The Lost State of Franklin

America's First Secession

Kevin T. Barksdale

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813154039
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

In the years following the Revolutionary War, the young American nation was in a state of chaos. Citizens pleaded with government leaders to reorganize local infrastructures and heighten regulations, but economic turmoil, Native American warfare, and political unrest persisted. By 1784, one group of North Carolina frontiersmen could no longer stand the unresponsiveness of state leaders to their growing demands. This ambitious coalition of Tennessee Valley citizens declared their region independent from North Carolina, forming the state of Franklin.

The Lost State of Franklin: America's First Secession chronicles the history of this ill-fated movement from its origins in the early settlement of East Tennessee to its eventual violent demise. Author Kevin T. Barksdale investigates how this lost state failed so ruinously, examining its history and tracing the development of its modern mythology. The Franklin independence movement emerged from the shared desires of a powerful group of landed elite, yeoman farmers, and country merchants. Over the course of four years they managed to develop a functioning state government, court system, and backcountry bureaucracy.

Cloaking their motives in the rhetoric of the American Revolution, the Franklinites aimed to defend their land claims, expand their economy, and eradicate the area's Native American population. They sought admission into the union as America's fourteenth state, but their secession never garnered support from outside the Tennessee Valley. Confronted by Native American resistance and the opposition of the North Carolina government, the state of Franklin incited a firestorm of partisan and Indian violence. Despite a brief diplomatic flirtation with the nation of Spain during the state's final days, the state was never able to recover from the warfare, and Franklin collapsed in 1788.

East Tennesseans now regard the lost state of Franklin as a symbol of rugged individualism and regional exceptionalism, but outside the region the movement has been largely forgotten. The Lost State of Franklin presents the complete history of this defiant secession and examines the formation of its romanticized local legacy. In reevaluating this complex political movement, Barksdale sheds light on a remarkable Appalachian insurrection and reminds readers of the extraordinary, fragile nature of America's young independence.

Chapter 1

Land of the Franks

The Backcountry Economy of Upper East Tennessee

The state of Franklin emerged out of the shared desires of a powerful coalition of landed elite, yeoman farmers, and backcountry merchants to defend, expand, and dominate the Tennessee Valley’s rapidly developing political economy. From the earliest permanent settlement of eastern Tennessee, a diverse, dynamic, and interconnected regional economy developed. Despite the potential financial rewards alluringly held out by commercial agriculture, mercantilism, and land sales, the region’s full economic efficacy remained unrealized throughout the 1780s. Lack of support from the North Carolina state government for the improvement of the Tennessee Valley’s infrastructure presented a formidable obstacle to economic advancement for the region’s ruling and laboring classes. The perceived unresponsiveness of North Carolina’s eastern political leaders to the demands made by backcountry farmers, stockmen, merchants, and land speculators for state funds for internal improvements ultimately served as one of the driving issues uniting many of the region’s economic elite and small-holders behind the Franklin statehood movement. Both the frontier localism and internal factionalism that erupted in the Tennessee Valley during the Franklin movement found their origins in the fierce competition for control over the region’s political and economic systems.

The state of Franklin began with a journey by a forty-eight-year-old Scots-Irish militia captain, planter, and long hunter named William Bean. Captain Bean and his wife, Lydia “Liddy” Russell, ascended the Great War Path, following the Appalachian Mountains southwest through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with their four children in tow, and settled in the upper Tennessee Valley, near the Watauga River. Bean is widely believed to have been the first white man to permanently settle in the Tennessee backcountry. Hundreds of families followed the Beans into the heart of the southwestern frontier to stake their claim to the rich resource-laden lands of the future state of Tennessee.¹

In 1769, Bean built his mud-chinked log cabin at the mouth of Boone’s Creek, a small tributary of the Watauga River he named for his friend and hunting companion Daniel Boone.² After a year spent busily improving land, cultivating crops, avoiding Indians, and giving birth to their fifth child, Russell, the first white child born to permanent settlers on the Tennessee frontier, the Bean family moved even deeper into the Tennessee interior.³ The Beans finally settled along the banks of the lower Watauga River at the junction between two key frontier routes, the Old Catawba Road and the Great War Path. Bean constructed a four-room log cabin that served as the family’s home and as a small inn for settlers, fur traders, and speculators who ventured into the Tennessee wilderness. The modest inn, known respectively as Bean’s Crossroads, Bean’s Cabin, or Bean’s Station, soon grew to include a tavern and a small blacksmith shop.⁴

