settler; in addition to overseeing such government functions as census enumeration, they provided the most meaningful exchanges and contested elections in which these men were involved throughout the pre-territorial period.^[38]

            This democratic impulse clearly had its limits. Because settlers maintained traditional notions of deference, no one outside of the small clique of speculator gentry provided any substantive input on questions that mattered in terms of institutional development at either the territorial or federal levels. Although it was voluntary and conditional on the frontier, as it was for most areas in the colonial and revolutionary South, adherence to traditional political cultural forms ensured that a paternal system would evolve with little input from below.^[39]  Virginian Arthur Campbell, for example, a man often regarded as unusually democratic for his era, noted that although “a real republican system is a delightful object for me to contemplate; I am not so deficient in the knowledge of mankind, as not to doubt the wisdom and virtue of a people that are yet far from being enlightened.”^[40] In the Mero District the trend away from wider political participation was particularly pronounced, as seven out of eight legislators and eighteen of twenty-four county court judges were either speculators or employed by them.

            After 1790, the restrictive nature of the Northwest Ordinance only tightened speculator control. Specifically, the Ordinance’s provisions gave the governor nearly unlimited power over his territory by giving him the authority to convene a legislature, as well as the ability to appoint “the necessary officers of Government, that is Justices, Sheriffs, Constables, Clerks, Registers, and Militia officers of every grade below a General.”^[41] Controlling these positions -- most prominently the militia officers -- ensured that the electioneering of the earlier period would become less significant. Population and the ordinance, in short, meant that no formal mechanism could emerge through which Tennesseeans could challenge elite control. While one may grant that, in the broadest sense, public perception continued to play a role in molding the course of government, the fact that “leading men acceded to ideas about popular sovereignty” nevertheless was more abstract than it might have seemed.^[42] Whatever the elite had in common with settlers simply stemmed from the fact that in the territorial period the two groups had similar goals -- to reduce Indian assaults, assure land titles, protect land value, enhance economic growth, and foster immigration.

            The six-year territorial period thus served as a vehicle for speculators’ interests, where high levels of land accumulation and jealous protection of reputation became a prerequisite for offices of any regional or national significance.^[43] William Blount perhaps provides the perfect example, as his political stature in North Carolina (in addition to his legislative and Congressional service, he had also acted as a delegate to the 1787 Federal Convention), combined with his vast holdings in the western district, virtually ensured that President George Washington would appoint him to the all-powerful post of territorial governor.  Blount clearly recognized the position’s potential. “The appointment is truly important to me,” he wrote to John Steele, “more so in my opinion than any other in the Gift of the President could have been, the Salary is handsome, and my Western lands had become so great an object to me that I should go to the Western Country to secure them and perhaps my presence might have enhanced their value.”^[44] Moreover, given his long-standing position that “it is a principle with me never to . . . stand between a friend and a benefit,” Blount’s formal appointment meant that land speculators would come to represent the overwhelming majority of the new territorial government.^[45]

            His first act as governor further solidified his network. Upon his arrival in the Southwest Territory the new governor visited all of the major settlements, familiarizing himself with local concerns and legitimizing the power of local authorities. In effect, this “swing around the circuit” created a group of loyal lower-level elites that remained part of his “machine” until well after statehood. Loyalty to Blount in turn helped several aspiring lawyers -- including John McNairy, Archibald Roane, Andrew Jackson and John Overton -- establish themselves within the political structures of their respective locations.  Subsequently they would use their positions as springboards to leadership in the early statehood years in Tennessee.^[46]                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

[William Blount attempted to protect the Tennessee region from Indian hostilities and the influence of the Spanish. Through much of his term, he hoped that Congress would wage a "vigorous national war...to bring the Indians to act as they ought," and thereby ensure territorial stability. The federal government never met his expectations. (Portrait by Washington B. Cooper, Tennessee Historical Society.) ]

            Control by this speculator elite also meant that the residents of the Territory South of the River Ohio would closely follow their political allegiance, first, with the Washington administration. Although there was certainly no Federalist “party” in 1790, the territory’s leadership came into power believing that President Washington would create an atmosphere conducive to speculation, immigration, and commerce. Accordingly, they were more than willing to support federal policies and continued to do so after internal squabbling had produced out of Washington’s cabinet the coalitions later labeled “Hamiltonian” and “Jeffersonian.” Even so, the lust for land by Blount and his fellow speculators proved to be so insatiable that it soon managed to alienate the administration and its allies.

