America's first secession: The weird, short-lived state of Franklin
On December 14, 1784, 43 men met in the frontier town of Jonesboro, North Carolina, to make a momentous decision. They were tired of being “taxed to support the Government, while they were deprived of all the Blessings of it,” they wrote to their ruler. No protection, no representation, just exploitation. “Our lives, liberties and property can be more secure and our happiness much better propagated by our Separation,” the majority concluded. They declared themselves independent – of North Carolina.
Everyone knows about America’s biggest secession, the Civil War. Almost no one knows about the first: Franklin. But this weird, short-lived political conflict holds lessons for us today – and is a ripping good yarn.
Expanding westward, no matter who's there
White colonists began trickling to the area by the Watauga, Nolichucky and Holston rivers near present-day Johnson City in the 1760s. Twenty years later, the end of the Revolutionary War extended North Carolina’s western border all the way to the Mississippi River -- in theory; Native American tribes didn’t agree. Settlers descended like flies on meat.
The lure? “Cheap and abundant land,” historian Samuel Cole Williams wrote. He quoted a North Carolina land speculator: “Every person … wished to own a part of the Bent of Tennessee.” Yet just one year later, in 1784, North Carolina ceded everything it held past the Appalachians to the new federal government so both could pay war debts.
The white settlers, to use a technical phrase, freaked the frak out. They held a meeting. Already the North Carolina assembly was already practically inaccessible over the near-impassable mountains; moreover, it had not set up courts or militia commanders over the mountains, so frontier justice ruled, Franklin descendant J.G.M. Ramsey wrote. Now support would grow even more distant and tenuous. The Cherokee Indians that North Carolina had bribed were pushing back. Would the Continental Congress protect them and their land claims, or sell their wealth out from under them?
Alarmed by the meeting, and fearing the federal government would not adequately compensate the state for its gift of land, North Carolina’s legislature retracted the cession in late October. They installed courts, representatives and militia leaders in the region, as the westerners had wanted. It didn’t matter. They voted to secede. After considering the name “Frankland,” they settled on paying homage to the printer from Philadelphia.
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The State of Franklin sets up shop
In the early spring of 1785 the new Franklin State Assembly made its first laws – most important, to confirm existing property claims. It was the frontier: They met in a crude cabin with sunlight filtering between the logs, author Richard Kreitner wrote. They banned lawyers from public office and allowed officials to be paid in pelts, a much surer item of value, out there, than coin. They sent a man to Congress to petition for admission to the Union and chose Revolutionary War hero John Sevier as governor. (Salary: 1,000 deer pelts per year, historian Kevin Barksdale wrote.)
North Carolina Gov. Alexander Martin condemned the secession in a manifesto, rebutting their complaints point by point. The declaration set a dangerous precedent, he warned: “Far less causes have deluged States and Kingdoms with blood.” Immediately, some settlers vowed loyalty to the mother state, including Col. John Tipton. “I think myself in duty bound to obey your Excellency’s Commands in all points required, both from the Zeal I bear the old State and the respect I bear toward your Excellency,” he wrote back. The lines of the micro civil war were set: the Franklinites versus the Tiptonites.
Sevier and Tipton had some things in common: extensive landholdings, first wives who died in childbirth, double-digits of children and the desire to get Native Americans out of the region. Personality-wise, they were nothing alike. Sevier was a star -- “handsome and graceful,” Williams wrote. “A charm of manner made him irresistible with soldiers or civilians.” Many of his supporters had fought under him and nicknamed him “Nolichucky Jack.” Tipton, on the other hand, was a Virginia newcomer. Though he had political acumen, apparently no one would have begged him for an autograph: He was “strong-willed and of a jealous and unrelenting disposition,” Williams wrote.
The Franklin government moved to consolidate its authority and its landholdings. After negotiating a treaty at the point of a gun with the Cherokee, it opened a land office and simply began selling Cherokee lands out from under them. Chief Old Tassel sent an anxious message to the North Carolina governor. “You have often promised me in talks that you sent me that you would do me Justice and that all the disorderly people should be moved off our Lands, but the longer we wait to see it done the farther it seems off,” he said. “Your people have built houses in sight of our Towns.”
Soon local politics devolved into slapstick. North Carolina and Franklin had competing courts, militias and elected officials. In 1786 “taxes were imposed by both governments, and paid to neither,” Haywood wrote. On the other hand, engaged couples got married twice, once under each authority, just in case. Sometimes the sheriffs went back and forth and confiscated each other’s papers, on one occasion hiding them in a cave, Haywood wrote.
A long, slow endgame
The Franklin statehood effort “was a long shot,” Barksdale said. “The really remarkable fact is how close they came.” At the Continental Congress, seven of the nine required states approved Franklin’s admission to the Union. But by the end of 1786, it became clear that Franklin was doomed.
The North Carolina Assembly stood firm, promised Franklinites that they could return to their old loyalties scot-free and began hiring some of them (including Tipton) to plum public jobs. Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry and other Revolutionary heroes condemned the effort, as did Virginia’s governor, who feared his own westerners would secede. Even the state’s honoree Benjamin told Sevier to “amicably settle your Difference with North Carolina.” And the new proposed federal constitution reacted to the crisis by stating that no state could secede unless its parent state agreed.
