第37章 Chapter VIII. Tennessee(1)

Indian law, tradition, and even superstition had shaped the conditions which the pioneers faced when they crossed the mountains. This savage inheritance had decreed that Kentucky should be a dark and bloody ground, fostering no life but that of four-footed beasts, its fertile sod never to stir with the green push of the corn. And so the white men who went into Kentucky to build and to plant went as warriors go, and for every cabin they erected they battled as warriors to hold a fort. In the first years they planted little corn and reaped less, for it may be said that their rifles were never out of their hands. We have seen how stations were built and abandoned until but two stood.

Untiring vigilance and ceaseless warfare were the price paid by the first Kentuckians ere they turned the Indian's place of desolation and death into a land productive and a living habitation.

Herein lies the difference, slight apparently, yet significant, between the first Kentucky and the first Tennessee* colonies.

Within the memory of the Indians only one tribe had ever attempted to make their home in Kentucky--a tribe of the fighting Shawanoes--and they had been terribly chastised for their temerity. But Tennessee was the home of the Cherokees, and at Chickasaw Bluffs (Memphis) began the southward trail to the principal towns of the Chickasaws. By the red man's fiat, then, human life might abide in Tennessee, though not in Kentucky, and it followed that in seasons of peace the frontiersmen might settle in Tennessee. So it was that as early as 1757, before the great Cherokee war, a company of Virginians under Andrew Lewis had, on an invitation from the Indians, erected Fort Loudon near Great Telliko, the Cherokees' principal town, and that, after the treaty of peace in 1761, Waddell and his rangers of North Carolina had erected a fort on the Holston.

* Tennessee. The name, Ten-as-se, appears on Adair's map as one of the old Cherokee towns. Apparently neither the meaning nor the reason why the colonists called both state and river by this name has been handed down to us.

Though Fort Loudon had fallen tragically during the war, and though Waddell's fort had been abandoned, neither was without influence in the colonization of Tennessee, for some of the men who built these forts drifted back a year or two later and setup the first cabins on the Holston. These earliest settlements, thin and scattered, did not survive; but in 1768 the same settlers or others of their kind--discharged militiamen from Back Country regiments--once more made homes on the Holston. They were joined by a few families from near the present Raleigh, North Carolina, who had despaired of seeing justice done to the tenants on the mismanaged estates of Lord Granville. About the same time there was erected the first cabin on the Watauga River, as is generally believed, by a man of the name of William Bean (or Been), hunter and frontier soldier from Pittsylvania County, Virginia. This man, who had hunted on the Watauga with Daniel Boone in 1760, chose as the site of his dwelling the place of the old hunting camp near the mouth of Boone's Creek. He soon began to have neighbors.

Meanwhile the Regulation Movement stirred the Back Country of both the Carolinas. In 1768, the year in which William Bean built his cabin on the bank of the Watauga, five hundred armed Regulators in North Carolina, aroused by irregularities in the conduct of public office, gathered to assert their displeasure, but dispersed peaceably on receipt of word from Governor Tryon that he had ordered the prosecution of any officer found guilty of extortion. Edmund Fanning, the most hated of Lord Granville's agents, though convicted, escaped punishment. Enraged at this miscarriage of justice, the Regulators began a system of terrorization by taking possession of the court, presided over by Richard Henderson. The judge himself was obliged to slip out by a back way to avoid personal injury. The Regulators burned his house and stable. They meted out mob treatment likewise to William Hooper, later one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Two elements, with antithetical aims, had been at work in the Regulation; and the unfortunate failure of justice in the case of Fanning had given the corrupt element its opportunity to seize control. In the petitions addressed to Governor Tryon by the leaders of the movement in its earlier stages the aims of liberty-loving thinkers are traceable. It is worthy of note that they included in their demands articles which are now constitutional. They desired that "suffrage be given by ticket and ballot"; that the mode of taxation be altered, and each person be taxed in proportion to the profits arising from his estate; that judges and clerks be given salaries instead of perquisites and fees. They likewise petitioned for repeal of the act prohibiting dissenting ministers from celebrating the rites of matrimony. The establishment of these reforms, the petitioners of the Regulation concluded, would "conciliate" their minds to "every just measure of government, and would make the laws what the Constitution ever designed they should be, their protection and not their bane." Herein clearly enough we can discern the thought and the phraseology of the Ulster Presbyterians.

But a change took place in both leaders and methods. During the Regulators' career of violence they were under the sway of an agitator named Hermon Husband. This demagogue was reported to have been expelled from the Quaker Society for cause; it is on record that he was expelled from the North Carolina Assembly because a vicious anonymous letter was traced to him. He deserted his dupes just before the shots cracked at Alamance Creek and fled from the colony. He was afterwards apprehended in Pennsylvania for complicity in the Whisky Insurrection.