            The problem first emerged in 1789 when, despite specific orders from the administration to cease trespassing, southwestern speculators pressed Georgia to sell its western (or Yazoo) lands. Blount, as well as ex-governor of Franklin John Sevier,  soon became part of the Tennessee Yazoo Company, which was looking to purchase the land surrounding the Muscle Shoals area in the great bend of the Tennessee River.^[47] Unsuccessful in this endeavor, the new governor in 1790 generously construed directions from Secretary of War Henry Knox that he re-affirm or revise the Cherokee boundaries that had been in relative limbo since the Treaty of Hopewell.

            The resulting Treaty of Holston was, as Knox noted, “materially different from the one suggested in his instructions,” and in fact was so egregious, that it, “combined with the attempts of the Georgia [Yazoo] companies, would have pernicious effects” on settler-Indian relations.^[48] Washington proved sympathetic, and despite public support for Blount’s treaty the President quietly provided a deputy agent and fifteen hundred dollars in gifts to placate unhappy Cherokee leaders. His actions, however, did little to stop the incessant stream of settlers, surveyors and speculators who continued their activity despite the new treaty.^[49] As Cherokee leader the Bloody Fellow lamented to Blount: “The talks we had [with the administration] was that we should not war with one another, and that [settlers] should not encroach on our land. But in place of that they are daily encroaching and building on our land; this is not what [we] had agreed upon.”^[50] The situation was bad enough that by the fall of 1792 younger Cherokees rejected the advice of tribal elders and began to apply more forceful means of protecting their territory.

            Problems with the Creeks and Spanish made the situation more precarious. Indeed, the Yazoo intrigue of 1789 in conjunction with the Holston treaty’s speculator-friendly boundaries put Creek and Spanish lands as well as Mississippi navigation within the easy grasp of a growing number of white Americans. The Creeks had already attacked the eastern settlements in Georgia because of their fears of excessive encroachment; these new developments were enough to make some Creek leaders fear that the young Republic might overrun their boundaries. In response, the Creeks decided to attack and destroy white settlements, particularly in the Cumberland. Their decision to go on the offensive also reflected the nature of their alliance with Spanish officials. The Spanish often reminded Southern tribes (most specifically the Creeks, but Cherokees and Chickamaugas as well) that they were “not like Americans -- first take your land, then treat with you, and give you little or nothing for them.”^[51] Extensive Spanish-tribal interaction virtually ensured that a new round of hostilities would become inevitable.

            Although South Carolinian Andrew Pickens reported in 1792 that the Spanish were using “all their influence with the Southern Indians to engage them against the United States,” speculators seemed not to appear overly concerned.^[52] After all, argued Governor Blount, the only thing that was needed to maintain territorial stability was a “vigorous national war . . . to bring the Indians to act as they ought.”^[53] Such an action, he told his political allies, would surely occur. “Congress, who alone have the right to declare war,” he wrote to James Robertson, “or in other words to order offensive operations are to meet on the 5^th Instant, November and no doubt is to be entertained, but they will do what the dignity of the government requires and redress the sufferings of their frontier citizens.”^[54] A few months later, after escalating assaults led settlers to demand some level of military retaliation, Blount made clear to Robertson that he should not “despair of the protection of Government. Congress ended their session the 4^th, Instant and no doubt have left power in the hands of the President to manage Indian affairs as he shall judge proper and in that case there is the greatest certainty that he will cause perfect justice to be done.”^[55] Perhaps the governor most explicitly expressed his commitment to the Washington administration when he wrote of the Genet conspiracy -- one supported by speculators across the old Southwest -- that “All attempting to injure our happy Government, the best yet discovered, serve to strengthen and to call more fully into view its worth.”^[56]

            Yet by autumn of 1793 the continued federal hesitancy to offer any substantive monetary or military assistance threatened Blount’s pro-administration coalition, leaving him in the unenviable position of having to relay to the Cumberland district that

