Tennessee (/ˌtɛnəˈsiː/ (About this soundlisten),[7][8] locally /ˈtɛnɪsi/[9]), officially the State of Tennessee, is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. Tennessee is the 36th largest by area and the 16th most populous of the 50 states. It is bordered by Kentucky to the north, Virginia to the northeast, North Carolina to the east, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to the south, Arkansas to the southwest, and Missouri to the northwest. Tennessee is geographically, culturally, and legally divided into three Grand Divisions of East, Middle, and West Tennessee. Nashville is the state's capital and largest city, and anchors its largest metropolitan area. Tennessee's population as of the 2020 United States census is approximately 6.9 million.[10]
Tennessee is rooted in the Watauga Association, a 1772 frontier pact generally regarded as the first constitutional government west of the Appalachian Mountains.[11] Its name is derived from "Tanasi", a Cherokee town in the eastern part of the state that existed before the first European American settlement.[12] Tennessee was initially part of North Carolina, and later the Southwest Territory, before its admission to the Union as the 16th state on June 1, 1796. It earned the nickname "The Volunteer State" early in its history due to a strong tradition of military service.[13] A slave state until the American Civil War, Tennessee was politically divided, with its western and middle parts supporting the Confederacy and the eastern region harboring pro-Union sentiment. As a result, Tennessee was the last state to formally join the Confederacy and the first readmitted to the Union after the war.[14]
During the 20th century, Tennessee transitioned from a predominantly agrarian society to a more diversified economy. This was aided in part by massive federal investment in the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the city of Oak Ridge, which was established during World War II to house the Manhattan Project's uranium enrichment facilities for the construction of the world's first atomic bombs. These were dropped on Imperial Japan at the end of the war. After the war, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory became a key center of scientific research. In 2016, the element tennessine was named for the state, largely in recognition of the roles played by Oak Ridge, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Tennessee in its discovery.[15] The state has also played a major role in the development of many forms of popular music, including country, blues, rock and roll, soul, and gospel.
Tennessee has diverse terrain and landforms, and from east to west, contains a mix of cultural features characteristic of Appalachia, the Upland South, and the Deep South. The Blue Ridge Mountains along the eastern border reach some of the highest elevations in eastern North America, and the Cumberland Plateau contains many scenic valleys and waterfalls. The central part of the state is marked by cavernous bedrock and irregular rolling hills, and level, fertile plains define West Tennessee. The state is twice bisected by the Tennessee River, and the Mississippi River forms its western border. Its economy is dominated by the health care, music, automotive, chemical, electronics, banking, food, and tourism industries, and cattle, soybeans, corn, poultry, and cotton are its primary agricultural products.[16] The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the nation's most visited national park, is in eastern Tennessee.[17]
Etymology
Main article: Name of Tennessee
The name Tennessee derives from the Cherokee settlement of Tanasi (ᏔᎾᏏ), whose etymology is uncertain.[18] According to ethnographer James Mooney, the name "can not be analyzed", and its meaning is lost.[19] The modern spelling is attributed to James Glen, the governor of South Carolina, who used it in his official correspondence during the 1750s. The spelling was popularized by the publication of Henry Timberlake's Draught of the Cherokee Country in 1765. In 1788, North Carolina created "Tennessee County", the third county to be established in what is now Middle Tennessee. When a constitutional convention met in 1796 to organize a new state out of the Southwest Territory, it adopted "Tennessee" as the name of the state.[20]
History
Main article: History of Tennessee
Pre-European era
Mississippian-period shell gorget from the Castalian Springs Mound Site in Sumner County
