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| The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture is an amazing collaboration of almost 550 authors who have created the first updated, comprehensive study of Tennessee history since 1960. In the years since 1960 thousands of books, articles, theses, dissertations have been written about Tennessee history and culture; new research fields have been opened while others have been more fully explored; and new collections of primary sources have been discovered and stored away at an increasing number of archival collections, historic sites, museums, and research libraries across the state. As the bicentennial of 1996 approached, all of this new scholarship was ready to be mined, analyzed, and condensed into a single volume representing the present generation's summation of an entire century worth of research and historiography. This volume, however, is not just a generation's statement, but a statement from generations. Frank B. Williams Jr., who published his first article in the Tennessee Historical Quarterly in 1943, has contributed a thematic entry on education, prepared additional individual entries, and reviewed sections of the manuscript. Another important contributor is Robert E. Corlew, who was a student of the imminent southern historian Frank B. Owsley Jr., published his first THQ article in 1951, and became one of the coauthors of that last comprehensive history of Tennessee in 1960. Wilma Dykeman also made her appearance as a Tennessee historian in the 1950s with her influential book The French Broad (1954). She has played a central role in the present project, advocating its creation and coauthoring her own essay on the "meaning" of Tennessee. That essay is the first entry of the book, appropriate due to Dykeman's position as state historian, appropriate due to her role in writing about Tennessee for half a century, and appropriate since her essay represents her generation's thinking and understanding of the state's past--and its future. In the pages that follow other voices explore in their own distinctive way the words "meaning" and "significance" in Tennessee history. Many are established scholars from the state's major universities who have made significant contributions to the literature over the last thirty years. Members of the editorial board of the Tennessee Historical Quarterly from 1992 to 1997--Don H. Doyle and Paul K. Conkin of Vanderbilt University; James L. McDonough of Auburn University; Margaret Ripley Wolfe of East Tennessee State University; Paul H. Bergeron, W. Bruce Wheeler, and Cynthia G. Fleming of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Anita S. Goodstein of the University of the South; Kay Baker Gaston of Springfield; W. Calvin Dickinson and Larry H. Whiteaker of Tennessee Technological University; Christopher Losson of St. Joseph, Missouri; Carole Stanford Bucy of Volunteer State Community College, Robert B. Jones of Middle Tennessee State University, and Thomas H. Winn of Austin Peay State University--were among the first to lend their knowledge and prestige to the book. In addition, there are up-and-coming scholars exploring new topics and creating their own distinctive narratives about the past. Historians Jonathan Atkins, Fred A. Bailey, Robert Tracy McKenzie, Patrick Craddock, Connie L. Lester, Jeanette Keith, Dan Pierce, Timothy Ezzell, Jayne C. DeFiore, Mary S. Hoffschwelle, W. Todd Groce, Paul V. Murphy, Camille Wells, Wayne C. Moore, Kenneth Goings, Ted Ownby, Kevin D. Collins, John A. Simpson, Linda T. Wynn, Michael Toomey, David Sumner, and Lynette Boney Wrenn, through their own important monographs or journal articles, are part of the new generation of researchers broadening our understanding of Tennessee. The Tennessee Encyclopedia also is a collaboration of different disciplines, perspectives, and approaches to history. County historians, identified through a list maintained by the Tennessee Historical Commission, were invited to prepare brief entries on their county's history. Most county historians bring a local consciousness to bear on their narratives as well as a concern with heritage, the people and events that give identity to a certain place or time. Avocational historians, who in their careers are attorneys, business people, and physicians, add research and information about people and institutions important in their respective professional fields. College professors from Departments of English, Political Science, Biology, Music, Religion, Art, Architecture, Agriculture, Anthropology, and Business, and Schools of Law, Divinity, and Medicine ensure that the narrative includes more than men of war and politics, because it is the entirety of our historical experience that shapes what Tennessee is today. The group of historians who practice their craft in or for public agencies such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Tennessee Historical Commission, and the Tennessee Department of Transportation have been invaluable contributors because their work has led them to study in depth often forgotten historical artifacts ranging from prehistoric mounds to early twentieth-century bridges. Add to that number the curators and historians who work at the state's expanding range of museums and historic sites and the geologists, folklorists, and anthropologists who work for the state government, and the wide range of disciplines and professional backgrounds represented by the authors of this volume becomes even more apparent. Most contributors are either natives of or work in Tennessee, but since the impact of the state's history and culture has often extended beyond its borders, it is no surprise that writers about Tennessee also come from the West Coast, the East Coast, and many points in between. Through their eyes we gain a broader perspective on the defining people, institutions, and moments of