Settlement Begins: Tennessee and Kentucky–Virginia Takes Over Kentucky

This module first  describes the initial, pre-1780 settlement of Tennessee and Kentucky, detailing the major actors and events. As such it outlines the settlement of Watauga, or eastern Tennessee, and then tells some of the tale associated with the Transylvania Land Company which conducted the early settlement of Boonesborough Kentucky, The events occurred in the aftermath of the victory of the British in the French-Indian War, and continue midway through the American Revolution. During this time the British Proclamation Line was legally in effect, and the rights of either North Carolina and Virginia to these western territories was in some flux  Events took a decided turn after 1775 when the reality that a War of Independence had commenced–and the frontier western lands fell into a limbo of sorts between the Articles of Confederation and the British Crown–the reality is no one could effectively exercise site control and migration of the bold into troubled waters occurred, in somewhat muted numbers.

The second topic of the module was Virginia’s almost immediate assertion of its claim to Kentucky, and support by the new Articles of Confederation. North Carolina, in my opinion, with a fragile, fragmented, and ineffective state government as existed among the thirteen colonies will be considered in the following module. Unlike North Carolina Virginia imposed Virginian law and governance on the Kentucky territory, called eventually Kentucky County. As such the Virginia structures and Virginia elites were privileged and eventually would be duly incorporated in the new state created in 1792. While as it turns out, Tennessee did adopt much of the Virginia structures of governance, the county specifically, it did have to work within the confines of the North Carolina state legislature, which was less interested in imposing its governance on its western counties, than in support a massive private land rush called at the time as the “Land Grab”. That this soon erupted into the formation of an independent state-nation of Franklin which lingered on for nearly four years. The contrast in how Virginia and North Carolina handled the more than a decade period before statehood, did create opportunities for Kentucky and Tennessee to evolve along different lines–which they did. Thus in the second part of this module we concentrate on how Kentucky evolved.

The Initial Settlement: Watauga Association and Transylvania Land Company

As we discover in the last module, both Kentucky and Tennessee were best accessed through the Watauga area of eastern Tennessee on the border of Kentucky, Virginia and North Carolina . The initial settlement of Watauga began late ‘in the decade preceding the Revolution, [and] North Carolina [technically] supplied most of the first European settlers of Kentucky, but at the same time North Carolina was itself being deluged by emigrants from Pennsylvania, Virginia, Scotland and Germany, and [North Carolina’s] population shot up from around 88,000 to somewhere between 175,000 and 185,000 … Inland North Carolina … was in effect a colony of Scottish Highlanders” [1]  In essence, a phenomena we label today as “chain migration” was occurring. Swarms of households were moving en masse from one location to another, setting up residence, and in due course, many would move on to another location. Most of these migrants were probably part of the Scots-Irish migration, but as discussed in the last module, even Virginians were wandering down into western North Carolina as were Pennsylvanian and Marylanders. In this first phase, a wandering migration free-for-all was in process. Eventually, the larger numbers of Scots-Irish will take over, but not in these early years.

Watauga’s earliest settlers, therefore, consisted of a very diverse mixture of ethnic/religious political cultures, state origins. But if only because of disposable wealth and reasonable access western “Virginians” (resident in Virginia not necessarily born in Virginia) were a disproportionate share of Watauga’s early settlers. Interestingly, one of Watauga’s earliest settlers, the Pennsylvania born and raised former Quaker, Daniel Boone, identified more than any single place with Virginia, and Virginia’s Thomas Paine “Give me liberty or give me death” fame, soon to be governor was deeply into acquiring Watauga-adjacent land. George Washington as we discovered in our opening chapter of this book, working through his agent Thomas Freeman had acquired land in Kentucky [2].

