In the 16th century, three Spanish exploration expeditions passed through what is now Tennessee. The Hernando de Soto expedition entered the Tennessee Valley via the Nolichucky River in June 1540, rested for several weeks at the village of Chiaha (near modern Douglas Dam), and proceeded southward to the Coosa chiefdom in northern Georgia.^[9] In 1559, the expedition of Tristan de Luna, which was resting at Coosa, briefly entered the Chattanooga area to help the Coosa chief subdue a rebellious tribe known as the Napochies.^[10] In 1567, the Juan Pardo expedition entered the Tennessee Valley via the French Broad River, rested for several days at Chiaha, and followed a rugged trail to the upper Little Tennessee River before being forced to turn back.^[11]

Chronicles of the Spanish explorers, while scant, provide valuable information regarding the Tennessee Valley's 16th-century inhabitants. Most of the valley, including Chiaha, was part of the Coosa chiefdom's vast sphere of influence. Inhabitants spoke a dialect of the Muskogean language, and lived in complex agrarian communities centered around fortified villages.^[12] Cherokee-speaking people lived in the remote reaches of the Appalachian Mountains, and may have been at war with the Muskogean inhabitants in the valley. The village of Tali, visited by De Soto in 1540, is believed to be the Mississippian-period village excavated at the Toqua site in the 1970s.^[13] The villages of Chalahume and Satapo, visited by Pardo in 1567, were likely predecessors (and namesakes for) the later Cherokee villages of Chilhowee and Citico, which were located near modern Chilhowee Dam.^[14]

European exploration and settlement

Possibly because of European diseases devastating the Native tribes, which would have left a population vacuum, and also from expanding European settlement in the north, the Cherokee moved south from the area now called Virginia. As European colonists spread into the area, the native populations were forcibly displaced to the south and west, including the Muscogee, Yuchi, Chickasaw and Choctaw peoples. From 1838 to 1839, the US government forced Cherokees to leave the eastern United States. Nearly 17,000 Cherokees were forced to march from Eastern Tennessee to Indian Territory west of Arkansas. This came to be known as the Trail of Tears, as an estimated 4,000 Cherokees died along the way.^[15] In the Cherokee language, the event is called Nunna daul Isunyi—"the Trail Where We Cried".

Government under North Carolina

In the days before statehood, Tennesseans struggled to gain a political voice and suffered for lack of the protection afforded by organized government. Six counties—Washington, Sullivan and Greene in East Tennessee and Davidson, Sumner, and Tennessee in Middle Tennessee—had been formed as western counties of North Carolina between 1777 and 1788.

After the American Revolution, however, North Carolina did not want the trouble and expense of maintaining such distant settlements, embroiled as they were with hostile tribesmen and needing roads, forts and open waterways. Nor could the far-flung settlers look to the national government, for under the weak, loosely constituted Articles of Confederation, it was a government in name only.

State of Franklin

The westerners' two main demands—protection from the Indians and the right to navigate the Mississippi River—went mainly unheeded during the 1780s. North Carolina’s insensitivity led frustrated East Tennesseans in 1784 to form the breakaway State of Franklin.

John Sevier was named governor, and the fledgling state began operating as an independent, though unrecognized, government. At the same time, leaders of the Cumberland settlements made overtures for an alliance with Spain, which controlled the lower Mississippi River and was held responsible for inciting the Indian raids. In drawing up the Watauga and Cumberland Compacts, early Tennesseans had already exercised some of the rights of self-government and were prepared to take political matters into their own hands.

Such stirrings of independence caught the attention of North Carolina, which quietly began to reassert control over its western counties. These policies and internal divisions among East Tennesseans doomed the short-lived State of Franklin, which passed out of existence in 1788.

Eight Counties of State of Franklin; circa 1786.   Today is northeast Tennessee.

Southwest Territory

When North Carolina finally ratified the Constitution of the United States in 1789, it also ceded its western lands, the Tennessee country, to the Federal government. North Carolina had used these lands as a means of rewarding its Revolutionary soldiers. In the Cession Act of 1789, it reserved the right to satisfy further land claims in Tennessee.