As Franklin lost ground, its partisans grew more desperate. And it wasn’t just Three Stooges behavior anymore. Franklin’s assembly passed a law punishing anyone who served as a North Carolina agent, “under which Act they proceed with the greatest Vigor, beating, imprisoning & seizing the property of men in arms,” a North Carolina general wrote the governor. “The Matter is truly alarming; and it is beyond a doubt with me that Hostilities will in a short time Commence, and without the interference of Government without delay an effusion of Blood must take place.”
So much did they care about their independence – and their prosperity -- that these fighters of the American Revolution corresponded with the Spanish ambassador about making Franklin a vassal of the Spanish crown. At the time, Spain controlled the mouth of the Mississippi and blocked United States river traffic – and that was the easiest route for Franklin magnates to get their goods to international markets. Sevier sent his son to meet twice with Louisiana Gov. Esteban Miró before Franklin fell apart, Barksdale said.
In February 1788, the kindling caught. After unsuccessfully searching to arrest Sevier, Tipton ordered the sheriff to seize some of Sevier’s livestock and slaves for unpaid taxes. Furious, Sevier marched a battery of armed men over snow-covered fields to Tipton’s house on Sinking Creek. He sent a flag over and demanded that Tipton surrender. Though the North Carolina official had only about a dozen people in the house to Sevier’s 150, he refused. (J.G.M. Ramsey writes, thrillingly, that Tipton declared, “Fire and be damned!” but alas, no one has found any proof of that.)
For a night, a day and another night Sevier besieged the house as snow began to fall. Tipton’s friends snuck out for reinforcements and several people coming to and fro were shot. At daybreak, almost 200 North Carolina troops arrived and attacked. Ten minutes later, it was all over, humiliating the war hero. The Tiptonites “forced the Governor to retreat without his boots,” Barksdale wrote.
The magniloquently named Battle of Franklin ended the breakaway state government. Only three people died, according to the Tipton-Haynes State Historic Site: No one wanted to kill their neighbors.
Still, Sevier remained at large, wanted for high treason. He spent the next months fighting Indians in the mountains with his supporters – who, in June, killed Cherokee leaders Old Tassel and Old Abraham after they had raised the white flag of truce.
It looked like Sevier might just ride free forever. Until one October night. David Deaderick, a North Carolina justice of the peace and storekeeper, was hanging out in his shed in Jonesboro when a boy told him that Sevier was at the front door. The storekeeper came out, whistling, to find Sevier on horseback with 10 or 12 men.
“We want no whistling, we want Whiskey or Rum,” the future first governor of Tennessee said.
Deaderick said that “as to whistling he hoped he might do as he pleased, but whiskey or Rum he had none,” according to a deposition. Soon Sevier was hurling abuse at Jonesboro and its people, and “called the deponent a son of B—ch.” Deaderick replied that Sevier “was a d—d son of a B—ch, and stepped close to Sevier, who immediately drew out his pistol, or pistols. O, says the deponent, if you are for that I have pistols too.”
The fight and threats spilled out into the street, with both men waving their guns. Sevier accidentally shot a bystander and rode off. Deaderick and his friend Tipton rounded up a search party. At daybreak they found Sevier hiding at the widow Brown’s “in his undress,” Hayward writes, and arrested him at last. They put him in irons and sent him 80 miles over the rough mountains to be jailed in Morganton. His friends posted bail, and though he was not supposed to leave the county, he went back home.
And that was that. Sevier failed upwards: The westerners voted him state senator and North Carolina pardoned everyone. In 1790, the General Assembly re-ceded the territory to the federal government. In 1796, Sevier became the first governor of the new state of Tennessee. Outside of Tennessee, he may be best known for lending his name to Dolly Parton’s hometown.
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The aftermath of Franklin
What to make of Franklin today? It is a miniature, mountain-bound example of the ways we use, misuse, disguise and twist American ideals to justify political acts, Barksdale and Kreitner said.
Both sides claimed an identical moral high ground: the noble principles of the American Revolution. Franklinites stuck with that message even when negotiating to join the Spanish Empire. It made Kreitner think of January 6: “You have people who are claiming to be nationalists attacking the seat of national government,” he said.
Afterwards, east Tennesseans embraced Franklin as a tale of the revolutionary American spirit, of a self-made, rough-and-ready people claiming their turf against an uncaring coastal elite. (Sound familiar?) Upon discovering Franklin, Barksdale thought it was going to be “a very romantic, noble sort of story,” he said. “The reality has a lot more to do with political control and control of land.” All of them wanted to get rich, including Tipton.
“The high ideals expressed in history books don’t represent” the factors that actually drive historical actors, Barksdale said, and “that’s power and profit.”
If you needed any additional relevance, as everyone knows who’s seen the gif where Bugs Bunny saws off Florida, we keep talking about secession: California, Texas, western Oregon counties trying to join Idaho.
Law professor Frank Buckley, author of the book American Secession, argued that secession can be good. Think of the former Czechoslovakia’s “velvet divorce,” he said. “It is democratic to let people split up their country.” It may seem impossible to imagine, but “once the ball gets rolling, you never know what will happen.”
To Barksdale, Franklin serves as a warning. People assume that after the American Revolution, the commitment to the country, the patriotism, “were just there.” But they weren’t. The country came under threat of breaking apart from minute one.
The story of Franklin shows “how fragile the American republic really is,” Barksdale said.
Danielle Dreilinger is a North Carolina storytelling reporter and author of the book The Secret History of Home Economics. She has a photo of herself posing with the Dolly statue in Sevierville. Contact her at 919-236-3141 or ddreilinger@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: America's first secession: Franklin, formerly from North Carolina
