The State of Franklin, lost and found

Not too long ago I posted about a recently-published book I’d run across, Kevin T. Barksdale’s The Lost State of Franklin: America’s First Secession (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2009).  I’m always excited to see any new work on the Tennessee frontier, and I eagerly looked forward to reading it.

Franklin was a 1780′s separatist movement in what was then western North Carolina and is now eastern Tennessee.  Residents of the Tennessee Valley had, for some time, wanted a government closer to home to be more responsive to their own needs.

In April 1784, North Carolina finally ceded her western lands to the federal government, but by the time westerners actually voted to create an independent state that December, the North Carolina legislature had repealed the cession and reclaimed sovereignty over the lands west of the mountains.  The new state of Franklin was once again a part of its parent, and its adherents were technically insurgents.  The Tennessee frontier, which Barksdale argues had been a haven of political unity up until this time, was now the setting for a nasty political squabble.

This led to the bizarre situation of overlapping Franklin and North Carolina jurisdictions, with competing courts, sheriffs, elections, and tax systems operating in the same area.  North Carolina used a divide-and-conquer strategy to win over the residents of the Tennessee Valley, liberally offering pardons, offices, and freedom from back taxes.  Still, there was rancor and violence between North Carolina loyalists and Franklinites, particularly near the end of the state’s existence.

Barksdale’s view of Franklin’s origins and development is decidedly cynical.  Before the separation, he argues, wealthy elites enjoyed effective control over the region’s economic and political life.  The movement’s main architects tended to be the wealthiest landowners—Barksdale finds that their landholdings were significantly higher than those of the average Tennessee Valley resident or of Franklin opponents.  Separation allowed these elites to consolidate their control, and to promote their goals of better access to markets and protection of land claims—goals their less influential neighbors also shared.

Furthermore, Barksdale argues that the new state was hardly democratic.  When the convention to draw up a frame of government for Franklin met in Greeneville in November 1785, a group of Presbyterian-influenced idealists presented a plan that would have provided for a unicameral legislature, universal suffrage for free males, and widespread education.  The convention instead adopted a modified form of North Carolina’s government, stifling the possibility of political power passing out of the hands of the frontier elite and becoming broadly diffused among average Tennessee Valley residents.

The establishment of Franklin also allowed regional leaders a freer hand in dealing with the Indians than they experienced before.  In 1785 Franklin secured its first Indian treaty at Dumplin Creek, obtaining land set aside by North Carolina for the Cherokee from a cadre of tribal members pliant enough to give in to their demands.  Both the U.S. and North Carolina governments repudiated Franlin’s Indian relations, but they were unable to enforce their own separate agreements with the Indians.  Violence between settlers and Native Americans in the Tennessee Valley eventually led to open warfare that outlasted Franklin itself.  Leading Franklinites also secured an alliance with Georgia to drive out the Creeks who inhabited the fertile Muscle Shoals region, hoping to profit from developing the lands there.

North Carolina’s refusal to accept Franklin, her conciliatory approach to wooing her former citizens, and the new national government’s refusal to acknowledge a state’s creation without the consent of its parent, prompted more and more Franklinites to abandon the movement.  Not even tentative western attempts to secure Spanish support prevented Franklin from collapsing.  In late February 1788, Franklin’s governor, John Sevier, led an armed force to the farm of his arch-opponent John Tipton in order to reclaim property seized for non-payment of North Carolina taxes.  Sevier’s followers drove off one party marching to Tipton’s aid, but when Tiptonite reinforcements arrived, the Franklinites fled.

Following this confrontation, Sevier found himself wanted for treason by a new North Carolina governor less conciliatory than his predecessor.  Sevier was arrested in October and taken to North Carolina for trial; his friends bailed him out of jail in Morganton, and the backcountry hero escaped to Jonesboro, eventually receiving a pardon and enjoying a long career under the governments of North Carolina and eventually Tennessee.  Franklin dissolved, but enjoyed a kind of second life as a rhetorical weapon in debates over Tennessee’s Revolutionary legacy and Appalachian Unionism.

