Yet such higher justifications needed the sanction of high and legitimate authority, which white Tennesseans struggled to gain during these years. Stories of Indian warfare that laid heaviest emphasis on tragedy and loss took root among white Tennesseans. Yet they remained largely private and internal, rarely emerging in public political discourse and printed narratives until much later. Antiquarians would repeat some of the lists of the dead, but they would use the notion of a blood price paid for the land only as a minor element encouraging filiopietism. Instead, they would justify the state's settlement through the causes of civilization, the Revolution, and the progress of the American nation and the white race. For the moment, while the reasoning behind the Tennessee conquest narrative was clear, it remained inadequate to the broader needs of the region's white settlers. They might claim a basic right of conquest, paid for in blood and treasure, but they lacked the narrative tools to do so effectively. Tennesseans could not assert their autonomy without a stronger historical narrative justifying their past and defining their identity. To find that narrative they would have to stretch their story beyond their narrow geographic boundaries.

Race and Nation (1800-1820)

In the years after 1800, white Tennesseans were able to resolve the problems that had plagued their historical beliefs in the 1780s and 1790s. The election of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency in 1800 brought in a national administration much more sympathetic to the trans-Appalachian region. For their part, white Tennesseans did a great deal to elect Jefferson, and in the years that followed Tennessee politicians pushed the Republican administration to adapt their vision of American development to the goals of western settlers. White Tennesseans emerging narrative of their own past was crucial to this process, as they built a tale around the region's settlement that pushed the nation toward the War of 1812, and later fed into a national history centered on westward expansion.

White Tennesseans had always been eager to link their story to the powerful narrative being constructed around the American Revolution - hence George Roulstone's need to characterize William Blount as an ardent patriot and confidant of George Washington. The people writing the history of the founding of the republic cut through the complexities of colonial politics to unite political power, leadership, and popular aspiration into a single story of heroic liberation. Yet linking the struggles of the overmountain settlements to the Revolutionary epic had been a difficult for white Tennesseans. Frontier regions themselves had played only a tangential role in the war itself, and had provided none of the major leaders who would become known as the Founding Fathers. For most of the 1780s and 1790s the main tangible outcome of the Revolution, the new national government, seemed decidedly unsympathetic to the overmountain settlements. As noted above, drawing on the whiggish common law narrative was also awkward, as the national government kept undermining settlers attempts' to establish precedents that would trump the claims of North Carolina, the Cherokee, and other parties that had an interest in events in the Tennessee and Cumberland Valleys.

Jefferson's administration, however, brought in a policies for land distribution and Indian relations much more supportive of settlement expansion. Jefferson also appointed federal officials in the west much more sympathetic to the locals, such as Cherokee Indian Agent Return Jonathan Meigs.⁽³⁸⁾ As the national administration grew more friendly, state relations with North Carolina deteriorated. North Carolina's continued attempts to use the terms of the 1789 cession to sell Tennessee lands threatened the new state's precarious finances. Tennesseans responded to the new political situation by telling a story that embraced their American-ness while demonizing North Carolina.

Tennesseans began constructing this narrative by simplifying and dramatizing the frontier hostilities that marked the expansion of white settlement in the region. To do this they joined their story to a racist narrative emerging around the European world during this period. Early modern stories such as Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, the legends of Prester John, and Hakluyt's Principal Navigations of the English Nation, had all foreseen the possibility of a multi-racial Christendom that would vindicate European expansionism.⁽³⁹⁾ Profitable colonial empires, however, required forced labor and confiscation of land and resources. Yet justified conquest still demanded a higher cause than simple self-aggrandizement be served by western settlement. European history and literature filled this need by creating a narrative archetype of race war, in which heroic colonizers battled monstrously savage natives, often in defense of the romantic symbols of civilization, white women. The Revolution seems to have accelerated this trend in the United States and it reached its fruition in a flood of historical fiction depicting a frontier race war during the early national period.⁽⁴⁰⁾ By the time major novels like Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, Robert Montgomery Byrd's Nick O' the Woods, and William Gilmore Simms's The Yemassee were published later in the antebellum era, readers were primed to accept stories of Indian atrocities, hand-to-hand combat between white and red in the primeval forest, and the desperate struggle to protect or despoil pure white womanhood.⁽⁴¹⁾ Political and intellectual leaders also encouraged this process, as writers like Thomas Jefferson created a popular cause in their vision of a broad advance of white American civilization at the expense of racially-inferior Native Americans.⁽⁴²⁾ In their stories of the events of the settlement period, Tennessee pioneers were also using these models, turning their frontier battles into an ennobling national struggle between civilization and savagery. In practical terms, they turned them into a brutal race war.