Tennessee's past. These diverse authors write about an equally diverse range of Tennessee people and events, from the deep past of the prehistoric age to the latest developments in the health care industry. Chosen for their national, statewide, or regional significance, the individual entries also are associated with larger historical themes, particular chronological periods, and different constituencies. Through their diversity, the hundreds of entries create a balanced yet comprehensive narrative on history and culture, one that acknowledges, for example, the importance of both politicians and musicians in creating the defining traditions and moments of Tennessee's past. Diversity is an obvious word to describe the contributors and contents of the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. But to revel in diversity for its own sake adds little to the study and interpretation of the past. A cacophony of voices without unifying themes typically makes little sense--of all that is being said, what is important? What are the associations with other peoples from other times? Why should we listen? Out of the hundreds of thousands of words from the hundreds of voices in this volume, however, clarity does emerge if we step back and think about the basic ideas and attitudes that all of Tennessee's different classes, races, and genders share in common. Five words--"duty," "courage," "faith," "change," and "continuity"--convey best the shared meaning and significance of the many people, places, and events found within these pages. The concept of duty, certainly defined in various ways by different people, links together such diverse people as Dragging Canoe, Andrew Jackson, Frances Wright, Sam Davis, Samuel P. Carter, Julia Hooks, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Alvin C. York, and Theotis Robinson. In surveying the rapid changes being experienced by the Cherokees during the years of the American Revolution, Dragging Canoe saw his duty as an aggressive defender of his homeland and culture. Andrew Jackson's sense of duty led him into both heroic and foolhardy adventures, and more often than not--witness the Eaton Affair--he was willing to pay the price that duty sometimes demands. Frances Wright saw her duty as building a place in the wilderness of West Tennessee where blacks and whites could live and work together as free people in an age when the rest of society saw few alternatives to slavery. A few years earlier, but in a far different place in East Tennessee, Elihu Embree and Benjamin Lundy had followed a similar sense of duty as they launched the first abolitionist newspapers. Shared concepts of duty, honor, and responsibility propelled hundreds of thousands of Tennesseans into action during the Civil War. Placing duty to his fellow soldiers and unit above all considerations, Confederate scout Sam Davis of Rutherford County proclaimed, "[I]f I had a thousand lives I would lose them all before I would betray my friends or the confidence of my informer," before meeting a horrible death in Pulaski in 1863. In that same war, Samuel P. Carter of Carter County saw his duty as a defender of the Union. He served as a brigadier general of the U.S. Volunteers during the Civil War and afterwards he returned to a naval career where he rose to the rank of rear admiral upon his retirement. A similar sense of duty to defend the country convinced Alvin C. York to lay aside, temporarily, his religious convictions and to fight in World War I. In late-nineteenth-century Memphis, two African American women acknowledged their duty in the fight for civil rights. Ida B. Wells-Barnett took to the editorial pages to denounce extralegal violence and lynching. Julia A. Hooks, in a 1894 address at the Beale Street Baptist Church, announced that the "Duty of the Hour" was to build the strength of character and purpose which could carry African Americans through the difficult years ahead. A later generation, represented in part by Theotis Robinson at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, renewed this sense of duty in the late1950s and 1960s as it grasped the mantle of leadership and strode onto college campuses first and other public institutions next to obtain civil rights and equal opportunity for all people. Courage walks hand-in-hand with one's sense of duty, as shown through the stories of such pioneers of the Civil Rights movement as James Lawson, Diane Nash, and Viola McFerren. It required tremendous courage to confront the forces of segregation and violence with dignified nonviolent protest. Outnumbered, portrayed as quacks, insurrectionists, or worse in the media, and surrounded by the power of the state, the participants in the Civil Rights movement displayed courage beyond what most people possess, not only to stand up and be counted--but to lead. This generation was not the only one to demonstrate such courage and conviction. Many Tennesseans, from John Ross among the Cherokees to Reconstruction-era black legislator Samuel McElwee to suffrage leader Anne Dallas Dudley to Highlander Folk School founder Myles Horton, have assumed similar leadership roles when the easier course would have been to stand back and join the crowd. During the backcountry era of Tennessee history, it also took courage to explore new lands and encounter new peoples, but the potential rewards in furs and land compelled waves of Europeans to set fear aside to come into the lands of the Cherokees, Shawnees, Chickasaws, and Choctaws. Soto, Pardo, LaSalle, Marquette, Joliet, Arthur, and Demonbreun were among the first. Later in the second half of the eighteenth century, a relative handful of trailblazers, such as legendary Thomas Spencer, left home and headed west in search of those new lands and to create new patterns of exchange between English colonists and Native Americans. Courage has distinguished Tennesseans on the battlefield ever since the