The most popular path into Watauga, through Virginia’s Clinch Rivers and headed south into eastern Tennessee or western North Carolina.  When Lexington first developed it drew lots of its settlers from, of all places, Pittsburgh–they floated down the Ohio. “Getting there” early did matter; it gave the “first settlers” an advantage of securing the best land for use and development, and to begin to amass land they could sell to others. The first commercial enterprises also got a head start. That one was a member of the original group of settlers was in itself an element for eventual elite status. Elites were open, and the solidification of elite status was a work in progress throughout this chapter.

There were elites at any point in time, but their composition was in considerable flux–and that meant, I believe, that charisma, expertise, and willingness to assert oneself mattered greatly–but past social/economic status and access to prominent folk didn’t hurt either. Since as discussed in the last module the struggle with Native Americans was brutal and constant, the skills and expertise associated with both Indian fighting and land management (surveying and scouting for the best land open for settlement) were critical skills. Success in agriculture certainly was key, but that took awhile to prove itself, and was land and crop/stock dependent.

The centrality of the Cherokee Tribe to Watauga’s stability, if not its existence, played a major role in recruitment of Watauga elites. Hard-fighting charismatic frontiersmen like Scots-Irish James Robertson, Pennsylvania Quaker Daniel Boone and Huguenot John Sevier, share military leadership with Virginians like Issac Shelby, John Donelson, and George Rogers Clark. Below these generals were  subordinate military commanders with equally diverse backgrounds.

In this chapter, the reader is seeing how the initial policy system is literally created from “nothing”. We are discussing the “birth” of Kentucky and Tennessee first policy system. Each birth, each drive to statehood, will be in its own way different.  Differences are incorporated into that state’s culture, governance institutions, demographic composition, and the impact of geography and location on its economic bases. As we shall see the “blend” of these dynamic factors, over time, greatly explain how and why each state is different from each other–no matter how much is shared their policy systems are bent on birth to their distinctive directions. Thus the reader should appreciate how and why states became “different”, and stayed different through history.

Watauga’s Birth: Watauga Association/Washington County North Carolina

To help the reader ground himself, Watauga is today Eastern Kentucky. Knoxville is the most known and largest city, and others will identify with Tennessee-Virginia’s Tri-Cities. They are edge to what some refer to as the West Virginia Appalachians with whom they will share considerable history. None of these, of course, existed at this time. Watauga’s northern limits include Virginia’s-West Virginia’s Bluefield micropolitan SMSA. Chattanooga lies on their southern edge–but that area in this period is Cherokee, and would be so until the late 1830’s Trail of Tears. Chattanooga was not incorporated as a very small city until 1839. The area has given birth to many celebrities but our favorite for this period is Davy Crockett–who was not born in Tennessee, no matter what Walt Disney said. He was born in the state/nation of Franklin. The reader ought be sensitive to the geographic reality that Watauga is on the other side of a major Appalachian ridge. There are trails, no roads, and no wagons. It is actually easier for a Virginian to enter Watauga than a North Carolinian in these years.

The first “real” settlement in what would become Tennessee, near present day Elizabethton along the Watauga River, was by settlers born in Virginia (the Sevier family) and North Carolinian Scots-Irish (led by James Robertson)  in 1769. They were followed by a succession of micro-groups from a variety of different locations and backgrounds so that by 1771 a number of micro settlements populated the Watauga Valley area, the principal ones being Sevier’s and Robertson’s around Sycamore Shoals–today’s Elizabethton. By 1772, Richard Henderson, the principal partner of his newly incorporated Transylvania Company, arrived along with his long-time employee Daniel Boone–and together they enlisted in their partnership James Robertson. Boone BTW had been Henderson’s purchase agent and land “scout” since 1769.

To establish some sort of legal standing and physical security from the resident Native American tribe, the settlers from these individual settlements joined together (1772) to form the Watauga Association. Watauga Association “citizens” almost immediately approved a semi-governmental compact (not unlike in function that of the Mayflower Compact) which adopted and applied necessary and relevant Virginia law to the area–although Association members probably did not considered themselves as either Virginians or North Carolinians per se. The semi-government they set up, compete with elected officials, was a homesteader’s democracy, with enactments meant to provide order, security (they created their own “army”, and rudimentary land and judicial system). They also empowered Robertson to negotiate a land lease from the Indians, which Robertson and Daniel Boone more or less successfully accomplished.

