Volume IV Part 6 (2/2)

Blount's First Appointments.

Blount recommended the appointment of Sevier and Robertson as brigadier-generals of militia of the Eastern and Western districts of the Territory, and issued a large number of commissions to the justices of the peace, militia officers, sheriffs, and clerks of the county courts in the different counties. [Footnote: Blount MSS., Journal of the Proceedings, etc.] In his appointments he shrewdly and properly identified himself with the natural leaders of the frontiersmen. He made Sevier and Robertson his right-hand men, and strove always to act in harmony with them, while for the minor military and civil officers he chose the persons whom the frontiersmen themselves desired. In consequence he speedily became a man of great influence for good. The Secretary of the Territory reported to the Federal Government that the effect of Blount's character on the frontiersmen was far greater than was the case with any other man, and that he was able to get them to adhere to the principles of order and to support the laws by his influence in a way which it was hopeless to expect from their own respect for governmental authority. Blount was felt by the frontiersmen to be thoroughly in sympathy with them, to understand and appreciate them, and to be heartily anxious for their welfare; and yet at the same time his influence could be counted upon on the side of order, while the majority of the frontier officials in any time of commotion were apt to remain silent and inactive, or even to express their sympathy with the disorderly element. [Footnote: American State Papers, iv.; Daniel Smith to the Secretary of War, Knoxville, July 19, 1793.]

Blount's Tact in Dealing with Difficulties.

No one but a man of great tact and firmness could have preserved as much order among the frontiersmen as Blount preserved. He was always under fire from both sides. The settlers were continually complaining that they were deserted by the Federal authorities, who favored the Indians, and that Blount himself did not take sufficiently active steps to subdue the savages; while on the other hand the National Administration was continually upbraiding him for being too active against the Indians, and for not keeping the frontiersmen sufficiently peaceable. Under much temptations, and in a situation that would have bewildered any one, Blount steadfastly followed his course of, on the one hand, striving his best to protect the people over whom he was placed as governor, and to repel the savages, while, on the other hand, he suppressed so far as lay in his power, any outbreak against the authorities, and tried to inculcate a feeling of loyalty and respect for the National Government.

[Footnote: Robertson MSS., Blount to Robertson, Feb. 13, 1793.] He did much in creating a strong feeling of attachment to the Union among the rough backwoodsmen with whom he had thrown in his lot.

Treaty of Holston with the Cherokees.

Early in 1791 Blount entered into negotiations with the Cherokees, and when the weather grew warm, he summoned them to a treaty. They met on the Holston, all of the noted Cherokee chiefs and hundreds of their warriors being present, and concluded the treaty of Holston, by which, in consideration of numerous gifts and of an annuity of a thousand (afterwards increased to fifteen hundred) dollars, the Cherokees at last definitely abandoned their disputed claims to the various tracts of land which the whites claimed under various former treaties. By this treaty with the Cherokees, and by the treaty with the Creeks entered into at New York the previous summer, the Indian t.i.tle to most of the present State of Tennessee, was fairly and legally extinguished. However the westernmost part, was still held by the Chickasaws, and certain tracts in the southeast, by the Cherokees; while the Indian hunting grounds in the middle of the territory were thrust in between the groups of settlements on the c.u.mberland and the Holston.

Knoxville Founded.

The ”Knoxville Gazette.”

On the ground where the treaty was held Blount proceeded to build a little town, which he made the capital of the Territory, and christened Knoxville, in honor of Was.h.i.+ngton's Secretary of War. At this town there was started, in 1791, under his own supervision, the first newspaper of Tennessee, known as the _Knoxville Gazette_. It was four or five years younger than the only other newspaper of the then far West, the _Kentucky Gazette_. The paper gives an interesting glimpse of many of the social and political conditions of the day. In political tone it showed Blount's influence very strongly, and was markedly in advance of most of the similar papers of the time, including the _Kentucky Gazette_; for it took a firm stand in favor of the National Government, and against every form of disorder, of separatism, or of mob law. As with all of the American papers of the day, even in the backwoods, there was much interest taken in European news, and a prominent position was given to long letters, or extracts from seaboard papers, containing accounts of the operations of the English fleets and the French armies, or of the att.i.tude of the European governments. Like most Americans, the editorial writers of the paper originally sympathized strongly with the French Revolution; but the news of the beheading of Marie Antoinette, and the recital of the atrocities committed in Paris, worked a reaction among those who loved order, and the _Knoxville Gazette_ ranged itself with them, taking for the time being strong grounds against the French, and even incidentally alluding to the Indians as being more blood-thirsty than any man ”not a Jacobin.” [Footnote: _Knoxville Gazette_, March 27, 1794.] The people largely shared these sentiments.

In 1793 at the Fourth of July celebration at Jonesborough there was a public dinner and ball, as there was also at Knoxville; Federal troops were paraded and toasts were drunk to the President, to the Judges of the Supreme Court, to Blount, to General Wayne, to the friendly Chickasaw Indians, to Sevier, to the ladies of the Southwestern Territory, to the American arms, and, finally, ”to the true liberties of France and a speedy and just punishment of the murderers of Louis XVI.”