Overmountain Men gathered at Sycamore Shoals and crossed the Appalachians to defeat the British at Kings Mountain. A generation later, so many Tennesseans rushed to fight in the War of 1812 that the state gained its nickname--the Volunteer State. Ever since, a wide range of Tennesseans--Felix Zollicoffer, Cornelia Fort, and James T. Davis among many others--have sacrificed for a greater cause. Standing up for the "cause," for principle, lies behind many famous events and places across the state. Competing principles certainly were on trial, along with John Scopes, at the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton in 1925. The national media circus that descended upon Dayton touted the values of modern science in contrast to the rural traditions of many local residents. To outsiders, Science and Rationality won at Dayton, no matter the verdict against Scopes. Yet within five years the advocates of modern science met a much more worthy adversary from the halls of Vanderbilt University in the Agrarians. This disparate union of writers, historians, and economists loudly proclaimed "I'll Take My Stand" in defiance of the alliance between science, technology, and industry in the early twentieth century. As Andrew Nelson Lytle contended, the modern age "presents an awful spectacle: men, run mad by their inventions, supplanting themselves with inanimate objects. This is, to follow the matter to its conclusion, a moral and spiritual suicide, foretelling an actual physical destruction." (1) By the next decade, however, modern science and technology had reshaped the state's very landscape through federal projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, Cumberland Homesteads, and the Oak Ridge facilities of the Manhattan Project. Scientists came from throughout the world to gather at these Tennessee places; their courage was of a different kind: to step into new frontiers and dream of a brave new world, a broader universe documented fifty years earlier by the photography of astronomer Edward E. Barnard. Duty and courage would accomplish little without the faith that a courageous stand makes a difference. In the conflict between the Agrarians and the prophets of modern technology, for example, both sides possessed courage and conviction for their cause because they faithfully believed that the future would vindicate them. Technocrats at the TVA and Oak Ridge placed their faith in science; the Agrarian writers placed theirs in history and tradition. Different faiths about the fundamental principles of democratic society and political economy also distinguished the rhetoric and actions of both Democrats and Whigs in the heated political wars of the mid-nineteenth century. Neither Democrats nor Whigs hesitated to invoke the name of God in and for their cause as both believed that they were fighting for the future. The Democrats championed the agrarian economy of their forefathers while the Whigs looked forward to prosperity under the evolving market revolution of the antebellum age. A century later, faith in righteousness and God were strongly associated with another political upheaval, the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Faith allowed the strategy of nonviolence to convince, slowly, the majority of Tennesseans of the immorality of segregation. Faith also has led generations of Tennesseans to establish and maintain several of most influential protestant churches of today. Few states have had as many churches established within their boundaries or that maintain national and world headquarters within the state. Tennessee is home to the Free Will Baptists, National Baptist Convention, Inc., Southern Baptist Convention, Christian Methodist Episcopals, Cumberland Presbyterians, Church of God in Christ, and Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) and has played a formative role in the Disciples of Christ, Church of Christ, and Assembly of God denominations. The presence of these religious faiths brought educational and publishing institutions, which, in turn, elevated higher education and the music publishing and recording industry within the state. To some, Tennessee may be derisively described as the "buckle of the Bible Belt," but without its faiths, it would be a far different, and diminished, place. Change and continuity are the push-pull of Tennessee history. There are few static times in the state's past. Even during the deep prehistoric period, change occurred, merely at a much slower pace than we are accustomed to. Prehistoric Tennesseans changed and adapted to climate, geography, and environment through four primary eras--Paleoindian, Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian. Then in the mid-1500s began two centuries of contact with European explorers and traders, a time of rapid change compared to past patterns, a pace that accelerated even more with the coming of permanent European settlers in the second half of the eighteenth century. Older narratives of this process of cultural interaction often told a simple, straightforward story line: the Indians passed on in face of the juggernaut of western civilization. The story, as witnessed in this volume, is hardly so simple, but one of complexity, change, and continuity. The Trail of Tears certainly marked a concerted federal effort to remove the Native American presence from Tennessee, for instance, but today Cherokees maintain homes and traditions throughout Middle and East Tennessee while Chickasaws and Choctaws still live in parts of West Tennessee. Indeed, the Choctaws returned to Tennessee after World War II as part of the extensive rural migration associated with an emerging modern agricultural economy. Agriculture is another theme often assumed to change little over the decades. Our farms, especially the lands cultivated by Tennessee's Century Farm families, clearly represent continuity as fields and pastures are farmed by