The first inhabitants of Tennessee were Paleo-Indians who arrived about 12,000 years ago at the end of the Last Glacial Period. Archaeological excavations have indicated that the lower Tennessee Valley was heavily populated with Ice Age hunter-gatherers, and Middle Tennessee is believed to have been rich with game animals such as mastodons.[21] The names of the cultural groups who inhabited the area before European contact are unknown, but archaeologists have named several distinct cultural phases, including the Archaic (8000–1000 BC), Woodland (1000 BC–1000 AD), and Mississippian (1000–1600 AD) periods.[22] The Archaic peoples first domesticated dogs, and plants such as squash, corn, gourds, and sunflowers were first grown in Tennessee during the Woodland period.[23] Later generations of Woodland peoples constructed the first mounds in the state. Rapid civilizational development occurred during the Mississippian period, when Indigenous peoples developed organized chiefdoms and constructed numerous ceremonial structures throughout the state.[24]
Spanish conquistadors who explored the state in the 16th century encountered some of the Mississippian peoples, including the Muscogee Creek, Yuchi, and Shawnee.[25][26] By the early 18th century, most Natives in Tennessee had disappeared, most likely wiped out by diseases introduced by the Spaniards.[25] The Cherokee began migrating into what is now eastern Tennessee from what is now Virginia in the latter 17th century, possibly to escape expanding European settlement and diseases in the north.[27] They forced the Creek, Yuchi, and Shawnee out of the state in the early 18th century.[27][28] The Chickasaw remained confined to West Tennessee, and the middle part of the state contained few Native Americans, although both the Cherokee and the Shawnee claimed the region as their hunting ground.[29] Cherokee peoples in Tennessee were known by European settlers as the Overhill Cherokee because they lived west of the Blue Ridge Mountains.[30] Overhill settlements grew along the rivers in East Tennessee in the early 18th century.[31]
Exploration and colonization
Further information: Province of North Carolina; Watauga Association; Washington District, North Carolina; State of Franklin; and Southwest Territory
The first recorded European expeditions into what is now Tennessee were led by Spanish explorers Hernando de Soto in 1540–1541, Tristan de Luna in 1559, and Juan Pardo in 1566–1567.[32][33][34] Pardo recorded the name "Tanasqui" from a local Native American village, which evolved into the state's current name.[35] In 1673, British fur trader Abraham Wood, sent an expedition led by James Needham and Gabriel Arthur from Fort Henry in the Colony of Virginia into Overhill Cherokee territory in modern-day northeastern Tennessee.[36] Needham was killed during the expedition and Arthur was taken prisoner for more than a year.[37][38] That same year, a French expedition led by missionary Jacques Marquette and trader Louis Jolliet explored the Mississippi River and became the first Europeans to map the Mississippi Valley.[37][36] In 1682, an expedition led by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle constructed Fort Prudhomme on the Chickasaw Bluffs in West Tennessee.[39] By the late 17th century, French traders also began to explore the Cumberland River valley.[40] A group of French traders under Charles Charleville's command established a fur trading settlement at the present location of downtown Nashville near the Cumberland River in 1714, which became known as French Lick.[40][41] In 1739, the French constructed Fort Assumption under Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville on the Mississippi River at the present-day location of Memphis, which they used as a base against the Chickasaw during the 1739 Campaign of the Chickasaw Wars.[42]
Reconstruction of Fort Loudoun, the first British settlement in Tennessee
In the 1750s and 1760s, longhunters from Virginia explored much of East and Middle Tennessee.[43] In 1756, settlers from the Colony of South Carolina built Fort Loudoun near present-day Vonore, the first British settlement in what is now Tennessee, and the westernmost British outpost to that date.[44][45] Hostilities erupted between the British and the Overhill Cherokees into an armed conflict, and a siege of the fort ended with its surrender in 1760.[46] After the end of the French and Indian War, Britain issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which forbade settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains in an effort to mitigate conflicts with the Natives.[47] Migration across the mountains continued, however, and the first permanent European settlers, began arriving in the northeastern part of Tennessee in the late 1760s.[48][49] Most of these settlers were English, but nearly 20% of them were Scotch-Irish.[50] These settlers formed the Watauga Association in 1772, a semi-autonomous representative government.[51] Three years later, the settlers reorganized themselves into the Washington District to support the cause of the American Revolutionary War.[52] The following year, after an unsuccessful petition to Virginia, the settlers petitioned North Carolina to annex the Washington District in order to provide protection from Native American attacks, which was granted in November 1776.[53]