This worked well enough until Lord Dunsmore’s Virginian-Indian war erupted in 1774. The war, Virginia/West Virginia based, pushed Native Americans out of routes into Watauga–Kentucky. After that war relations elements from the  Cherokee Tribe led by Dragging Canoe began chronic and economically devastating raids/attacks that lasted until 1795 and are known as “the Cherokee-American War”.  As America drifted into the American Revolution (1775-6), British colonial administrators supported Dragging Canoe and the fledgling and fragile Watauga Association was soon hard-pressed to do much more than protect themselves and find a way to raise crops and livestock to make it through the winter. Although Watauga will “enjoy” sustained migration inflows during this torturous period, this is as rough a spot as exists on the then-frontier.

The area was then annexed by Revolutionary War North Carolina State government in 1776-7. That meant the Watauga Association  area erupted into a larger war with the Cherokee, requiring a militia army recruited from Virginia and North Carolina be sent. It also meant that North Carolina assumed for the first time a formal role in administering the Watauga area. While the military expedition was in process, the state formally incorporated the area as NC’s Washington County. With some degree of security, Washington County grew over the 1770’s and 1780’s, and became the State of Tennessee’s largest population base (about 65,000 out of 77,000) when it became a state in 1795-6. North Carolina’s annexation went uncontested by Virginia, and by de fault it was North Carolina’s. Substantial elements of North Carolina’s eastern plantation elites, however, were not happy with the annexation.

Kentucky Settlement: the Transylvania Company

Once jump-started by Watauga’s more of less spontaneous migration, the potential for western settlement gathered some momentum. Among those it attracted was a Virginia-born gentry, who had as a child moved to North Carolina with his family, Richard Henderson. Henderson initially was attracted to law and in due course was appointed by William Tyron, North Carolina’s Royal Governor as Associate Justice on the Colony’s Superior County (1768). His timing was terrible, and he found himself not only in the midst, but a central player in the most significant populist rebellion previous to the Revolution: the North Carolina Regulatory War. Nearly captured by the Regulators, his farther-in-law was, his house and estate were burned. Following the Battle of Alamance (1781), in which the Regulators were crushed, Henderson became one of the presiding judges who tried those caught. Six were executed. Henderson retired from the bench in 1773.

That experience was enough for Henderson and he decided on a career change, to follow his childhood dream of going west. For advice he turned to an friend he had met while a lawyer. Earlier, when he was on the Superior Court, he had traveled with this friend into the interior on an adventure. From that he funded his friend to conduct further exploration into the wilderness and make a report. His friend, the reader is no doubt suspecting it is Daniel Boone, went on a two year expedition (1769-71) and reported back.

Upon his retirement from the bench, Henderson immediately formed a North Carolina royal-chartered company with six investors, the Louisa Company, whose intent was to negotiate a land purchase from the Indians and subsequent settlement of the acquired acreage. That was the company that tried the earlier misadventure in establishing a settlement in Kentucky. Boone was his agent/employee. With the coming of the Revolution, Henderson was a Patriot, Henderson, reincorporated under Patriot North Carolina law, a state-chartered company, the Transylvania Company, whose purposes were identical to the Louisa. In any event, the initial venture of the Transylvania Company was to open up Kentucky–it was Boone’s idea of paradise and Henderson concurred–nearly impossible to reach in 1775.

