State of Franklin
The State of Franklin (also the Free Republic of Franklin or the State of Frankland)[a] was an unrecognized proposed state located in present-day East Tennessee, in the United States. Franklin was created in 1784 from part of the territory west of the Appalachian Mountains that had been offered by North Carolina as a cession to Congress to help pay off debts related to the American War for Independence. It was founded with the intent of becoming the 14th state of the new United States.
This article is about the historical proposed US state. For other uses, see Franklin (disambiguation).The State of Franklin (Frankland)
Jonesborough (August 1784 – December 1785)
Greeneville (December 1785 – 1788)
Republic / Organized, extralegal territory
President/Governor Col. John Sevier
Congress of Greeneville
Senate
House of Representatives
post American Revolution
April 1784
August 23, 1784
May 16, 1785
December 24, 1785
March–September 1788 1788
1790
Counties
East Tennessee, United States
Franklin's first capital was Jonesborough. After the summer of 1785, the government of Franklin (which was by then based in Greeneville), ruled as a "parallel government" running alongside (but not harmoniously with) a re-established North Carolina bureaucracy. Franklin was never admitted into the union. The extra-legal state existed for only about four and a half years, ostensibly as a republic, after which North Carolina reassumed full control of the area.
The creation of Franklin is novel, in that it resulted from both a cession (an offering from North Carolina to Congress) and a secession (seceding from North Carolina, when its offer to Congress was not acted upon and the original cession was rescinded).
Concept[edit]
The concept of a new western state came from Arthur Campbell of Washington County, Virginia, and John Sevier.[1] They believed the Overmountain towns should be admitted to the United States as a separate state. They differed, however, on the details of such a state, although John Sevier (in a letter written in 1782) acknowledged Campbell's leadership on the issue. Campbell's proposed state would have included southwestern Virginia, eastern Tennessee, and parts of Kentucky, Georgia, and Alabama. Sevier favored a more limited state, that being the eastern section of the old Washington District, which was then part of North Carolina.
Although many of the frontiersmen supported the idea, Campbell's calls for the creation of an independent state carved out of parts of Virginia territory caused Virginia governor and Kentucky land speculator Patrick Henry—who opposed a loss of territory for the state—to pass a law that forbade anyone to attempt to create a new state from Virginia by the cession of state territory.[1] After Virginia Gov. Henry stopped Campbell, Sevier and his followers renamed their proposed state Franklin and sought support for their cause from Benjamin Franklin. The Frankland movement had little success on the Kentucky frontier, as settlers there wanted their own state (which they achieved in 1792).
Cession and rescission[edit]
Franklin's support[edit]
The United States Congress was heavily in debt at the close of the American War for Independence. In April 1784, the state of North Carolina voted "to give Congress the 29,000,000 acres (45,000 sq mi; 120,000 km2)[b] lying between the Allegheny Mountains" (as the entire Appalachian range was then called) "and the Mississippi River" to help offset its war debts.[2] This area was a large part of what had been the Washington District (usually referred to simply as the Western Counties).[3] These western counties had originally been acquired by lease from the Overhill Cherokee, out of which the Watauga Republic had arisen.
The North Carolina cession to the federal government had a stipulation that Congress would have to accept responsibility for the area within two years, which, for various reasons, it was reluctant to do. The cession effectively left the western settlements of North Carolina alone in dealing with the Cherokee of the area, many of whom had not yet made peace with the new nation. These developments were not welcomed by the frontiersmen, who had pushed even further westward, gaining a foothold on the western Cumberland River at Fort Nashborough (now Nashville), or the Overmountain Men, many of whom had settled in the area during the days of the old Watauga Republic.[4] Inhabitants of the region feared that the cash-starved federal Congress might even be desperate enough to sell the frontier territory to a competing foreign power (such as France or Spain).[2]
North Carolina's reluctance[edit]
A few months later, a newly elected North Carolina Legislature re-evaluated the situation. Realizing the land could not at that time be used for its intended purpose of paying the debts of Congress and weighing the perceived economic loss of potential real estate opportunities, it rescinded the offer of cession and reasserted its claim to the remote western district. The North Carolina lawmakers ordered judges to hold court in the western counties and arranged to enroll a brigade of soldiers for defense, appointing John Sevier to form it.[2]
Subsequent status[edit]
By early 1789, the government of the State of Franklin outside of Lesser Franklin had collapsed entirely and the territory was firmly back under the control of North Carolina. Soon thereafter, North Carolina once again ceded the area to the federal government to form the Southwest Territory, the precursor to the State of Tennessee. Sevier was elected in 1790 to the US Congress to represent the territory, and became Tennessee's first governor, in 1796.[9] Col. John Tipton signed the Tennessee Constitution as the representative from Washington County.
Legacy[edit]
The Washington County farm of Col. John Tipton, where the 1788 Battle of Franklin was fought, has been preserved by the State of Tennessee as the Tipton-Haynes State Historic Site in southeastern Johnson City, Tennessee.
Samuel Tipton, a son of Col. John Tipton, donated land for a town to be located along the east side of the Doe River near its confluence with the Watauga River in what was then known as Wayne County, and the town was named in his honor as Tiptonville (not to be confused with present-day Tiptonville, in West Tennessee). The losers of the Battle of Franklin (1788) later regained political power and renamed Wayne County as Carter County (after the former State of Franklin Senate Speaker Landon Carter), and also renamed Tiptonville as Elizabethton (after the wife of Landon Carter, Elizabeth Carter) when Tennessee was first admitted to the Union in 1796 and John Sevier became the first governor of Tennessee.
The Franklin area also played a role in the Southern Unionist East Tennessee Convention. Throughout the first half of the 19th century, East Tennessee was frequently at odds with Tennessee's two other grand divisions, Middle Tennessee and West Tennessee. Many East Tennesseans felt the state legislature showed persistent favoritism toward the other two divisions, especially over funding for internal improvements. In the early 1840s, several East Tennessee leaders, among them Congressman (and future President) Andrew Johnson, led a movement to form a separate state in East Tennessee known as "Frankland". Though this movement was unsuccessful, the idea that East Tennessee should be a separate state periodically resurfaced over the subsequent two decades.[19]
Many businesses in the State of Franklin use that name to keep the legacy alive, such as the "State of Franklin Bank", based in Johnson City, Tennessee.[20]
One of the main thoroughfares in Johnson City is named "State of Franklin Road" and passes by East Tennessee State University.[21]
In law-school examinations in the U.S., a fictional "State of Franklin" is used as a placeholder name for a generic state, often the one in which the property of Blackacre is located. This way, variations in existing state law do not complicate the theoretical legal issues arising from the property disputes. By convention, Blackacre is located in Acre County, Franklin.
The combined present-day (as of 2015 census) population of the counties that would have made up the State of Franklin is 540,000, which would have made the state have about 40,000 people fewer than Wyoming, the current least-populous state.