[because] the most rigid economy is enjoined on me by the federal government as well as protection required by the inhabitants of the territory which I ever feel a pleasure in granting as far as in my power, I cannot enlarge my order . . . more than to allow in the whole a company of mounted Infantry on duty at any one time to act together or separate as you shall judge proper in advance on the frontiers.^[57]

            Initially, Blount blamed an unsympathetic Congress, commenting to James Robertson that

I can assure you with great pleasure that no man on Earth has a more just idea of the Indian business than the President, having benn [sic] much acquainted with the perfidy of the Indians at an early age, and it is only to be lamented that Congress with which the power of peace & war rests have not hitherto understood it as well as everybody else seems to have done, and it is equally to be lamented that Beard and other foolish uninformed people have done the cause of the suffering frontier people so much injury in the eyes of the people of the Atlantic states. It is to be hoped that the next Congress will be more enlightened.”^[58]

He soon became aware, however, that the problem was worse than he had thought; the entire “Federalist” coalition, not just its Congressional wing, was explicitly retreating from any appearance of support for the territory. The reason, it seemed, was that high levels of speculation (most strongly reinforced by a State Department report in 1791 showing that as little as 300,000 acres were available to the government) not only violated instructions not to encroach upon Indian country, but also minimized the potential for federal control of available land.^[59] Anecdotal reports from the territory only made Federalists more cynical. As agent James Seagrove pointed out, “I find the Creeks have been killing some white people on their Western frontiers. In my talks with the Indians, I am led to believe that the people killed, belong to a settlement South of the Cumberland river, and on lands that never have been sold, or ceded by the Indians; that those people have repeatedly been ordered off by the Indians, but will not go.”^[60]

            Other evidence indicates that Seagrove’s anecdotes were accurate. By early 1793 speculators had come to maintain such a brisk pace of activity that reports from the Cumberland district often blurred the distinction between encroachment and Indian attack. Resident John Nichols provides a key example. While reminding William Lytle “to purchase me a small tract of land, from Capt Davis of Newbern . . . [of one hundred acres of] land near Eaton’s old station,” he delivered the news that “you’re old friend Col Isaac Bledsoe was unfortunately killed and scalped about the middle of last month.”^[61] And amidst this bloody situation larger-scale land grabs continued unabated. In 1794, for example, Martin Armstrong and Stockley Donelson wrote to North Carolina Secretary of State James Glasgow of a potential opening that eventually would embroil all of them in scandal. “We are ever Sensible of your Friendship,” they wrote to him in Raleigh,

and it would be ingratitude at This Period to Secret The lucrative views That now presents to us more capital in the Western Territory Than any yet discovered. Our communications are good. We wish you to be connected in the benefits That may after wards acrue [sic] and without ceremony We are desirous to purchase all the Military and State Land warrants That may be had on reasonable terms to cover a tract of Sixty Thousand Acres.^[62]

            Governor William Blount shed even greater light on the extent of the land grab. Looking to complement his already substantive holdings, he admitted to James Robertson

Your part of the land [in middle Tennessee] I would not purchase generally at any price but it may be that I may purchase your part of particular tracts if we can agree in the price and ten cents [per acre] is the very highest I will give for any tract be the quality what it may. Don’t suppose I have opened a market for Cumberland Lands and want to purchase to sell again to immediate profit for I pledge you my word and honor I have not and I believe I never shall unless I would possess myself of a large body laying together near the settlements say from sixty thousand to hundred thousand acres in a body.^[63]

            In short, as the new Federalist coalition was coming into existence they became aware that the government held few prospects of controlling the territory through centrally organized land sales. With little opportunity of lowering its indebtedness in the Southwest Territory, they simply had no incentive to authorize large-scale military expenditures.^[64] Secretary of War Henry Knox thus asserted that offensive measures were “a very great and . . . insupportable evil.  Everything depends upon your exertions to avert the event of a war, that will be reluctantly entered into and at best but illy supported.”^[65] Only a year later Knox -- ironically, himself a speculator of the first order -- better encapsulated the emerging Federalist consensus when he wrote to Blount that “it is not to be supposed that [the United States] will support the expences [sic] of a war brought on the frontiers by the wanton blood thirsty disposition of our own people.”^[66] Perhaps the Knoxville Gazette best summarized the emerging Federalist position when it lamented that the government was “not disposed to believe that the necessity of justice really exists, and if it does, that it is the Indians that should be protected and not the whites.”^[67]