The settlement of Bean’s Station and the rapid blossoming of a small community surrounding the homestead typified the early maturation of the Tennessee frontier. During a “long hunt,” Captain Bean and Daniel Boone had camped above the future site of the Bean’s Station settlement, and the weary hunters undoubtedly had made note of the abundance of water, land, game, nutrient-rich soils, and economic potential that lay at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains. Bean left his Pittsylvania County, Virginia, home and substantial landholdings to advance his family’s economic fortunes. Despite the remoteness of Bean’s Station, he managed to create a thriving and diverse business that served the needs of the newest settlers and entrepreneurs traveling the ancient Indian paths into the Great Valley of Tennessee. The same desires for land and prosperity that led Bean to ignore the threats posed by Indian massacres, harsh winters, and geographic and cultural isolation lured hundreds of frontier families into the southwestern frontier. The defense of these backcountry land claims and communities and the expansion of the region’s multifarious economy compelled the descendents of the Tennessee Valley’s first inhabitants to form the state of Franklin.⁵

After William Bean’s pioneering effort in the Watauga Valley, several permanent settlements sprang up along the twisting banks of the Watauga, Tennessee, and Holston rivers. These upper Tennessee Valley communities included Carter’s Valley, Shelby’s Station, Sycamore Shoals, and the Nolichucky settlements.⁶ Most of these early settlements developed similarly to Bean’s Station. Men with economic vision and a desire to benefit from a rapidly expanding frontier economy established these communities. John Carter, founder of Carter’s Valley on the Holston River, was a Virginia merchant and trader who settled in the region sometime in 1772. He and his partner, Joseph Parker, watched a small community flourish around the backcountry store they erected to capitalize on the lucrative Cherokee fur trade and the influx of new frontier families.⁷ The financial success of Carter’s store led to its eventual looting by Cherokee Indians from the neighboring Overhill towns who bitterly complained that the store competed with their own fur trade.⁸ In 1772, fifty-one-year-old Welshman Evan Shelby, a “hard-drinking Marylander,” moved his family into the Watauga Valley and settled on a 1,946-acre tract of land he called Sapling Grove.⁹ Shelby expanded his settlement, at the present-day site of the city of Bristol, Tennessee, by constructing a trading post and a small stockaded fort (appropriately named Fort Shelby) to protect his investment. Shelby’s Station, also known as “North-of-Holston,” became a critical trading post and rendezvous point for settlers venturing into the southwestern frontier.¹⁰ Jacob Brown, an “itinerant trader” from South Carolina, and a small group of former North Carolina Regulators leased a tract of land from the Cherokee Indians and established the Nolichucky River settlements.¹¹ Brown opened a small store, a gunsmith shop, and a blacksmith shop on the north bank of the Nolichucky River to cater to Indian fur traders.¹² In the spring of 1770, James Robertson, an Orange County, North Carolina, farmer and participant in North Carolina’s Regulator movement, erected a settlement on a piece of land he called Sycamore Shoals.¹³ Robertson had fled into the Watauga Valley to escape the violence surrounding the Regulator movement. The Sycamore Shoals settlement quickly grew to include twenty families, most Robertson’s own relatives.¹⁴ Capitalism drove the first frontier settlers into the wilds of East Tennessee, and their successful businesses became the fiscal engines driving the economic development of the Tennessee Valley.¹⁵

Following the close of the American Revolution, the backcountry communities that would eventually comprise the future state of Franklin experienced tremendous demographic and economic growth. By 1784, population increases and the rapid expansion of the regional marketplace had transformed the underdeveloped Tennessee Valley frontier settlements. Historians Paul H. Bergeron, Stephen V. Ash, and Jeanette Keith described the “push-pull” effect responsible for this dramatic population explosion. Either legal or financial difficulties “pushed” early Tennessee Valley frontier families out of their communities, or economic possibilities “pulled” them into the region.¹⁶