Without going into complicated detail, the principals behind the leadership of the Watauga Association at this time (Daniel Boone, James Robertson and John Sevier) and the Transylvania Company  Richard Henderson) overlapped, and as time wore on were hard to separate. Kentucky, seen only by a relatively few, these lands were deemed especially suitable, fertile and hunting (furs) paradises, attractive for settlement beyond Watauga. Through Boone, Henderson knew the best way northwest into Kentucky was through the now-famous Cumberland Gap. In 1773 Boone led an unsuccessful expedition to establish a settlement in Kentucky–and then departed to pursue various adventures associated with the Lord Dunsmore’s War for the next two years. Still he spent Much of this time in Kentucky/Virginia borderlands (Clinch River) and the Great Appalachian Valley.

When he returned to Henderson and Watauga in 1775, Boone apparently urged Henderson that the time was ripe to purchase land from the Cherokee. To this end Henderson and Boone ventured into the interior, and in March 1775 they successfully negotiated the purchase of about half of Kentucky and some Middle Tennessee (Treaty of Sycamore Shoals). Upon his return Henderson purchased the land necessary to construct a road through the Cumberland Gap (the Path Grant Deed). Boone was then retained to blaze a path through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky, a path now known as the Wilderness Road [3]. After completing his trail-blazing Wilderness Road infrastructure, Boone founded a stockade-settlements, Boonesborough. Henderson actively promoted the the assets of the Transylvania Company. “The country [of the Transylvania Company] might invite a prince from his palace, merely for the pleasure of contemplating its beauty and excellence, but only add the rapturous idea of property, and what allurements can the world offer for the loss of so glorious a prospect” [3a].

Boonesborough, was not the first such settlement (also called fort or station in Kentucky/Tennessee). Nearby Harrodsburg, founded by James Harrod, was the first(1774). Alongside Boonesborough and Harrodsburg addition stations were quickly settled: Logan’s Station, Limestone, and Lexington. Boone moved his family to Boonesborough in September 1775. Henderson in May 1775 under the auspices of the Transylvania Company  engineered the approval of the “Transylvania Compact”, and Association similar to the Watauga Compact. What we are seeing in this multiplicity of local ” governance compacts” are a curious combination of direct democracy with corporatism. They were intended to be a kind of corporate charter and the hope was over time they would found a city.

In May 1775, Henderson summoned a legislature to meet under a gigantic elm at Boonesborough, which drew up a bill of rights, and a democratic form of government. Henderson and his associates conceived of the Transylvania colony as a [sort of] [proprietary colony like Maryland. They hopped to make lucrative profits from the sale of land, and from charging an annual quitrent {a land tax] of 2 shillings for each one hundred acres [3b].

 

By this point the Revolutionary War had started in Massachusetts, and the Second Continental Congress was about to begin. Despite incessant British and Indian attacks, Kentucky had indeed been “opened up” by Boone, Henderson and the Transylvania Company. But no sooner than Kentucky had been opened up, the “deck of governance cards” was shuffled dramatically.

Henderson intended to ask the new Revolutionary War Articles of Confederation to approve his Treaty and Company Purchase, and to allow his (two-state) Transylvania Purchase to enter the Articles Union  as the fourteenth state. Henderson was well aware Virginia had been aggressive in pursuit of western lands. A Virginian colonial governor sent George Washington on a surveying expedition into what is today western Pennsylvania–i.e. downtown Pittsburgh as early as 1754. Virginia, in contravention of the British Proclamation Line, formally insisted that it possessed sovereignty over an area it called Fincastle County (essentially Kentucky) in 1772.

Henderson nevertheless countered Virginia’s interest by directly approaching the Articles of Confederation Congress for a decision. Why? The Articles essentially deferred to Virginia on jurisdictional sovereignty. Virginia rejected it outright, and instead successfully asserted to the Articles Congress  its legal dominance over an ill-defined Kentucky, leaving whatever remained to be potentially annexed by North Carolina. Essentially, Virginia’s action (and North Carolina’s formal annexation of its western lands in 1776) ended the life of the Transylvania Company, and rendered the Sycamore Shoals Treaty invalid. Henderson had to begin almost from scratch.

All this played out in a matter of months in late-1775-early 1776.