Barksdale’s work is a solid study, clearly written and argued.  It is grounded in secondary scholarship on early Tennessee history and in important primary materials such as the Draper manuscripts.  Furthermore, it makes a real contribution to historiography, since good academic work on the Tennessee frontier is all too scarce.

I do, however, wonder whether Barksdale has been too quick to attribute events to the activities of self-interested elites.  He effectively demonstrates that the region’s wealthiest and most influential citizens were active proponents of Franklin, and that they held many of the new state’s most important offices.  Certainly the creation of an independent western state allowed these men to exercise greater influence than they would have in the bigger pond of North Carolina politics.

But there are other statements in the book that would seem to challenge this explanation.  Barksdale notes that these elites enjoyed broad support from Tennessee Valley yeomen before the separatist movement, and these average inhabitants shared the elites’ desire to improve access to outside markets and to secure themselves from attack.  If the region was indeed unified behind elite leadership, and if yeomen and elites shared many of the same goals, then perhaps the average Tennessee Valley resident was more active in the state’s creation than Barksdale indicates.  It’s possible that the elites led the way simply because they had the influence to do so, and that records of their activities have survived simply because they were more prominent.

Furthermore, the argument from self-interest leaves open the question of why many Tennessee Valley residents opposed Franklin.  Presumably, these opponents would also have benefited from secure land claims, access to markets, a more responsive state government, and a proactive Indian policy.  This is where Barksdale’s top-down approach falters a bit.  I hasten to add that the motives of rank-and-file frontiersmen may not be recoverable to us, but the consistent focus on the leadership made me wonder whether Barksdale was too hasty in dismissing factors besides elite agency.

These aren’t so much criticisms of the book as they are unresolved questions I had while reading it.  I was glad to see a study like this in print, and I recommend it to everyone interested in the eighteenth century or the southern frontier.  Thanks to Barksdale’s work, we now have a much clearer picture of this brief but fascinating episode in Tennessee history than we’ve ever had before.  The “Lost State of Franklin” didn’t endure, but in terms of scholarship, it isn’t lost anymore.

Another book that needed to be written

This is turning out to be a good year for books that I’ve always wished somebody would write.  Back in March we got the first full-scale study of the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, and it was everything I’d hoped it would be.

Today I ran across another new book that I’m frantic to read, Kevin T. Barksdale’s The Lost State of Franklin: America’s First Secession.  This is a fascinating chapter of early American history that’s gone unexamined for far too long, and I’m glad somebody’s finally putting out a detailed piece of research on it.

This baby just shot to the top of my reading list.  Unfortunately, I’m neck-deep in class preparation, so it’ll be a while before I can dive in.  I’ll let you know what I think.

Making sense of Guilford Courthouse

I’ve mentioned before how thrilled I was to learn about a new book called Long, Obstinate, and Bloody: The Battle of Guilford Courthouse, by Lawrence Babits and Joshua Howard.  We’ve long needed a full-scale treatment of this battle, and I can’t think of anyone better suited to co-write it than Babits, whose earlier book on the Battle of Cowpens was a remarkable piece of research.

I eagerly awaited the arrival of my copy of Long, Obstinate, and Bloody, and when it finally came I felt like a kid on Christmas morning.  I absolutely devoured it, and it’s as fine a piece of military history as I expected it to be.  Guilford was a confused and messy affair, but Babits and Howard have done an outstanding job of making sense of it all.  There’s some intensive primary research collected in these pages, and it shows.

The battle’s anniversary is, of course, this weekend.  Check out the schedule of events.  Babits and Howard are speaking at Guilford Courthouse National Park tonight and signing books tomorrow; there’s also a reenactment at the adjacent Country Park and a number of other presentations at both the NP and nearby Tannenbaum Historic Park. 