            As Indian attacks increased in number and ferocity, the administration’s defensive strategy hamstrung a territorial government that was obligated to carry out federal orders, and left many settlers, particularly in the Cumberland, wondering, “What are the blessings of Government to us? Are we to hope for protection? If so, when?”^[68] By 1793 tensions reached the boiling point -- so much so that territorial secretary Daniel Smith wrote of a palpable “spirit for war against Indians [that] pervades people of all Ranks so far that no order of Government can stop them.”^[69] Incidents of settler raids were so prevalent, and were deemed such a threat to territorial interests, that Smith authorized an “exploratory expedition” that would enable militia General John Sevier to halt individual acts of vigilantism and show settlers that the government was doing something to “pursue and chastize [sic] the enemy.”^[70] Sevier’s militia burned several Creek and lower Cherokee villages in Georgia before returning to Knoxville in October of that year.^[71]

            The Sevier expedition certainly slowed the determination of roving bands of Cherokees, Creeks, and Chickamaugas to crush the Cumberland settlements. It did not stop them, however, and in 1794 the territorial leadership once again appealed to the federal government for help.  When no significant aid was forthcoming many began to re-evaluate their position vis-à-vis the Washington administration. As Mero district attorney Andrew Jackson wrote:

I fear that their Peace Talks are only Delusions; and in order to put us off our guard; what motives Congress are governed by with Respect to their pacific Disposition towards Indians I know not; some say humanity dictates it; but Certainly she ought to extend an equal share of humanity to her own Citizens[.]  this country is Declining very fast, and unless Congress lends us a more ample protection this Country will have at length to break or seek protection from some other Source than the present.^[72]

            A large number of Cumberland settlers went a step further. Whereas Jackson searched for a political solution, many settlers by the spring and summer of 1794 once again turned to individual acts of “justice.” James Taylor’s account provides merely one example. In a letter to William Lytle he pointed out that “the Indians are very troublesome on the frontier of Cumberland,” and that when Indians killed “5 persons in my neighborhood, about 100 men followed them, came up with them on the head of the Elk river, killed them and took 2 squaws which composed the whole party.”^[73] Even as Blount moved towards the creation of a territorial legislature to address public concerns over Indian assault, a more formal “spirit of war” sprang from a district militia that proved quite willing to engage in indiscriminate attacks on nearby Indian settlements. Perhaps the most infamous instance occurred in August of 1794 when near constant offensives led Cumberland general James Robertson (and, some argue, Governor Blount, despite his federally ordered neutrality) to authorize an unrestricted raid on the Chickamauga settlements to the southeast. The militia destroyed the Indian towns of Nickajack and Running Water before triumphantly returning to Nashville.^[74]

            Of course, Robertson’s activity, in conjunction with Sevier’s late 1793 campaign, served only to infuriate the Federalist coalition in Philadelphia. By 1795, the government had become so hostile that no amount of Indian depredation could justify to them the need for an offensive counter-attack. Newly appointed Secretary of War Timothy Pickering, for example, responded to Blount’s request for federal troops by stating, “Upon the whole, sir, I cannot refrain from saying that the complexion of some of the transactions in the south-western territory appears unfavorable to the public interests.” As such, he made clear, “All ideas of offensive operations are to be laid aside and all possible harmony cultivated with the Indian tribes.”^[75] Pickering proclaimed that Blount should cease complaining about Indian depredations, noting, “Tranquility on the frontiers is not to be expected while we permit our Citizens to encroach on Indian lands. One species of robbery affords as just grounds of hostility as the other.”^[76] The secretary’s hostile review was by no means a lone voice, either; territorial Congressional delegate James White consistently had to defend settlers against Federal charges of being “bloodthirsty and semi-savage.”^[77]