I think it unlikely Henderson thought he could bypass Virginia–the state with the most representatives in the Articles Congress. He more likely mistakenly thought he had worked out a deal with its governor. Before leaving to negotiate Sycamore Shoals for the Transylvania Purchase, Henderson approached his principal land speculation rival, Virginia’s Patrick Henry.  At that meeting Henderson was apparently told by Henry that the latter was consumed by his own political ambitions (to be governor), and although interested and sympathetic to Henderson’s plan for land purchase, was unable to join in the venture. The larger issue of how other Virginia policy-makers would react, is not known to have been broached [5].  Shortly after the meeting, Henry became governor. My guess, it is only a guess, is that Henderson equated a lack of Henry’s willingness to join in the deal privately extended to Henry’s definition of state interests. It didn’t As a real estate speculator Henry was OK with Henderson’s proposed deal; as governor he was not.

Henry was Virginia’s first Revolutionary War period Governor–the administration that replaced Virginia’s longstanding colonial government. He served five one-year terms. So successful and popular was he with the Virginia voter, an early populist who loved his inflammatory rhetoric, that the gap between the public-populist Henry and the private-land speculator Henry was huge. An ideological product of the evangelical Great Awakening, Henry was a firm states-righter, and though a former member of the Articles Congress, Henry quickly stepped down to focus on Virginia. A stern and rabid anti-British revolutionist, he was profoundly anti-Federalist from the start. He and Washington kept each other at arms-length, and personal relations were minimal. When the time came, Henry opposed the 1789 Early Republic constitution. In any case, Henry was a Tidewater Virginia plantation planter, and like most Tidewater plantation owners, was repelled by slavery, yet remained a slaveholder his entire life. Henderson came from that same ilk, but had adjusted his views to pragmatically fit frontier realities. Henry, in turn, was a large-scale, pioneering western land speculator, owning substantial properties in today’s West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. He clearly had a dog in Henderson’s fight. So did the multitude of station-forts led by James Harrod.

In 1776, Patrick Henry, likely Thomas Jefferson, and definitely James Harrod and George Rogers Clark combined forces and in short order the Virginia Legislature repudiated Henderson’s Transylvania Purchase over lands asserted as Virginian–today’s Kentucky. The Virginia Legislature then expanded Fincastle County and renamed it Kentucky County. The Articles Congress deferred and so Virginia successfully imposed Virginia law/jurisdiction on Kentucky County. In short order the Virginia Assembly install the forms and structures of its local governance as detailed in Jefferson’s new Virginia state constitution, and formally set up its own county government over Kentucky. Accordingly, Virginia, in 1779, formally incorporated Boonesborough as a Virginia town, and that municipal enterprise was off and running. (But not for very long. The town by the 1820’s declined so significantly that today it is a public sector “ghost town”, i.e. a state historic park near Lexington, KY).

Encouraged by the British, Native American tribes attacked the frontier settlements, commencing a desperate period in which sheer survival was the hoped-for end goal. These attacks wreaked horror, on both sides, for the next two decades. That Native Americans mostly sided with the British during the Revolutionary War, and then allied with them in the period previous to the War of 1812, is an important factor, right or wrong, on how the settlers and politicians of what was then considered the American southwest viewed Native Americans and tribal land ownership rights. When Britain was finally removed from the frontier in 1816, southwestern European Americans often viewed the lands acquired by the Treaty of Paris as sovereignty attained by victory over their opponents, and that involved the surrender of any land rights the Native Americans held, or thought they held. In this atmosphere my use of “conquest” in describing Indian Removal takes on new meaning.

Over the next several decades an estimated 200,000 settlers made their way into Kentucky over that path-which obviously was improved by Henderson and others over time. While some rudimentary surveying, a core element in the Northwest Ordinance , did occur, mostly in efforts to figure out Kentucky’s and Tennessee’s boundaries, pre-sale land and lot platting in Kentucky and Tennessee was minimal to non-existent. This is important. People are going to spend a lot of money and risk their lives for very ill-defined semi-legal title to land in Indian-controlled areas. That simple omission of surveying and platting meant the first two decades of statehood would be consumed with this issue. In effect since land ownership is the first economic development strategy of a new western state, eclipsing even developmental transportation infrastructure, this is important.