My plans to attend fell through at the last minute, much to my disappointment.  I’ll have to postpone my pilgrimage until next week, so here’s your homework assignment.  If you’re within driving distance of Greensboro, head on over and then report back.  If not, then order yourself a copy of Long, Obstinate, and Bloody and enjoy.

Facing historical figures

I think my favorite living historian is David Hackett Fischer.  His books are wide-ranging, exhaustively researched, intelligently argued, and beautifully written.  He’s a tremendous inspiration to me, and his work has provided me with many instructive lessons on the craft of history.

One of those lessons involves how to approach historical figures.  The temptation, of course, is to do so with either blind admiration or fashionable contempt. 

Fischer offers what I think is a sensible approach in his book on the events leading up to Lexington and Concord.  His two main actors are the American patriot Paul Revere and the British officer Thomas Gage.  One of his purposes, he writes, is “to study both Paul Revere and Thomas Gage with sympathy and genuine respect.”¹

Neither worship nor condemnation, but “sympathy and respect,” a simple appreciation of their basic humanity and a willingness to put oneself in their shoes.  Not bad advice for scholars who find themselves passing judgment on men and women in extraordinary circumstances.

¹ David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), xviii.

…and all those seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century wars, too

I drove down to Knoxville, Tennessee today to run a few errands and decided to hit a couple of the bookstores on the west end of town.   For those of you who haven’t spent much time there, Knoxville probably has more big bookstores than any other city of comparable size, and some cities much larger—so many, in fact, that a few years ago the local weekly ran a feature story asking whether the place could sustain them all. 

Anyway, while browsing around the area’s biggest used bookstore, I got slapped with a stunning reminder of the lopsided state of American military historiography.  This place has a pretty substantial history section: world, European, U.S., regional, and so on.  It has, also, a considerable military history section, which for some bizarre reason is on the other end of the store, nowhere near the other historical books.

I’d guess that slightly more than half of the titles in the military section are Civil War books.  World War II has the second biggest share, with a good selection of other twentieth-century and international topics.

Nestled among these titles is a rather small section of shelf space with this label: ”U.S. WARS PRIOR TO WWI.”

That would be King Philip’s War, King William’s War, Queen Anne’s War, King George’s War, the French and Indian War, the Cherokee War, the Revolutionary War, the Northwest Indian War, the Chickamauga conflicts, the Quasi-War, the Barbary naval actions, the War of 1812, the Creek War, the Black Hawk War, the Seminole Wars, the Texas War of Independence, the Mexican War, the battles with the Sioux and Nez Perce, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine War, a few interventions in Latin America and China, and various other little spats that flared up from time to time.

So, are we gonna get to D-Day here, or what?

Guilford Courthouse study on the way, and it’s about time

One of the most critical battles of the Revolutionary War was the brutal face-off between the armies of Nathanael Greene and Lord Cornwallis at Guilford Courthouse, North Carolina on March 15, 1781.  It was a pivotal engagement, a Pyrrhic victory that crippled the British army and contributed to Greene’s reconquest of South Carolina and the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown.

I’ve looked long and hard for a full-length, documented account of this battle and I’ve never been able to find one.  That’s why I was thrilled to discover that a new one will be available this March, courtesy of UNC Press: Long, Obstinate, and Bloody: The Battle of Guilford Courthouse, by Lawrence Babits and Joshua Howard.  Babits is also the author of an incredibly detailed book on the Battle of Cowpens, in which he used intensive research to clear up quite a few misconceptions, providing us with a clearer understanding of that event than ever before.  I can’t wait to see what he and Howard have uncovered about one of the unduly-neglected battles of the decisive Southern Campaign.

History as literature

Every time I step into a major bookstore I can find copies of Foote’s Civil War trilogy, the early work of David McCullough, an abridgement of Freeman’s biographies of Lee and Washington, and a book or two by Barbara Tuchman.  All these books have been around for decades, and in terms of scholarship they’ve all been superseded (to one degree or another) by more recent studies.  Yet not only do they remain in print, they continue to cast a long shadow.