Congress designated the area as the "Territory of the United States, South of the River Ohio", more commonly known as the Southwest Territory. The territory was divided into three districts—two for East Tennessee and one for the Mero District on the Cumberland—each with its own courts, militia and officeholders.

President George Washington appointed William Blount as territorial governor. He was a prominent North Carolina politician with extensive holdings in western lands.

Admission to the Union

In 1795, a territorial census revealed a sufficient population for statehood. A referendum showed a three-to-one majority in favor of joining the Union. Governor Blount called for a constitutional convention to meet in Knoxville, where delegates from all the counties drew up a model state constitution and democratic bill of rights.

The voters chose Sevier as governor. The newly elected legislature voted for Blount and William Cocke as Senators, and Andrew Jackson as Representative.

Tennessee leaders thereby converted the territory into a new state, with organized government and constitution, before applying to Congress for admission. Since the Southwest Territory was the first Federal territory to present itself for admission to the Union, there was some uncertainty about how to proceed, and Congress was divided on the issue.

Nonetheless, in a close vote on June 1, 1796, Congress approved the admission of Tennessee as the sixteenth state of the Union. They drew its borders by extending the northern and southern borders of North Carolina, with a few deviations, to the Mississippi River, Tennessee's western boundary.

65. The First Settlers in Tennessee Largely Scotch-Irish.—The Holston and Watauga were not colonized, as the Cumberland afterward was, by strong companies moving in concert, under organized leaders. Their first settlers came in single families or small parties, with no concert of action, and without any recognized leader. The Virginia frontiers had now reached the headwaters of the Holston River, and straggling immigrants followed that stream beyond the borders of the province, and formed the first settlements in Tennessee ; supposing their settlements to be still in Virginia, some families even crossed the Holston. In 1769 or 1770, William Been, originally from Pittsylvania County, Virginia, penetrated as far south as the Watauga, and erected a log cabin at the mouth of Boone's Creek, where his son Russell, the first native white Tennessean, was soon afterwards born. His settlement was greatly augmented by the arrival of small bands of Regulators, whom the tyranny of the royal governor had driven out of North Carolina. But whether they came from Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, or Pennsylvania, the first settlers of Tennessee were, in the main, the same type of people— an aggressive, daring, and hardy race of men, raised up in the faith of the Presbyterian Covenanter, and usually comprehended under the general designation of Scotch-Irish, that people forming their largest element.

66. Origin of the Scotch-Irish.—Ireland, in the time of Henry VIII, was so strongly Catholic that all the power of that monarch was not sufficient to establish the Episcopacy on the island. His effort to do so resulted in a long, bitter, and bloody war, which was not finally terminated until near the close of Elizabeth's reign. When it did close, the province of Ulster, containing nearly a million acres, was found to have been almost depopulated b)T its devastations. James IV, of Scotland, succeeded to the throne, and in him the two kingdoms were united. He conceived the idea of colonizing Ulster with Protestant subjects. These he chose chiefly from his old subjects, the Scotch Covenanters, though mainly Englishmen settled in the southern part of the province.

67. Character of the Scotch-Irish.—These Scotch emigrants were stern, strict, liberty-loving Presbyterians, who believed in the Westminster Catechism and taught it to their children. They resented the pretensions of the Crown to be the head of the church, and believed with John Knox that the King derived his authority from the people, who might lawfully resist, and even depose him, when his tyranny made it necessary. They believed in education, and followed a system under which every preacher became also a teacher, a circumstance that had a marked influence on the educational history of Tennessee. The colony prospered wonderfully. But these Scotch-Irish as steadfastly resisted the Episcopacy as did the Irish Catholics, and were destined to suffer a like persecution. As early as 1636 some of them set sail on board the "Eagle Wing" for America, but unfavorable weather sent her back to port in a disabled condition, and the experiment was not again repeated for half a century.

68. The Great Ulster Exodus.—Their persecutions continued, with the exception of a short respite under the reign of William of Orange. Finally, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, the great exodus began. It reached its flood-tide near the middle of the eighteenth century. For some time prior to 1750, about twelve thousand Irish emigrants had annually lauded in America. In the two years following the Antrim evictions in 1771, as many as one hundred vessels sailed from the north ports of Ireland, carrying from twenty-five to thirty thousand Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, mostly to America. Their experience in Ireland had peculiarly fitted them to lead the vanguard of western civilization. Their hereditary love of liberty, both civil and religious, was strengthened by a long course of persecution and oppression. Moreover, the constant presence of danger from their turbulent neighbors had made them alert, active, resolute, and self-confident.