Tennesseans made notable changes in their print treatment of Native Americans during this period. Before 1800, stories of Indian attacks had been muted and matter-of-fact. Men and women were reported as having been "kill'd" or "murdered" with little editorializing. As noted above, the purpose of these stories was more to establish the blood price claim to the land than to demonize the Cherokee or Creek. In fact, white Tennesseans seemed to take more time to find a little black humor in stories of the Indian Wars. When reporting the killing of Jonathan Clayton by Chickamauga warriors (mentioned above), the unnamed pioneer storyteller went on to add "it is supposed that if he had of had a fair Chance he would of made his escape for the Indians said afterwards that he ran like a buck."⁽⁴³⁾ In 1791, the Knoxville Register told a brief story of a group of travelers crossing the Cumberland Plateau to reach the Middle Tennessee settlements. A group of Cherokee hunters appeared, spooking the men of the party, who abandoned women, children, and baggage to run back to the east. The Cherokee, no doubt highly amused, generously chased down the party's horses and guided them on to Cumberland River settlements.⁽⁴⁴⁾ Most interestingly, Cherokee leaders were portrayed in the writings of the pre-1800 period as distinct individuals. Not only in the official correspondence of frontier commanders and treaty negotiators like Joseph Martin and John Sevier, but in the popular press as well, men like John Watts, Hanging Maw, Bloody Fellow, and Dragging Canoe repeatedly appeared as unique personalities. Many years later, pioneers could still speak of their Indian opponents as feared and hated enemies, but still had an impressive understanding of the human complexities of Cherokee politics and leadership.

By the outbreak of the War of 1812, though, white Tennesseans' had changed their tone completely.⁽⁴⁵⁾ Leaders of the Creek Indian nation were largely unfamiliar, and noticeably unnamed, in Tennessee accounts of the Redstick War and Jackson's campaigns in Alabama. The distinct personalities of the late-eighteenth century view of Native Americans had been replaced with a stock character in a racial melodrama - the villainous savage. Andrew Jackson, of course, used the pulpit of his public position to lead the way in turning Indians into subhuman brutes in the public mind. His messages to his troops, to Governor Willie Blount and the Tennessee Legislature, and to the popular press and public meetings described the Creek simply as "ferocious by nature ... barbarians ... ignorant of the influence of civilization, and of government."⁽⁴⁶⁾ Yet Jackson only echoed the tone of commentary throughout Tennessee. A committee of the state legislature resolved for war in 1812, declaring that the Creek were "wretched, savage tribes," who had "raised their tomahawks ... for the indiscriminate murder of our Aged fathers and mothers, and helpless children."⁽⁴⁷⁾ A speaker at a Nashville public meeting after the war informed Jackson's officers that Tennessee had been attacked "by a foe destitute of every trace of humanity."⁽⁴⁸⁾ Accounts of individual Indian attacks began focusing on the more grisly details, eventually embroidering them into mind-boggling and often largely fictitious tales of maniacal blood lust. By the early 1820s, Edward Swanson was taking time to go into detail about the fate of one Mrs. James Haggert, who "was Shot and killed, her head ... Scalped, her body ... Cut open in a most inhuman manner, and the infant of her pregnancy torn out."⁽⁴⁹⁾ Women were raped and mutilated, babies' heads were dashed against rocks, and lurid adjectives piled one atop another in a frenzy of hatred and condemnation. The conflict in the southwest turned in popular memory from a desperate struggle for land into an epic clash between stages in the development of the human species.

Yet white Tennesseans also needed to convince themselves and others that the race war they were creating on the southern frontier was a microcosm of the broader struggles of the American nation. Historical narrative also played a vital role in this process. Against the old Federalist charge that Indian wars were brought on by illegal white settlements on Indian lands, Tennesseans told a story of foreign encouragement of Indian attacks. Britain and Spain, they claimed, were giving material and moral support to encourage the southern tribes to attack frontier settlements. The basis of this sinister conspiracy, they declared, was that European nations were jealous of American representative government and civilization, and hoped to thwart it in combination with the savage Indians. Rather than a troublesome backwater dragging the country into costly misadventures, the frontier became, for white Tennesseans and the people who listened to them, the front line of America's struggle for national liberation.⁽⁵⁰⁾ This nationalist story of the frontier wars quickly took deep root in Tennessee. By the early 1820s, one semi-lettered pioneer could tell the story of the Indian wars of the early 1790s in this way:

Those who Risided in the western teritory and the people of Kentucky who had been gilty of no other offence than that of Concurring with the Rest of the united States in aformation of a Constitution which Excluded from its formation arristrocrcy and monarky and was about to prove to the world that mankind could be haply governed with out the assistance of Either for this offence only the Inglish on the one hand had Stirred up the northern Indians against Kentucky and the Spanards now upon the Eve becoming their allies had also possesd the Creeks & Cherokees to begin the work of death and to harrow the people of Cumberland with all the dissolations these united Savages Could bring upon them ...⁽⁵¹⁾