            By late 1794 Blount was stuck between a territory dangerously close to mutiny and a federal government that had decisively rejected requests for military aid.^[78] By early 1795 even local Indian tribes noted the district’s precarious existence. As Bloody Fellow pondered, “For many years they have been killing the People of this Country; is it that this country is not under the Protection of the U. S., or is it that the President is uninformed of the many murders and Thefts committed by the Creeks?”^[79] With this question ringing in his ears, Blount considered any means by which to extricate the territory from its quagmire. Privately, he remained open to outside sources of support, which in 1796 would lead to not-so-quiet feelers to the British for assistance in placing part of the Southwest under the crown.^[80] In public, however, he made clear that “the wished for period [of peace] will never arrive until this Territory becomes a State and is represented in Congress.”^[81] He was aware that such a step would lessen his near hegemonic authority, but Blount nevertheless believed that Congress could not ignore the needs of a new state.^[82] After two-plus years of bloody confrontation, the territory overwhelmingly agreed; as John Sevier pointed out in a 1795 legislative report, “the great body of our constituents are sensible of many grave defects of our present mode of government and of the great and permanent advantages to be derived from a change and speedy representation in Congress.”^[83]  With the public clearly behind him, and with a subsequent enumeration that showed 77,262 residents, Blount moved forward with a constitutional convention for January of 1796.^[84] Within four weeks, the convention unanimously approved a document that was submitted to Philadelphia for approval.

            Over this same period Blount and his political machine moved towards an alignment with the Jeffersonian-Republican coalition, a group that drew upon western interests as a source of conceptualization for building the new nation.^[85] Federalists were less than pleased. Given the increasingly rancorous nature of the debate between the two “parties,” the territorial leadership’s movement into the Jeffersonian camp meant that statehood “would have the most serious effects [because it would provide] one twig of the electioneering cabal for Mr. Jefferson.”^[86] Since 1796 was a presidential election year, party leaders (particularly in the Federalist-controlled Senate) fought Tennessee’s petition on four grounds: that the North Carolina cession, in conjunction with the Northwest Ordinance, required Congress to create new states; that the territorial census was improperly executed because it lacked federal oversight; that the new Tennessee constitution was faulty; and that it was counter to federal law.^[87] Although the Jeffersonian-dominated House of Representatives managed to quiet the opposition and throw its collective support behind statehood, it would take a sympathetic conference committee finally to force the entire Congress into approving statehood, only two days before the end of the session.

            The unsurprising result of this contentious debate was that Federalism fell even further in the estimation of both the territorial administration and most settlers, and the state subsequently gave its three electoral votes to Jefferson. For many within the political elite, voting against their former allies became a sort of vendetta. Newly elected Senator Blount, for example, noted “Truth is that I have taken a great agency in this election and have been induced to do so by the part the adverse party took against the admission of the State of Tennessee.”^[88] Perhaps a more important result of their antipathy, however, was the elimination of a Federalist interest in the new state’s early political culture, meaning that there was no opposition through which a party system could come into existence. To the contrary, early national Tennessee became a bastion of Jeffersonian-Republicanism. Although economic and ideological differences rapidly emerged, this one-party political system would last well into the nineteenth century.^[89]

            Amidst the statehood debate frontier settlers also managed to obtain a modicum of peace with the Indians. Although certainly not the only reason, a critical element in this detente was Spain’s withdrawal from Southwestern intrigue. By 1794 the Spanish government had become convinced that European conflicts were spiraling out of control. As it focused more on achieving peace with Revolutionary France, it negotiated an American treaty that both opened the Mississippi River and ended Spain’s informal support of Indian hostilities. Although they would sporadically meddle in the Southwest until Napoleon sold Louisiana in 1803, Spanish withdrawal nevertheless left the Cherokee and Creek nations without a powerful source of moral and material assistance.^[90]

