Politics

Governor Thomas C. Rye was born in a log cabin in 1863 to Wayne and Elizabeth Atchison Rye of Benton County. Growing up on his father's farm, he attended county public schools. After studying law in Charlotte, North Carolina, he…

Born in 1850 in Indiana, Newell Sanders moved as an adult to Chattanooga at the encouragement of General John T. Wilder. Recognizing the need in the South for reliable farm machinery, Wilder encouraged Sanders to produce plows. His Chattanooga Plow…

Attorney, U.S. Senator, and Ambassador to the People's Republic of China James R. Sasser was born in Memphis in 1936, the son of Joseph Ralph and Mary Nell Gray Sasser. He attended the public schools of Nashville and was enrolled…

John H. Savage, congressman, state legislator, and veteran of three wars, was born at McMinnville on October 9, 1815, the son of George and Elizabeth Kenner Savage. Savage attended common schools and the Carroll Academy at McMinnville before studying law;…

Dewitt Senter, farmer, state legislator, and governor, was born in McMinn County on March 26, 1832, the son of William T. Senter, a Methodist minister, and Nancy White Senter. He attended the public schools in Grainger County and the Strawberry…

John Sevier, pioneer, soldier, statesman and a founder of the Republic, was Tennessee's first governor and one of its most illustrious citizens. Married and on his own at age sixteen, he was in the vanguard of frontier life and accomplishment…

Isaac Shelby, early Tennessee settler, Revolutionary War veteran, and governor of Kentucky, was born in Hagerstown, Maryland, in 1750 to Evan and Letitia Cox Shelby, who moved their family to Sapling Grove, the present site of Bristol, in 1771. Their…

Daniel Smith, pioneer, surveyor, treaty negotiator, secretary of the Southwest Territory, and U.S. senator, was a native of Stafford County, Virginia, who became infatuated with the trans-Appalachian West while a surveyor on the Virginia frontier. During the early years of…

William M. Smith was the preeminent Radical Republican leader in Memphis during Reconstruction. As a judge, Smith confronted some of the most controversial legal issues of the period and led the Shelby County Republican Party through decades of Democratic dominance.…

William R. Snodgrass served as comptroller of the treasury in Tennessee for forty-four years (1954-99), longer than any other person in that office. Tennessee is unusual among the states in that the constitutional officers, such as secretary of state, treasurer,…

The Spanish Conspiracy of the mid-1780s arose in the aftermath of the American Revolution when the leaders of the Cumberland settlements, which were then still part of North Carolina, courted a possible relationship with the Spanish government in New Orleans.…

Few issues have dominated an era of Tennessee politics like the debate over the state debt which raged for six years (1877-83) as a predominant political issue. Having first been incurred in support of antebellum railroad construction, the debt dramatically…

A short-lived attempt to create a new state in the trans-Appalachian settlement of present-day East Tennessee, the State of Franklin arose from the general unsettled state of national, regional, and local politics at the end of the Revolutionary War. Under…

Kate Bradford Stockton, a socialist and the first woman to run for governor in Tennessee, was born in Stockton, California, in 1880. She was a direct descendant of William Bradford, second governor of Plymouth Plantation. Her grandfather, Arthur Bradford of…

Governor of Tennessee since 1995, Don Sundquist was born March 15, 1936, and was the first member of his family to finish high school and attend college. He graduated from Augustana College and then served two years in the U.S.…

Governor and U.S. Congressman Alfred A. Taylor was born in Happy Valley, Carter County, August 6, 1848, the second son of Emma Haynes and Nathaniel Green Taylor. His father was a farmer, Methodist minister, twice First District U.S. representative, and…

Robert L. Taylor, three-term governor and one-term U.S. senator, was born into a political family in Carter County, July 31, 1850. At the time, his uncle Landon Carter Haynes, a Democrat, was serving as Speaker of the Tennessee House of…

In the early twentieth century, temperance was the key issue in Tennessee politics. The roots of the temperance movement date to Jacksonian America, when temperance reform appeared in conjunction with capitalistic economic efforts. For the next eight decades temperance leaders…

TennCare, initiated by Governor Ned Ray McWherter on January 1, 1994, replaced the jointly federal- and state-funded Medicaid program in Tennessee. TennCare's mission was twofold: to cut costs and to expand health care coverage. Twelve statewide managed care organizations (MCOs)…

The year 1996 marked Tennessee's bicentennial. In honor of the occasion, the general assembly created Tennessee 200, Inc., and charged it with developing bicentennial programs. Local and traveling programs were developed to bring the celebration to all areas of the…