To secure their vitriol against the British, Tennesseans framed the War of 1812 as a logical culmination to the American Revolution.⁽⁵²⁾ A public celebration held after the return of Tennessee troops from the Creek War toasted the salute, "The Heroes of '76 -- Their blood sealed our Independence, Ours shall cement it!"⁽⁵³⁾ On the eve of war, the Nashville Whig approving reprinted a piece from the Charlestown Gazette that claimed "It is a truth incontrovertible, solemn, and impressive, that the United States may never look for permanent peace and prosperity while G. Britain holds any territory in North America."⁽⁵⁴⁾ With this story about the origins of the decades-long war on the southern frontier having gained popular acceptance, Tennessee was able to recruit thousands of men to go on two expeditions to fend off a British invasion of the Gulf Coast. A few years later, Andrew Jackson was able to cross the Florida border and execute two British Indian traders to the general delight of white Tennessee. Just as importantly, the American public listened to stories of Indian savagery and European intrigue, and forced the government to lend even more vigorous support to the extension of western settlement.

John Haywood and the Fulfillment of Tennessee History

In 1810, esteemed North Carolina attorney and jurist John Haywood left his home state and settled in Middle Tennessee. In addition to building a prosperous law practice and being quickly appointed to the state supreme court, Haywood pursued an intense interest in Tennessee history. His work culminated in the publication of The Civil and Political History of Tennessee from its Earliest Settlement to 1796, the state's first formal history.⁽⁵⁵⁾ In that work, Haywood pulled together the strands of Tennessee historical narrative into a powerful account of the state's history. Haywood's story about the origins of Tennessee would serve as the basis for later antiquarian and public histories of the state, stand largely unchallenged until the emergence of academic scholarship on the region well over a century later.

Haywood's story about the origins of the overmountain settlements, in particular, combined the narrative archetypes Tennesseans were using. His pages were full of accounts of Indian battles and depredations, and of descriptions of virtuous backcountry leaders who defied indifferent and ineffectual authority to protect the settlements. Yet for all the research that went into The Civil and Political History of Tennessee, Haywood's story often butted heads with the facts. To make the story of Tennessee an exemplary microcosm of America's history, Haywood needed to make the migration to the Holston country a trek of liberation. Any good journey to freedom, of course, needed an escape from slavery in the Exodus tradition. Haywood found his source of enslavement in the North Carolina Regulators, a revolt of backcountry farmers against local government officials. The Regulator Movement offered Haywood excellent material - as a rebellion against expanding power and corrupt officialdom, it fit well into the common law narrative of the Revolution. In the ringing language of the Anglo-American resistance tradition, Haywood wrote that "the extortions of clerks, lawyers, and tax-gatherers fell with intolerable weight upon the people." "The offenders," he went on, "were the men in power, who were appointed by the law to redress the wrongs of the people."⁽⁵⁶⁾

Armed rebellion itself did not fit well with an Exodus plot structure, though, and Haywood passed over it in three sentences. He preferred instead to talk about emigration as a means of resistance, writing that,

"In these afflicting circumstances it became necessary for men of property to come to the westward in quest of the means to repair the dilapidations of their broken fortunes, and for the poor to go somewhere in search of independence and a share of respectability, absolutely unattainable in the country of their nativity. In the wilderness beyond the mountains they were promised at least exemption from the supercilious annoyance of those who claimed a pre-eminence above them."⁽⁵⁷⁾

The problem with all this was that only a rather small minority of the overmountain settlers came from North Carolina. The vast majority came instead down the Shenandoah Valley and from parts of Virginia, including prominent leaders like Evan Shelby, Arthur and David Campbell, and John Sevier. The parties to the Watauga Compact adopted the Virginia legal code they were familiar with. Moreover, there seems to have been a decidedly negative correlation between involvement in the Regulator uprising and migration to the Holston country.⁽⁵⁸⁾ Indeed, many of the early leaders of settlement were closely tied to Richard Henderson's land speculations - even though the man was a major target of Regulator wrath.⁽⁵⁹⁾

Haywood also worked to match his settlement story to the emerging American nationalism of Tennessee history in the early nineteenth century. He tied his vivid picture of backcountry North Carolinians "driven by oppression to desperation and madness" to the larger movement of the Revolution. He could not get around the frequent references made by late eighteenth-century Tennesseans to North Carolina Tories who migrated from the western reaches of the state to the Watauga settlements before and during the Revolution. Indeed, just thirty years earlier an author in the Knoxville Gazette recalled events in this manner, saying