In 1775, Richard Henderson negotiated a series of treaties with the Cherokee to sell the lands of the Watauga settlements at Sycamore Shoals on the banks of the Watauga River in present-day Elizabethton. An agreement to sell land for the Transylvania Colony, which included the territory in modern-day Tennessee north of the Cumberland River, was also signed.[54] Later that year, Daniel Boone, under Henderson's employment, blazed a trail from Fort Chiswell in Virginia through the Cumberland Gap, which became part of the Wilderness Road, a major thoroughfare for settlers into Tennessee and Kentucky.[55] The Chickamauga, a Cherokee faction loyal to the British led by Dragging Canoe, opposed the settling of the Washington District and Transylvania Colony, and in 1776 attacked Fort Watauga at Sycamore Shoals.[56][57] The warnings of Dragging Canoe's cousin Nancy Ward spared many settlers' lives from the initial attacks.[58] The frontier fort served as a staging area for the Overmountain Men in preparation for their trek over the Appalachian Mountains to engage and defeat the British Army at the Battle of Kings Mountain in South Carolina in 1780.[59]
In 1779, James Robertson and John Donelson led two groups of settlers from the Washington District to the French Lick.[60] These settlers constructed Fort Nashborough, which they named for Francis Nash, a brigadier general of the Continental Army.[61] The next year, the settlers signed the Cumberland Compact, which established a representative government known as the Cumberland Association for the colony.[62] This settlement later grew into the city of Nashville.[63]
The Southwest Territory in 1790
Three counties of the Washington District broke off from North Carolina in 1784 and formed the State of Franklin.[64] Efforts to obtain admission to the Union failed, and the counties, now numbering eight, rejoined North Carolina by 1788.[65] North Carolina ceded the area to the federal government in 1790, after which it was organized into the Southwest Territory on May 26 of that year.[66] The act allowed for the territory to petition for statehood once the population reached 60,000.[66] Administration of the territory was divided between the Washington District and the Mero District, the latter of which consisted of the Cumberland Association and was named for Spanish territorial governor Esteban Rodríguez Miró.[67] President George Washington appointed William Blount as territorial governor.[68] The Southwest Territory recorded a population of 35,691 in the first United States census that year, including 3,417 slaves.[69]
Statehood and antebellum era
Surveyor Daniel Smith's "Map of the Tennassee State" (1796)
As support for statehood grew among the settlers, Governor Blount called for elections, which were held in December 1793.[70] The 13-member territorial House of Representatives first convened in Knoxville on February 24, 1794 to select ten members for the legislature's upper house, the Council.[70] The full legislature convened on August 25, 1794,[71] and in June 1795, conducted a census of the territory and a poll of the settlers on the question of statehood.[72] The census recorded a population of 77,263, including 10,613 slaves, and the poll showed 6,504 in favor of statehood and 2,562 opposed, with most the inhabitants of the Cumberland Association opposed.[72][73] Elections for a constitutional convention were held in December 1795, and the delegates convened in Knoxville on January 17, 1796 to begin drafting a state constitution.[74] During this convention, the delegates chose the name Tennessee for the new state.[20] The constitution was completed on February 6, which authorized elections for the proposed state's new legislature, the Tennessee General Assembly.[75][76] The legislature convened on March 28, 1796, and the next day, John Sevier was announced as the state's first governor.[75][76] Tennessee was admitted to the Union on June 1, 1796, as the 16th state and the first state created from federal territory.[77][78]
Tennessee reportedly earned the nickname "The Volunteer State" during the War of 1812, when 3,500 men enthusiastically answered a recruitment call by the General Assembly for the war effort.[79] These soldiers, under Andrew Jackson's command, played a major role in the American victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, the last major battle of the war.[79] A number of Tennesseans took part in the Texas Revolution of 1835–36, including Governor Sam Houston and Congressman and frontiersman Davy Crockett, who was killed at the Battle of the Alamo.[80] The state's nickname was solidified during the Mexican–American War when President James K. Polk of Tennessee issued a call for 2,800 soldiers from the state, and more than 30,000 volunteered.[81]