This is pretty remarkable when you consider that most history books, even those that are models of research and analysis, are mere blips on the radar of the national consciousness.  How many works of historical scholarship continue to garner impressive sales and legions of new readers five decades after they’re first published?  A very, very few.

It seems to me that the reason books by Freeman, Tuchman, and Foote stay on the shelves is the fact they’ve transcended history and become genuine pieces of literature.  People read them not merely to acquire the information in them, but for the experience of reading them.  They want to immerse themselves in the language and follow the same journey that other readers have experienced; they read them for the same motives that might prompt them to pick up Moby Dick or The Great Gatsby. 

I’m not arguing that these books are historically superior to more rigorous, scholarly studies.  In fact, I’d advise anyone looking for an accurate assessment of Lee to turn to the work of Emory Thomas rather than Freeman, and I could recommend any number of books on the American Revolution above Tuchman’s The First Salute.  But I do think that, in this age of the academic fad and over-specialization, the endurance of classics like these should at least give us us pause, and make us consider what these writers-turned-historians knew how to do that we don’t.

Following the evidence

Lately I’ve been digging back into a couple of classics on political thought during the American Revolution.  The first is Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, which originated as an introduction to a collection of pamphlets written during the imperial crisis.  The second is Gordon Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence of these two books.  Both of them helped generate historians’ appreciation of republicanism as the dominant theme of revolutionary politics, a synthesis that made sense of eighteenth-century Americans’ obsession with public virtue, the common good, and the invasive nature of power.

Ideological Origins and Creation of the American Republic have something in common besides their arguments, something that explains why both books were seminal when first published and have stood the test of time.  In assembling their work, both Bailyn and Wood let the evidence guide them.  They saturated themselves in what revolutionary-era Americans were reading and writing, they looked for patterns, and they made sense of it all.  They didn’t ask, “What were eighteenth-century Americans thinking about such-and-such a subject?”  Instead, they simply asked, “What were eighteenth-century Americans thinking?” 

Writing the history of political thought, or any kind of intellectual history, should be an attempt to recover a past worldview.  Bailyn and Wood didn’t consider themselves to be shapers of the evidence.  They considered themselves subject to it, and that accounts for their work’s remarkable staying power; they listened to the American Revolutionaries and then allowed them to speak to us.

(Both book cover images are from Amazon.com.)

A handy overview of America’s military beginnings

I recently picked up a copy of a book that’s worth recommending: A Respectable Army: The Military Origins Of The Republic, 1763-1789, by James Kirby Martin and Mark Edward Lender.  This book is part of Harlan Davidson’s American History Series edited by John Hope Franklin and A.S. Eisenstadt, which offers concise guides to important periods and themes in U.S. history. 

This volume answers a question that’s central to an understanding of the Revolution: How did a republican rebellion started by a citizen militia, supported by a society terrified of standing armies, develop into a war conducted by professional soldiers?  The book also incorporates short summaries of the major campaigns, making it ideal for anyone needing a refresher on the course of the Revolution or instructors looking for a course supplement.  It’s a great introduction to the questions Revolutionary War historians have been asking and the answers they’ve found.

David Hackett Fischer’s Champlain Biography Released

I was in a bookstore earlier today and found, to my surprise and delight, that David Hackett Fischer’s Champlain’s Dream is now available.  In my opinion, Dr. Fischer is simply the finest American historian working today, simply because he does so many different types of history incredibly well. 

His range is considerable; he’s written about everything from early American folkways to economic trends.  His research is always exhaustive, his conclusions are unfailingly provocative and insightful, and as a writer he has few equals.  I particularly recommend Fischer’s two accounts of pivotal events during the Revolution: Paul Revere’s Ride and Washington’s Crossing.  If you’re skeptical of the scholarly possibilities of narrative history, these two books will change your mind. 

Check out Simon & Schuster’s website for Champlain’s Dream to read an excerpt.