Samuel Cole Williams • History of the Lost State of Franklin

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History of the Lost State of Franklin
by
Samuel Cole Williams

The Author and the Work

Samuel Cole Williams (1864‑1947) was a distinguished jurist and scholar who rose to become a Justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court, and the first dean of the Lamar School of Law, Emory University. Although born in West Tennessee, he moved to Johnson City when he was in his late twenties, and is best known in connection with East Tennessee — the area of the State of Franklin. He founded the East Tennessee Historical Society and wrote many articles and books on Tennessee; the book transcribed here is his best-known work. A fuller and sympathetic biographical sketch of Judge Williams is given in The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture.

[image ALT: A photograph of an oil painting, a portrait of a middle-aged man in an 18c military uniform. He is John Sevier, Governor of the short-lived State of Franklin and first Governor of the State of Tennessee.]

Frontispiece:
John Sevier
From portrait in Lobby of Hotel John Sevier,
Johnson City, Tennessee.

If you might be beguiled into believing this to be a true contemporaneous portrait of Sevier, consider yourself disappointed: everything about this painting points to its being a sentimental production of the twentieth century.

Preface to the First Edition; Introduction [to the Revised Edition]		p. ix
1	The Control of the West	1
2	Genesis of the Franklin Movement	5
3	The Great Bend of the Tennessee	13
4	The First Cession Act — 1784	19
5	Movement for a Separate Government in the West — 1784	27
6	Repeal of the Cession Act	35
7	The First Constitutional Convention — 1784	39
8	The Franklin Movement in Virginia	45
9	The First General Assembly — 1785	56
10	Manifesto and Counter Manifesto — 1785	67
11	Franklin's Cause Before Congress — 1785	82
12	Second Session of the Assembly — 1785	90
13	The Second Constitutional Convention — 1785	94
14	Clear Sailing — 1786	99
15	Storm Clouds Gather — 1786	106
16	Franklin Sends a Commission to Carolina — 1786	114
17	Spain and Closure of the Mississippi — 1786	123
18	Factors that Worked for Continued Separation — 1787	126
19	Efforts to Compromise Futile — 1787	140
20	A High Debate — 1787	149
21	Defeat of Compromise and Rsuing Violence	161
22	A Cry for Help from the Cumberland — 1787	170
23	Franklin and Georgia — 1787	177
24	Franklin and the West in the Constitutional Convention — 1787	183
25	Close of the Crucial Year — 1787	189
26	The Sevier-Tipton Skirmish — 1788	198
27	Occurrences on the Border — 1788	210
28	The Lesser Franklin	218
29	The Arrest of Sevier — 1788	231
30	The Spanish Intrigue — 1788	235
31	North Carolina Convention and Assembly — 1788	245
32	The Second Cession and Afterwards	249
33	Modes of Life	255
34	Travelers in Franklin	259
35	Religion in Franklin	270
36	The People of Franklin	275
37	Survival of the Conception and Spirit	282
The Franklinites		289
The Antis		330
Appendix A: The Constitution of the State of Franklin		339
Appendix B: Petition of the Inhabitants of the Western Country		348
Appendix C: Proceedings		356
Bibliography		359

Technical Details

Edition Used, Copyright

The edition transcribed here is the Revised Edition published by The Press of the Pioneers, New York, 1933. The original edition was copyright 1924 but the copyright was not renewed in 1951 or 1952; the revised edition was copyright 1933 but the copyright was not renewed in 1960 or 1961. The text of the revised edition is therefore now in the public domain. (Details here on the copyright law involved.)

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if successful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.) My transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The edition I followed was pretty well proofread. My corrections are marked, when important (or unavoidable because inside a link), with a bullet like this;º and when trivial, with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the bullet or the underscored words to read what was actually printed. Similarly, bullets before measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., •10 miles.

A number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked.

Any overlooked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a copy of the printed book in front of you.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57 these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

The icon I use to indicate this subsite is a map of the eight counties of today's State of Tennessee which together correspond more or less to Franklin; the original map, much larger and fully readable, is from Wikimedia.

Images with borders lead to more information.
The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)

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A page or image on this site is in the public domain ONLY if its URL has a total of one *asterisk. If the URL has two **asterisks, the item is copyright someone else, and used by permission or fair use. If the URL has none the item is © Bill Thayer.