The Hermitage, plantation home of President Andrew Jackson in Nashville
Between the 1790s and 1820s, additional land cessions were negotiated with the Cherokee, who had established a national government modeled on the U.S. Constitution.[82][83] In 1818, Jackson and Kentucky governor Isaac Shelby reached an agreement with the Chickasaw to sell the land between the Mississippi and Tennessee Rivers to the United States, which included all of West Tennessee and became known as the "Jackson Purchase".[84] The Cherokee moved their capital from Georgia to the Red Clay Council Grounds in southeastern Tennessee in 1832, due to new laws forcing them from their previous capital at New Echota.[85] In 1838 and 1839, U.S. troops forcibly removed nearly 17,000 Cherokees and about 2,000 Black people the Cherokees enslaved from their homes in southeastern Tennessee, and forced them to march to Indian Territory in modern-day Oklahoma. An estimated 4,000 died along the way.[86][87] In the Cherokee language, the event is called Nunna daul Isunyi, meaning "the Trail Where We Cried", and removal route is commonly known as the Trail of Tears.[86]
As settlers pushed west of the Cumberland Plateau, a slavery-based agrarian economy took hold in these regions.[88] Cotton planters extensively utilized slave labor on large plantation complexes in the fertile and flat terrains of West Tennessee after the Jackson Purchase.[89] Cotton also took hold in the Nashville Basin during this time.[89] Entrepreneurs such as Montgomery Bell used slaves in the production of iron in the Western Highland Rim, and slaves also cultivated such crops as tobacco and corn throughout the Highland Rim.[88] East Tennessee's geography did not allow for large plantations as in the middle and western parts of the state, and as a result, slavery became increasingly rare in the region.[90] A strong abolition movement developed in East Tennessee, beginning as early as 1797, and in 1819, Elihu Embree of Jonesborough began publishing the Manumission Intelligencier (later The Emancipator), the nation's first exclusively anti-slavery newspaper.[91][92]
Civil War
Main article: Tennessee in the American Civil War
At the onset of the American Civil War, Tennesseans were divided in their allegiances between the North and the South.[93] This was primarily due to the distribution of slavery throughout the state; most Middle and West Tennesseans favored secession in order to preserve the slavery-based economy in those regions, while in East Tennessee, most favored remaining in the Union.[94] In 1860, slaves composed about 25% of the population of Tennessee, the lowest share of the states that joined the Confederacy.[95] The state provided more Union troops than any other Confederate state; more than 51,000 soldiers, more than 20,000 of whom were Black.[96] The state provided about 135,000 Confederate troops, the second-highest number after Virginia.[14] Due to its central location, Tennessee was a crucial state during the war, and saw more military engagements than any other except Virginia.[citation needed]
After Abraham Lincoln's election as president in 1860, secessionists in the state government led by Governor Isham Harris sought voter approval for a convention to sever ties with the United States, which was rejected in a referendum by a 54–46% margin in February 1861.[97] After the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in April and Lincoln's call for troops from Tennessee and other states in response, Harris began military mobilization, submitted an ordinance of secession to the General Assembly, and made direct overtures to the Confederate government.[98] The Tennessee legislature ratified an agreement to enter a military league with the Confederacy on May 7, 1861.[93] On June 8, with Middle Tennesseans having significantly changed their position, voters approved a second referendum on secession by a 69–31% margin, becoming the last state to secede.[99] In response, East Tennessee Unionists organized a convention in Knoxville with the goal of splitting East Tennessee from the state to form a new state loyal to the Union.[100] The Union-backing State of Scott was also established at this time and remained a de facto enclave of the United States throughout the war. In the fall of 1861, Unionist guerrillas in East Tennessee burned bridges and attacked Confederate sympathizers, leading the Confederacy to i