            For the Cherokees this development, combined with the destruction of the Northern pan-Indian alliance at Fallen Timbers and the desire of tribal elders to reestablish contact with the Blount administration, led them to do all in their power to put a halt to the assaults upon the Cumberland settlements. Although the Creeks resisted a bit longer, losing Spanish and Cherokee support, in conjunction with a potential war with the Chickasaws, led them to pursue peace in 1796. Some Native American resistance would continue into the early part of the nineteenth century, but the treaty period of 1795-1796 removed some of the last major obstacles for white settlement in East and Middle Tennessee. This in turn led to a flood of immigration, which gave speculators the opportunity to re-start the cycle of exploitation in West Tennessee.^[91]

            By that point, of course, most Federalists had come to endorse Timothy Pickering’s assessment that Southwestern settlers were “the least worthy subjects of the United States.”^[92] Subsequent events only reinforced their view.^[93] William Blount’s efforts while a U. S. Senator to acquire Louisiana for the British, for example, proved to Federalists that the ex-governor had operated in a manner unbecoming an officer of the federal government. Even after he resigned and hastened back to Knoxville, Federalists charged him with treason and commenced impeachment proceedings.^[94] In 1797, moreover, the new Adams administration decided to re-define Tennessee’s still vague southeastern Indian boundary in an attempt to build peaceful relations with the Cherokees. Unfortunately, they appointed Benjamin Hawkins, Andrew Pickens, and James Winchester to survey the line -- the former two being men Governor John Sevier called “inveterate enemies to this country.”^[95] Such an affront upset the state’s leaders, and led some, including a newly re-invigorated William Blount, to call for open resistance. The situation became so dangerous that the war department ordered out two companies of federal troops to ensure the commissioners’ safety. From Knoxville Colonel Benjamin Howard commented on the situation. In a letter to William Preston he wrote,

“I am sorry to find you and your Brother officers rendered unhappy between the daring demagogues of faction and the unfortunate misled; instead of being considered the protectors of your Country are viewed as the Engines of oppression and your toils rewarded only by the suspicions and insults of those around you. Certainly the people have had time to reflect & see the reasons upon which the Government acted in their removal also to discover that it was not a wanton exercise of power but a measure that grew out of necessity.”^[96]

            Ultimately, only Governor Sevier’s political savvy kept the state from plunging into armed chaos. By alternately appealing to the local populace, remonstrating to Philadelphia, allowing for the implementation of Federal policy, and serving as a treaty commissioner to the Cherokees, Sevier kept the peace and got the Adams administration eventually to purchase confiscated squatter land.^[97]

            Yet for Federalists, their problems with the “Jeffersonian” leaders in Tennessee went beyond just treason and mutiny. Indeed, amidst the boundary controversy emerged another scandal that confirmed to Federalist partisans that their long-standing fear of the region was well warranted.  In early 1798 newly appointed Senator Andrew Jackson “was informed by a Mr. Charles of the rascality carried on at Nashville” in the land office, and deemed it worrisome enough that it was “sufficient inducement to make it known to the Governor of North Carolina” of potentially fraudulent activity by North Carolina speculators.^[98] When North Carolina Governor Samuel Ashe initiated a formal inquiry he received word of a large “number and variety of frauds, perjuries and forgeries, [which] the gentlemen of the board [of inquiry] have strong grounds to presume have been committed, with procuring military warrants and grants, in all stages of business both on this, and the other side of the mountains.”^[99]

            Judge H. O. Tatum of Tennessee soon provided the framework through which the frauds occurred: “Many locations originally made by A and recorded, now appear to be the property of B and this by erasing the name of A and the number of the warrant, and inserting the name of B and the number of his warrant, and this can be proved by comparing the file, with the book of Record.” Moreover, there was the problem of

permitting blank locations to be filed and carried forward to the books, and perhaps some years after a warrant, and the name of the owner is annexed to the location as it stands in the books, by which such person, in many instances, has a location older than his warrant. And should it so happen, as it often will, that some other person has made a fair entry subsequent to the [aforementioned] blank one, the filling of this blank, in the manner I have mentioned has rendered the honest locators right doubtful, it not appearing on the books at what time the warrant & name was annexed to the blank location.^[100]

            Many speculators were even bolder. Ashe’s investigating commission ultimately reported that officials issued military warrants to individuals who had not served in the Continental line, had gone AWOL, or were dead. The commission also presented evidence that speculators had assigned themselves as attorneys for veterans or their heirs and subsequently issued warrants under their own name.^[101]