generations of the same family. But at the same time the story of Tennessee agriculture is a dynamic one, from the evolution of the market economy in the antebellum era to the death of slavery and reorganization of agricultural labor during the Reconstruction period and on to the progressive farming revolution of the twentieth century. Farm families might be on the land of their great-great-grandparents, but they raise products, such as soybeans and new livestock breeds, unheard of by their ancestors. Nor could their ancestors have imagined the high technology and mass production associated with the Nissan and Saturn automobile factories built in the 1980s in former corn and cotton fields of Middle Tennessee. But the heralded arrival of Nissan and Saturn are merely the latest chapters in the state's long industrial history. Large-scale multinationalinvestments in Tennessee resources and people began to reorder lives and landscapes in the years after the Civil War when, for example, the Dupont Corporation came to Cheatham County to manufacture gunpowder. During World War I Dupont built a huge modern ammunition factory and a complete company town, now known as Old Hickory, on a bend of the Cumberland River in Davidson County. In the 1890s northern financiers, led by international banker J. P. Morgan, reorganized struggling East Tennessee railroad lines and the Memphis and Charleston Railroad as integral parts of a new regional transportation monster, the Southern Railway, which soon built impressive urban terminal gateways in Knoxville and Chattanooga. In that same decade international investors looked with favor toward mining and timber resources at Cumberland Gap, the very spot where Daniel Boone and others had initially launched the movement west--the very process that defined, according to the famous 1893 "frontier thesis" of historian Frederick Jackson Turner, the American character. As industrial development gained momentum in the resource-laden lands of the Cumberland Plateau and Appalachian Mountains, as well as within the state's four major urban centers of Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga, it also began to transform smaller cites and towns. In the early twentieth century Massachusetts industrialists built a modern cotton mill village, Bemis, outside of Jackson while Pittsburgh industrialists developed the modern aluminum plant and town of Alcoa outside Maryville, powering the facility with electricity from a series of hydroelectric dams located throughout the Appalachian region. After World War I, New York capitalists launched major industrial plants in Kingsport, and German investors built huge rayon production facilities in Elizabethton. In the 1930s the Tennessee Valley Authority was many things to many people, but in general the mega-agency represented an effort to harness a river and its resources for a new industrial future. Industry and mining have a deep, significant history in Tennessee, a history of change, reaction, failure, and success. Today abandoned hulks of once large, prosperous firms litter the landscape as new firms and industries build postmodern office complexes and factories. Race is another constant in Tennessee history. The first European settlers brought their slaves as they carried in other essential items of property. Slavery would prove to have a complex and challenging history over the next one hundred years before emancipation. African American slaves cleared many Tennessee fields and built most of the elegant manor houses that are now historic museums. But only in selected areas were there slave gangs toiling in the cotton or tobacco fields. More frequently, farmers and their families worked the fields with their few slaves; most Tennesseans did not own slaves and developed their farms themselves. But across the state free-born African Americans found life difficult and their choices more limited in the antebellum period. Slaves also encountered a more brutal legal and cultural world by the mid-century. The abolition movement found an early home in East Tennessee, but the state as a whole remained firmly wedded to slavery as an essential economic and social institution. When the Civil War came, Tennessee joined the Confederacy, although most of East Tennessee, and isolated pockets in the other two grand divisions, remained Unionist. Indeed, Greeneville resident Andrew Johnson was Republican Abraham Lincoln's second vice president and became president after Lincoln's assassination in 1865. By that time, emancipation and Reconstruction already had initiated a new chapter in race relations, one of hope, opportunity, and promise perhaps best embodied in new educational institutions such as Fisk University, Roger Williams University, Lane College, Lemoyne Owen College, and Knoxville College. But progress and promise were impeded during the repression and violence of Jim Crow segregation, a nadir in Tennessee race relations from its turn to the mid-twentieth century. Yet ironically out of Jim Crow, Tennessee African Americans established institutions like the American Baptist Theological Seminary, local NAACP chapters, and Tennessee State University that would help carry the day for equality and opportunity during the struggle for civil rights. Politics is another way to explore the interplay of change and continuity in Tennessee history, from the personal politics of the Jackson-Sevier rivalry to the ideological battles between Whigs and Democrats to Tennessee's very different relationship, compared to other southern states, with the Republican Party. Democratic Party dominance in the South has often been assumed to be the norm, from the days of Jefferson and Jackson to recent years, but that assumption is mistaken. The Democrats had difficulty even winning elections during the Age of Jackson, and when Columbia resident James K. Polk won the presidency in the 1844 election, he failed