The word ”Jacobin” was used as a term of reproach for some time.

The ”Gazette” Sound in its Politics.

The paper was at first decidedly Federalist in sentiment. No sympathy was expressed with Genet or with the efforts undertaken by the Western allies of the French Minister to organize a force for the conquest of Louisiana; and the Tennessee settlers generally took the side of law and order in the earlier disturbances in which the Federal Government was concerned. At the Fourth of July celebration in Knoxville, in 1795, one of the toasts was ”The four western counties of Pennsylvania; may they repent their folly and sin no more”; the Tennesseeans sympathizing as little with the Pennsylvania whiskey revolutionists as four years later they sympathized with the Kentuckians and Virginians in their nullification agitation against the alien and sedition laws.

Its Gradual Change of Tone.

Gradually, however, the tone of the paper changed, as did the tone of the community, at least to the extent of becoming Democratic and anti-Federal; for the people felt that the Easterners did not sympathize with them either in their contests with the Indians or in their desire to control the Mississippi and the farther West. They grew to regard with particular vindictiveness the Federalists,--the aristocrats, as they styled them,--of the Southern seaboard States, notably of Virginia and South Carolina.

One pathetic feature of the paper was the recurrence of advertis.e.m.e.nts by persons whose friends and kinsfolk had been carried off by the Indians, and who anxiously sought any trace of them.

Queer Use of the ”Gazette.”

But the _Gazette_ was used for the expression of opinions not only by the whites, but occasionally even by an Indian. One of the Cherokee chiefs, the Red Bird, put into the _Gazette_, for two buckskins, a talk to the Cherokee chief of the Upper Towns, in which he especially warned him to leave alone one William c.o.c.ke, ”the white man who lived among the mulberry trees,” for, said Red Bird, ”the mulberry man talks very strong and runs very fast”; this same c.o.c.ke being afterwards one of the first two senators from Tennessee. The Red Bird ended his letter by the expression of the rather quaint wish, ”that all the bad people on both sides were laid in the ground, for then there would not be so many mush men trying to make people to believe they were warriors.” [Footnote: _Knoxville Gazette_, November 3, 1792.]

Efforts to Promote Higher Education.

Blount brought his family to Tennessee at once, and took the lead in trying to build up inst.i.tutions for higher education. After a good deal of difficulty an academy was organized under the t.i.tle of Blount College, and was opened as soon as a sufficient number of pupils could be gotten together; there were already two other colleges in the Territory, Greeneville and Was.h.i.+ngton, the latter being the academy founded by Doak. Like almost all other inst.i.tutions of learning of the day these three were under clerical control; but Blount College was chartered as a non-denomination inst.i.tution, the first of its kind in the United States. [Footnote: See Edward T. Sanford's ”Blount College and the University of Tennessee,” p. 13.] The clergyman and the lawyer, with the school-master, were still the typical men of letters in all the frontier communities. The doctor was not yet a prominent feature of life in the backwoods, though there is in the _Gazette_ an advertis.e.m.e.nt of one who announces that he intends to come to practise ”with a large stock of genuine medicines.” [Footnote: _Knoxville Gazette_, June 19, 1794.]

Books of the Backwoods.

The ordinary books were still school books, books of law, and sermons or theological writings. The first books, or pamphlets, published in Eastern Tennessee were brought out about this time at the _Gazette_ office, and bore such t.i.tles as ”A Sermon on Psalmody, by Rev. Hezekiah Balch”; ”A Discourse by the Rev. Samuel Carrick”; and a legal essay called ”Western Justice.” [Footnote: _Knoxville Gazette_, Jan. 30 and May 8, 1794.] There was also a slight effort now and then at literature of a lighter kind. The little Western papers, like those in the East, had their poets' corners, often with the heading of ”Sacred to the Muses,” the poems ranging from ”Lines to Myra” and ”An Epitaph on John Topham” to ”The Pernicious Consequences of Smoking Cigars.” In one of the issues of the _Knoxville Gazette_ there is advertised for sale a new song by ”a gentleman of Col. McPherson's Blues, on a late Expedition against the Pennsylvania Insurgents”; and also, in rather incongruous juxtaposition, ”Toplady's Translation of Zanchi on Predestination.”

Settlers Throng into Tennessee.

Settlers were thronging into East Tennessee, and many penetrated even to the Indian-hara.s.sed western district. In travelling to the western parts the immigrants generally banded together in large parties, led by some man of note. Among those who arrived in 1792 was the old North Carolina Indian fighter, General Griffith Rutherford. He wished to settle on the c.u.mberland, and to take thither all his company, with a large number of wagons, and he sent to Blount begging that a road might be cut through the wilderness for the wagons; or, if this could not be done, that some man would blaze the route, ”in which case,” said he ”there would be hands of our own that could cut as fast as wagons could march.”

[Footnote: Blount MSS., Rutherford to Blount, May 25, 1792.]

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