            Public disclosure of widespread fraud sent shockwaves through unknown and prominent speculators alike.^[102] Most embarrassed were men such as Sevier, William Blount, Stockley Donelson, and North Carolina Secretary of State James Glasgow, all of whom were connected to millions of acres in fraudulent claims. Concern over extensive public exposure was so great that Governor Sevier refused to allow Governor Ashe access to the fraudulent warrants. Several other conspirators met at Blount’s home in Knoxville to destroy the most dubious claims. In North Carolina, William Tyrrell and James Glasgow even hatched a plan to burn down the statehouse in Raleigh, lest the illegal warrants end up in Governor Ashe’s possession.

            The land fraud conspiracy clearly justified Federalist leaders’ decision to discard their conceptualization of “nation building” and employ a restrained and confrontational policy on the Southwestern frontier. Historian John Murrin has pointed out that Federalists firmly advocated western settlement -- but also insisted that it should follow “an orderly process . . . closely supervised by the government, with a major role for the United States Army.”^[103] That they were much more successful on the Northwestern frontier -- and much more willing to engage in said policy -- did not diminish their abstract desire for the same in the South. The problem was that Southwestern speculators simply had a different idea of the means by which government should centralize its control. Whereas the Washington administration wanted an organized process that would maximize land sales for federal coffers, the territorial elite wanted the government merely to sanction and develop their activities by securing land titles and providing the military and economic support necessary to foster migration. When Federalists saw the extent to which this policy undermined their notion of development, and the extent to which speculation had already minimized available land, they had little reason actively to alleviate territorial problems with Indian tribes.

            Simply put, the lack of land for sale in the Southwest turned Federalist leaders against the territory. If more had been available for use by federal authorities, perhaps they would have acted more sympathetically -- as they did with speculators in the Northwest, Maine, and within the confines of the New England Mississippi Land Company.^[104] Once these seeming allies turned against each other, Jeffersonian-Republicanism would become the only lens through which Tennesseans could fulfill the envisioned social, commercial, and political promise of their region.^[105] As nineteenth century Tennessee gradually took on the characteristics of a more settled state, Federalism became little more than a derogatory label placed upon political enemies.^[106]  Perhaps an 1808 letter to the Carthage Gazette provided the best example of nineteenth century Tennesseans’ devotion to Jefferson’s coalition. “It is true,” wrote “A Citizen,” “that of all objects, that of ascertaining that your candidate is immovably attached to Democratic Republican Principles, is the most important.”^[107]

            Thus by the early nineteenth century Tennessee had undergone transformations that I. H. Williamson could not have foreseen when he wrote to Robertson of the burgeoning relationship between the region and the government -- from the contested zone of interaction among Spanish, Indians, and the small but increasing population of slaves and white settlers to a speculator-controlled political and economic system about to transform. Although the Cumberland district had barely more than 11,500 residents when Adams was elected, over the next twenty-five years it would mushroom into a white and slave population of 287,501 that was increasingly committed to plantation agriculture, banking, and land speculation.^[108] Because of this growth the Cumberland River would become a highway for trade goods, which, in turn, would create a mercantile class that relied upon the produce of local cotton and tobacco farmers so as to perpetuate the increasingly vibrant economy. By 1818, in fact, merchants and planters would combine to become noticeable engines for economic expansion. “The commercial and agricultural capabilities of our country,” noted the Nashville Clarion,

are every day opening to our view new sources of wealth and enterprise. A few years since and this portion of our country was a wild and trackless desart [sic], where nothing but savage inhabitants crossed the traveller’s path -- but now he is greeted by the busy face of the bustling merchant, and the steady phiz [sic] of the plodding and industrious planter who give to him a comfortable and hospitable reception.^[109]

Perhaps the Clarion best characterized the emerging entrepreneurial impulse when it proclaimed that “If people would do as much for opening streams, and improving roads, as nature has done for the soil and climate, Tennessee would be the most desirable district in the union.”^[110]