to carry the vote of Tennessee. (Ironically, the same was true in the 2000 election for Albert Gore Jr., who also failed to his carry his native state.) The Whig Party and platform significantly influenced the state's development in the mid-nineteenth century, and many members of that party, like Samuel Arnell of Maury County and Emerson Etheridge of Weakley County, were Unionists during the Civil War and became founding members of the Republican Party in the Reconstruction period. Congressional districts in East Tennessee consistently elected Republican representatives throughout the twentieth century, creating the political foundation for the party's reemergence during the 1960s as a statewide force led by Howard Baker Jr. of Scott County. The Democratic Party certainly emerged from the 1870 constitutional convention as a political power without equal. But its power and goals (except the principle of white supremacy) were often diminished by factional divisions and third party threats, especially from the agrarian revolt of the late 1880s and 1890s. Then came the personal politics exercised by urban political bosses such as Hillary Howse of Nashville and Edward H. Crump of Memphis and small town bosses like those in McMinn County who were finally turned out of power by determined former GIs in the "Battle of Athens" in 1946. The gunfire on the streets of Athens, unfortunately, was not an isolated incident; violence and politics have a long association in the history of Tennessee. The duels of the Jackson-Sevier days were followed by the fisticuffs and armed threats of antebellum stump speakers. After the Civil War, political violence escalated, as witnessed by the rise of Ku Klux Klan, the lynchings of African Americans, state and local government suppression of labor activity, the night riders of the Black Patch War, the shooting of Edward W. Carmack on the streets of Nashville, and the twentieth-century racial battles in Knoxville and Columbia. Within the politically defined boundaries of Tennessee, the land itself has changed more than one would think. The earthquakes of 1811-12 left their legacy in an expanded Reelfoot Lake and altered the course of the Mississippi River. Later in the century, people began to transform the landscape permanently through mining coal at Tracy City and copper at Ducktown; by building tunnels at the Narrows of the Harpeth and at Cumberland Mountain; and by logging the hardwoods of West Tennessee and the Cumberland Plateau. Teams of soldiers and engineers from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reworked several rivers to improve navigation, and by the early 1900s the first hydroelectric dams and reservoirs were under construction. The efforts of the TVA were just the latest in a series of attempts by man to control nature by destroying it and replacing it with a technological system that people could control. These man-made alterations left a fearsome toll on the landscape: a moonscape of environmental degradation at Ducktown and Dunlap; tree stumps and eroded, deeply gullied land in Overton and Henderson Counties. We have spent a good part of the twentieth century attempting to reclaim Tennessee from our own worst excesses, and in the process Tennesseans have worked with outsiders to build a conservation landscape of parks, natural areas, scenic rivers, and forests that are the rival of any state in the nation. Fall Creek Falls, Savage Gulf, the Great Smoky Mountains, the Big South Fork, Reelfoot Lake, Cedars of Lebanon, and Roan Mountain are more than state landmarks: they are vital natural habitats of national significance. Duty, courage, faith, change, continuity. Many people, places, and events associated with these five words are success stories, ones of hope, determination, and inspiration. But stories of failure, violence, and greed are also part of the Tennessee experience. It has often taken a rude slap to the face to awaken Tennesseans to the reality that history is not just a steady march of progress. There are abrupt stops, sometimes even a forced march backwards. The steps forward, those backwards, and even those taken sideways combine with the state's rich physical setting to create a cultural understanding of who were are and, perhaps, where we are going--defining what we currently like to describe as "our sense of place." Tennessee's many parks, museums, and historic sites present the physical side of that "sense of place," but to find the spiritual side of the equation, we must turn to the stories, paintings, poems, lyrics, murals, and novels of generations of Tennessee writers, artists, and musicians. Our connection to the Tennessee past may be reflected in a short story by Peter Taylor, a novel by T. S. Stribling, or the poetry of Marilou Awiakta. As seen in the craftsmanship of a Woodland era bowl, the sculpture of Will Edmondson, or a painting by Gilbert Gaul, Tennessee is not the vision of one particular group of people, but a shared place of many different meanings created by many peoples over the centuries. The scholarship of the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture also has many meanings. Some entries are apparent to the casual reader; others require careful and repeated mining of the layers of history contained within their pages. History is a tough, demanding taskmaster, but the reward of meeting its challenge is worth the effort. Through its eyes, we can better understand who were are and how we got here. It is not always a pretty story, but together the diverse narratives of this volume document the amazing history of challenge, failure, sacrifice, greed, change, stubbornness, creativity, violence, justice, and faith that is the history of Tennessee. Carroll Van West Editor-in-Chief Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture Citation: (1) Twelve Southerners, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930), 202-3. |