"there were a number of people called Regulators, who had fledto the extreme frontier for safety, after their battle against Governor Tryon, at Alamance, in which they had got such a scourging, as to deter them from any further offensive measures against the British or their allies; and were then actually about joining the Cherokees against the Americans."⁽⁶⁰⁾

So instead Haywood worked to paint the Regulators' enemies as vigorous supporters of royal power. The militiamen of eastern North Carolina who defeated the Regulators at the Battle of Alamance in 1771, Haywood described as "the royal forces, under the command of Gov. Tryon." "When the oath of allegiance to the new State government was offered to the people of North Carolina," Haywood went on, "men ... who had so lately been the tyrants of the country refused to take the oath and left the United States."⁽⁶¹⁾ Again, more recent historical research has complicated this simple picture of royalist oppressors ruling the colony of North Carolina. The leaders of the Whig cause in the colony came from among the eastern elites who had supported Governor Tryon during the Regulator crisis in 1771.

Haywood took another step in joining the settlement of Tennessee to the Revolutionary cause. Tennesseans' main participation in the Revolution had been to take part in a victory over a small army of Loyalist troops at Kings Mountain, North Carolina, in 1780. Haywood focused in that event, inflating its significance to the Revolutionary cause, and touting the role of overmountain settlers in the fight. During a "dark and gloomy period of the Revolutionary War [in which] many of the best friends of the American government ... gave up their freedom and independence for lost," Haywood wrote that the forces of the Continental Army collapsed. According to Haywood, effective resistance only emerged when Evan Shelby and John Sevier decided to raise militiamen to fight the Loyalists. The victory they won (with the help of large numbers of Virginia and Carolina troops), Haywood enthused, led Lord Cornwallis, "on being informed [that] the riflemen of the West ... were bearing down on him, ordered an immediate retreat, march[ing] all night in the utmost confusion ... as far back as Winnsboro ... from whence he did not attempt to advance until ... three months later." Haywood took time to note critically that commemorative swords and pistols promised by the North Carolina legislature to overmountain heroes Shelby and Sevier were never delivered.⁽⁶²⁾ The Battle of Kings Mountain had become, in Haywood's hands, a foundation event for Tennessee history. Other historians would expand on his version of events, turning the fight into a morality tale of the vital role hardy, independent frontiersmen had played in creating the American nation.⁽⁶³⁾

Haywood and others who followed him gave white Tennesseans a vivid and uplifting historical past. Yet his work was a culmination rather than a beginning. Haywood merely integrated a number of stories and narrative archetypes people in Tennessee had been experimenting with for several decades. Settlers struggling for a clear sense of group identity and purpose in a confusing world needed to draw on and understand their own history. They followed the path of most human beings by imposing order on a mass of bewildering and contradictory events by trying to fit them into narrative archetypes common to their culture. White Tennesseans shaped a popular memory by retelling their memories, desires, and opinions as stories. The work of men like John Haywood was built on a foundation of popular imagination and storytelling that shaped, and was shaped by, the first half-century of white settlement in Tennessee.

1. Knoxville Gazette, 26 March 1800, reprinted in the Tennessee Gazette [Nashville], 16 April 1800.

2. George Washington to David Henley, 3 July 1797, The Papers of George Washington, Dorothy Twohig, ed., Retirement Series, vol. 1., 229-30.

3. For twentieth-century retellings of Blount's career, see Thomas Perkins Abernethy, From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee: A Study of Frontier Democracy, reprint edition, (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2003), and William Masterson, William Blount, (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1954).

4. Literary critics have, over the last several decades, generated an enormous volume of scholarship studying the rules of the narrative form. Seminal works in the field include Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1961), Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay on Method, trans. Jan Lewin. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives," in Susan Sontag, ed. A Barthes Reader, (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), 251-295, and Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984). For an accessible introduction to a diverse and difficult field, see H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

5. The best-known historian who has analyzed the ways in which narrative conventions make themselves felt in historical writing is Hayden White. See his works Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), and particularly The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).

6. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, (New York: Arthur A. Levine, 1998).

7. The archetype of the virtuous public servant developed in part, obviously, in opposition to an even more vivid stock character, Macchiavelli's scheming, power-hungry, amoral "Prince."

8. Washington to Henley, op cit.

9. Interestingly, the greatest attack on Blount's career, Abernethy's From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee, paints the man as a sinister, spidery figure, graping for power and corrupting public office in the quest for personal gain. Abernethy's Blount is a character remarkably similar to English political writer Bolingbroke's "Robinarch," the archetype of the shadowy back-room power-grabber. Bolingbroke sketched the Robinarch in contrast to the "Patriot King,", his own version of the virtuous public servant.