Post-Boonesborough Daniel  Boone

Kentucky’s tenuous, often brutal, certainly volatile first years are best captured by by continuing our story of Daniel Boone, after his founding of Boonesborough. wanted new settlements may life hell–driving all but a few hundred settlers out of that state.

From 1775 on migrants, encouraged through advertising, promotion, and sheer tavern-talk (i.e. word of mouth) and by Daniel Boone’s 1784 biography that opportunities abounded flowed into the area. Individuals and householders poured into this advertising their expectations, hopes, and private desperation into a dream for a Promised Land as promised by Boone.  Until 1778 Boone defended his settlement at considerable personal cost. In 1776 ,Boone’s daughter kidnapped by Indians, and Boone dramatically went to her successful rescue. Exciting stories followed, one after another through 1778 when in a battle-skirmish (Licking River) Boone was captured. During his captivity, after running the gauntlet several times, he escaped and was able to warn Boonesborough of a forthcoming Indian attack. By that time his wife and family had returned to Watauga–only to be brought back the next year.Somehow in all this, just barely, Boonesborough held on. Boone had little trouble in adjusting to rule by Virginia–and he made his personal commitment to that state.

In 1789 Boone left Boonesborough and moved onto other Virginia/Kentucky settlements along the Ohio River–serving three terms (1781-4) from three different counties in the Virginia General Assembly. Never missing out of the action, Boone was captured during his 1781 term by the notorious British cavalryman Banastre Tarleton (watch Mel Gibson’s the Patriot), after which he was paroled. Boone then had $20,000 in settler land payments stolen from him–a debt he repaid over the next twenty years. Boone also fought in several engagements, and jointed George Rogers Clark in his Ohio expedition, losing both a son and brother in these wars with Native Americans.

After his book was published in 1784 Boone became a celebrity. He set up a tavern in Limestone KY along the Ohio River, served yet one more term in the Virginia General Assembly. Sadly his fortunes reversed; the wealth acquired through land speculation was lost as the ventures failed, the lawsuits from which forced him to sell his tavern, and return to hunting and fur trading to pay the bills. After a decade of financial troubles, legal scandals, personal bankruptcy, and even warrants for his arrest, Boone and his family left Kentucky for Missouri (St Charles County) governed by Spain in 1799,  Living on land given him by the Spanish, he soon lost that when the Louisiana Purchase nullified all previous Spanish land grants–it was not until 1814 that Congress overturned that decision, allowing him to repay his past debts. He died in 1820 in Missouri seven years after his wife Rachael. His and Rachael’s remains were later transported to the Kentucky State Capital in Frankfurt.

Captured in Boone’s wild, and sad, final decades is the personal turbulence that lends a better sense of the time period, and the early days of Kentucky. That Boone was a land speculator through most of his frontier life should not be lost to the reader. It is only one more tale that supports the central importance of land as the primary ED strategy of a new western state.

 

Footnotes

[1] Bernard Bailyn, the Peopling of British North America (University of Wisconsin, 1985), p. 17.

[2] “September 1784”  https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/01-04-02-0001-0001

[3] Thomas Perkins Abernethy, From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee, p. 24.

[3a] Archibald Henderson, “A Pre-Revolutionary Revolt in the Old Southwest“, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 27, p. 198ff

[3b] Clement Eaton, A History of the Old South: the Emergence of a Reluctant Nation (3rd Ed) (Macmillan Publishing Co, 1975), p. 119.

[4] Thomas Perkins Abernethy,  From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee: a Study in Frontier Democracy (University of Alabama Press, 1932, 1967), See Chapter 1,” Watauga”.

[5] Thomas Perkins Abernethy, From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee, p. 24.