The State of Franklin: Four Years as a Separate Nation in the Appalachians

In the summer of seventeen eighty-four, the settlers west of the Blue Ridge found themselves in an unusual situation: North Carolina had simply given their territory away. The state legislature, strapped for cash after the Revolution, ceded all of its western lands to the new federal government. The settlers who lived there, in the river valleys of what is now northeastern Tennessee, and in the high mountain coves of western North Carolina, were left without a government, without courts, without any legal authority at all.

They decided to form their own state.

On August twenty-third, seventeen eighty-four, delegates from the westernmost counties met at Jonesborough and declared the State of Franklin independent from North Carolina. They chose John Sevier, a Revolutionary War hero and veteran Indian fighter, as their governor. They wrote a constitution, established courts, set taxes payable in deerskins and beaver pelts and whiskey when hard currency was not available, and began conducting the business of government.

North Carolina responded by refusing to recognize the secession and setting up its own parallel government in the same territory. For several years the region had two governors, two sets of courts, and two competing systems of law operating simultaneously. North Carolina officials eventually arrested Sevier in seventeen eighty-eight, and his supporters freed him from the local jail.

Franklin survived as an independent entity for four years, long enough to sign its own treaties with Cherokee leaders, long enough to establish four new counties, long enough to become a peculiar fact of American history. It fell apart as key supporters defected back to North Carolina, fighting broke out in seventeen eighty-eight, and Sevier and the last holdouts swore allegiance to North Carolina in early seventeen eighty-nine.

North Carolina ceded the territory to the new federal government in seventeen eighty-nine, and in seventeen ninety-six those same mountain counties became part of the new state of Tennessee. The western North Carolina portion remained North Carolina. The State of Franklin is largely forgotten today, but the ridge country it occupied, the high Appalachians where Tennessee, North Carolina, and what is now Virginia come together, still carries the particular independence of spirit that made people think secession was a reasonable idea in the first place.