In May 1772, the Watauga settlers banded together and fashioned a quasi-frontier government they called the Watauga Association.¹⁷ As the Tennessee Valley settlements continued to expand both economically and geographically, the backcountry residents realized the necessity of forming a frontier government in order to “manage land affairs and facilitate governance of the colony.”¹⁸ Under constant threat from the original Native American land claimants, mounting concern over the inadequacies of the local legal and political systems, and the looming revolutionary conflict, on July 5, 1776, the Watauga settlers sent a formal petition to the North Carolina General Assembly requesting to be annexed and organized into a frontier militia district or county.¹⁹ In April 1777, North Carolina accepted their petition, temporarily established the Washington District, and appointed twenty-one justices of the peace to oversee political and legal matters within the region. Seven months later, the North Carolina Assembly formally recognized the Wataugans by creating Washington County and establishing a much-needed Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions. Prior to the formation of the state of Franklin in 1784, administrative difficulties forced North Carolina to split off from Washington County the new counties of Sullivan (1779) and Greene (1783).²⁰ The counties of Washington, Greene, and Sullivan and the rapidly shrinking swath of Tennessee Valley land reserved for the Cherokee Indians eventually comprised the boundaries of Franklin.²¹

East Tennessee’s frontier economy is best described as a complex mixture of semi-subsistence agriculture, early rural market capitalism, and expansive land speculation. The development of this mixed economy began with early frontier communities like Bean’s Station and the other Watauga Valley settlements, but four critical factors collided to determine the future course of the Tennessee Valley’s frontier economy: population growth, the abundance of natural resources and land, geography, and the tenuous economic climate resulting from the American Revolution. The rapid growth of East Tennessee’s population dramatically impacted the region’s economy. Utilizing the scarce census records available prior to the formation of the state of Tennessee in 1796, historians estimate the 1778 population of Washington County, at the time encompassing nearly all of the eventual state of Franklin, at roughly 2,500 residents.²² This statistic reveals the tremendous regional growth in the six years following the settlement of the Watauga River Valley. The confusion presented by the division of Washington County into Washington, Sullivan, and Greene counties and the incomplete nature of early tax lists further complicate efforts to ascertain precise population statistics. A July 1, 1791, census conducted by the Southwest Territory’s Governor William Blount established the population of the eastern section of the Southwest Territory at 36,043 residents, with approximately 29,000 of the settlers inhabiting the Tennessee Valley settlements.²³ Compiled tax lists for this same period show the population of a geographically diminished Washington County to be 5,862 persons.²⁴ Despite the ambiguities of these census and tax records, it is clear that the Tennessee Valley experienced a sustained period of population growth between 1772 and 1791. The increased population strained relations with the region’s Native Americans and placed tremendous pressure on the Tennessee Valley’s court system, economy, and frontier defenses.²⁵

On May 28, 1788, the well-traveled Methodist bishop Francis Asbury recounted in his journal the challenges and conditions he found when piercing the Smoky Mountains and descending into the Great Valley of the Tennessee. Asbury wrote, “After getting our horses shod, we made a move for Holstein [Holston], and entered upon the mountains; the first of which I called steel, the second stone, and the third iron mountain: they are rough and difficult to climb.” He also noted the “heavy rain” and “awful thunder and lightning” that plagued his journey into the Appalachian frontier. Asbury’s journal entry concludes with a description of the “little dirty house where the filth might be taken up from the floor with a spade” that served as shelter for his traveling party.²⁶ Bishop Asbury’s description of the Tennessee frontier inadvertently offered keen insight into Franklin’s economy. The “rough and difficult” mountains made overland communication and trade enormously challenging and separated the Tennessee Valley settlers from their transmontane state government in Hillsboro, North Carolina.²⁷ The abundance of rainfall created excellent growing conditions for East Tennessee’s backcountry farmers, and the steel, stone, and iron mountains Asbury identified reflected the tremendous untapped wealth contained in the mineral resources buried deep within the surrounding ranges.²⁸

The Tennessee Valley’s “dual economy” functioned as both a traditional subsistence-based “household economy” and as a peripheral commercial marketplace.²⁹ Most recent frontier scholars believe that America’s preindustrial backcountry economies began as semicommercial and rapidly became “fully integrated in the world capitalist market system.”³⁰ The notion of a pure subsistence “moral economy”...