            In short, in twenty-five years a vibrant liberal capitalist, albeit slave, society would take shape on the western frontier. And such economic and demographic change placed those who inherited the territorial government in a political quandary. On the one hand, even as the elite espoused the “democratic” rhetoric of the Republican party, the reality was that they clearly differentiated between republican notions of the rule of the people and the practical application of popular democracy. As to the former, they understood the legacy of the Revolution and plainly endorsed the principle that freemen had earned the right to political participation -- which explains how and why a local democratic flair could emerge amongst a limited and contested territorial population. Even if they accepted the idea of popular sovereignty, however, the elite nevertheless carried into statehood their belief in the key features of colonial and revolutionary southern political culture, including honor, deference, paternalism and personal networks. “The people,” they felt, was an abstract idea to be carted out as a tool of self-promotion and vindication during highly contested state and federal elections. Although cognizant of local issues, in other words, they simply believed that “the people” needed only to provide their votes for the appropriate disinterested gentleman and then leave them to maintain a virtuous form of government.^[111] Speculator Arthur Campbell sheds significant light on elite paternalism. “Under the Constitution of the United States,” he wrote,

Every honest station of life is honorable, since they are all part of the great social body.  Between the Chief Magistrate and the People, the great and the mean, the rich and the poor, the acute and the dull, the learned and the ignorant There is no difference as to the rights of citizenship, but in possession of different powers, and in the discharge of different offices peculiar to each capacity and useful to all; and if one of them have a just demand for submission and obedience, for honor and respect, for convenience and ease; the other have as just a claim for protection and defence, for the administration of justice and the preservation of equal liberty, for the supply of their wants and the relief of their distresses, for instruction and good example.^[112]

            Speculator Ebenezer Brooks and early Tennessee Governor Archibald Roane were even more blunt in their assessment. In a letter to David Campbell in 1796 Brooks warned the young man, “I would caution you as a young adventurer in the political world against the impulses of enthusiasm. I tremble with apprehensions for you and the friendly citizens with whom you reside lest by some unlucky turn of affairs you should become Democratically Mad.”^[113] Only a few years later Roane wrote to Campbell in asking him further to pursue government service that the “people’s”

mode of education in life points out to them the station in which they are destined to act. But it is not so with you. One thing I trust you will always bear in mind that it is a duty you owe to yourself and your connections and to your country, not to bury your talent in the earth, but to look forward to the time when you may be called by your fellow citizens to assist in moving the wheels of Government.^[114]

            Perhaps a July 4^th, 1801, toast -- a ritual which David Waldstreicher has reminded us helped to reinforce notions of status and power within the community -- best illuminates their paternal understanding of “the people.” “To the freemen of Tennessee -- may they exercise the right of suffrage with judgment, and remember that the welfare of themselves and posterity, requires that men of patriotism, talents and integrity should alone be preferred to office.”^[115]

            On the other hand, the destruction of the territorial government ensured that the political elite would have to appeal to the rapidly expanding population in order to maintain their positions of power. In effect, they would have to accede to nascent democratic impulses, and they came to the belief that the best way to do so was to take advantage of the organization provided by the state’s militia system.^[116] In the years after 1796 they saw that virtually all of the state’s electorate belonged to militia companies. Cognizant that they could provide a solid foundation from which to maintain traditional political networks, the elite electioneered to place themselves and their allies in key positions of martial leadership.

            In so doing, however, they sparked an unanticipated side effect: as Davidson County up-and-comer Isaac Roberts noted, their machinations generated “a significant rise in partyism in Mero District.”^[117] A burst of contested militia elections suddenly gave middling and lower men -- including the miniscule population of free black men, who both voted and served in militias -- the opportunity to establish an elite endorsed precedent for political opposition. Extraordinary demographic growth ensured that this nascent democratic activity soon would explode into an unprecedented level of political consciousness amongst the middling and lower sorts in middle Tennessee.

            Thus in the early years of statehood emerged a blend of old political understandings with new democratic realities, and the result was a “Jeffersonian-Republican” system that revolved around contested definitions of political honor but saw the elite use high voter turnout in local militia elections as a means of maintaining and enhancing their power base. This political blend would set the tone of political life in early national Tennessee.