William Blount and the Southwest Territory
Near Knoxville, Tennessee
The house on Hill Avenue known as Blount Mansion was built in seventeen ninety-two and was, at the time, the first frame house west of the Appalachian Mountains. Its builder and owner, William Blount, was the governor of the Southwest Territory, which was the federal government's name for what would become Tennessee. He was also the superintendent of Indian affairs for the southern district of the United States, which meant that he was simultaneously the civil government of the territory and the official charged with managing relations with the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek nations whose lands the territory largely occupied.
Blount had come from North Carolina with the political instincts of a land speculator, which he was. He acquired hundreds of thousands of acres in the territory through his official position and his private dealings. He named the capital Knoxville after Secretary of War Henry Knox, partly in calculated deference to the federal official who controlled his territory's administrative future.
In seventeen ninety-six, Tennessee was admitted to the Union as the sixteenth state, and Blount became one of its first two United States senators. One year later, in seventeen ninety-seven, he was expelled from the Senate, the first senator ever to be expelled, for having participated in a conspiracy to hand Spanish Florida and Louisiana to the British. The scheme involved inciting Indigenous nations to attack Spanish territory in coordination with a British naval force. It did not succeed.
He returned to Knoxville, served in the Tennessee state senate, and died in eighteen hundred at the age of fifty. He is buried in the Old Gray Cemetery. Blount Mansion is a National Historic Landmark and one of the few structures in Knoxville that dates to the territorial period.
The house he built still stands. The land his tenure made possible for American settlement, much of it Cherokee land transferred through the Treaty of Holston and subsequent agreements, became the state that now exists.