69. The Scotch-Irish Settle on the Frontiers.—The Scotch-Irish reached the interior of America in two streams. The earliest and largest poured into Pennsylvania through the ports of New Castle and Philadelphia, whence it moved southward through Maryland and Virginia, up the Potomac and Shenandoah valleys, and along the Blue Ridge into North and South Carolina. There it met the counter stream flowing in from the south, mostly through the port of Charleston, but in smaller numbers through those of Wilmington and Savannah. All along the frontiers, from Pittsburg to Savannah, they interposed themselves as a conscious barrier between the sea-board settlements and their Indian foes.

70. The Scotch-Irish in America.—The Scotch-Irish were everywhere a masterful people. In Pennsylvania they were not regarded with favor. In 1725 the president of the province described them as bold, though rude and indigent strangers, who frequently sat down on any vacant land without asking questions. He expressed the fear that, if they continued to come, they would make themselves proprietors of the province. They were always jealous of their liberties, and ready to resist oppression with blood. In North Carolina they have made two counties famous — Mecklenburg for the first Declaration of Independence, and Orange for the battle of the Alamance.

1772 - A group of settlers form their own government called the Watauga Association. They draw up one of the first written constitutions in North America.
1775 - The Transylvania Company buys a large piece of land from the Cherokees. Daniel Boone, working for the company, blazes a trail from Virginia across the mountain at Cumberland Gap to open the land to settlement. His trail is called the Wilderness Road and becomes the main route to the new settlements.
1779 - Jonesborough is the first chartered town. 2 groups led by James Robertson and John Donelson settle around the Big Salt Lick on the Cumberland River. They build Fort Nashborough and draw up an agreement called the Cumberland Compact- - it establishes representative government and creates a court system.
1780 -

• Samuel Doak, a Presbyterian minister, starts the first school in Tennessee.
• "Over- mountain men" gather at Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga River on September 25th at Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga River on September 25th to march over the Great Smokey Mountains. Led by John Sevier, they help to defeat the British as the Battle of King's Mountain on October 7th. The victory proves to be a major turning point in the war. Scots- Irish Covenanters settle in the Tennessee Valley, naming their town Greeneville for Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene.

1784 - 3 counties in East Tennessee form the State of Franklin, which secedes from North Carolina for 4 years. Greeneville is the capital and John Sevier is their governor.
1789 - North Carolina gives the Tennessee region to the US It is made into a new territory, The Territory of the United States South of the River Ohio. William Blount is its first and only governor.
1791 - George Roulstone establishes the first Tennessee newspaper, the Knoxville Gazette.
1794 - Blount College is founded in Knoxville on September 10th, the first American nondenominational institution of higher learning.
1795 - Martin Academy in Washington changes its name to Washington College, the first college to be named after George Washington.
1796 - Tennessee adopts a constitution on February 6th in preparation for statehood- - Andrew Jackson helps to draw it up. Tennessee becomes a state on June 1st, the 16th state. John Sevier is elected the first governor. The total population of Tennessee is 77,000.

19th Century

1800 - Congress establishes a post rout along the Natchez Trace, an old trail between Nashville and Natchez, Mississippi.
1807 - Kingston is the capital for one day, September 21st, while the state legislature discusses a treaty with the Cherokee Indians.
1809 - 35- year- old national hero Meriwether Lewis dies of gunshot wounds at Grinder's Stand, a small inn on the Natchez Trace. Maybe a suicide and maybe not, questions abound and are never satisfactorily answered as to how the brilliant but moody explorer died.
1812 - The worst earthquake in US history occurs on February 7th in northwestern Tennessee. A vast land area drops several feet and tidal waves are created on the Mississippi River. The river flows backward into the depression, creating 13,000- acre Reelfoot Lake. Andrew Jackson is a hero of the War of 1812.