Franklin Was a 14th State for Four Years. Congress Said No by Two Votes

Seven. That was the number of states that voted in May 1785 to begin admitting a fourteenth state to the United States, out of thirteen. Under the Articles of Confederation the new state needed nine. It never got them, and so the State of Franklin, which had a governor, a legislature, two capitals, a militia, courts and a tax code, lasted four and a half years and then quietly stopped existing, leaving behind a road, a replica of its capitol and a great many bar-exam questions.

Over the mountains and out of reach

The place was the valleys of the Watauga, Holston and Nolichucky rivers, on the far side of the Appalachians from the rest of North Carolina, which owned them on paper. Settlers had been there since the late 1760s, mostly without permission, on land that treaties said belonged to the Cherokee. During the Revolution they had marched over the mountains to beat a British force at Kings Mountain in 1780 under a militia colonel named John Sevier, whom everyone called Nolichucky Jack.

Raleigh, two hundred miles east over bad roads, had never found them worth the cost of governing. In April 1784 North Carolina's legislature, broke and tired of frontier wars, offered the whole western territory to Congress to pay off the state's share of the national debt. Congress had two years to accept. The settlers, reading this as abandonment, decided not to wait and see who ended up owning them.

A state with no lawyers

On 23 August 1784 delegates from the western counties met at Jonesborough, a courthouse town of a few dozen buildings, and voted to form a separate state. In December they met again to write a constitution. The draft they considered, pushed by a Presbyterian minister named Samuel Houston (no relation to the Texan), barred lawyers, doctors and preachers from sitting in the legislature, on the grounds that they talked too much. The voters turned it down, which tells you something about the voters, and the state adopted a plainer copy of North Carolina's constitution instead.

Sevier did not want to be governor, and said so. He took the job anyway when the convention elected him in March 1785. The new state set up courts, raised a militia, started negotiating its own treaties with the Cherokee, and gave every citizen two years off from paying taxes, which was popular.

North Carolina, meanwhile, had changed its mind. In October 1784 the legislature in Raleigh repealed the offer to Congress, reclaimed the western counties and, in a gesture that reads today as rather pointed, made John Sevier a brigadier general of the North Carolina militia for the district he was now governing as a foreign country.

Frankland, Franklin and a polite refusal

The state's first name was Frankland, meaning land of the free, and the petition to Congress went in under that name. When it fell short, somebody had the idea of renaming the place after the most famous American alive and asking him for help. In June 1785 Frankland became Franklin, and Sevier wrote to Benjamin Franklin, then in Paris finishing his term as minister to France.

Franklin's answer, when it finally came in 1787, was a masterpiece of saying nothing kindly. He was flattered, he said, but he knew too little of the circumstances to form an opinion, and he advised them to settle their differences with North Carolina.

Paid in deer skins

Franklin had no mint and almost no coin. Its legislature made barter legal tender for taxes and salaries, and the accepted goods included corn, tobacco, cotton, apple brandy and animal skins. Sevier is said to have drawn his salary in deer hides. Every account since the 1850s repeats a full schedule of official pay in pelts, down to the clerk of the house in raccoon skins and a justice's fee of one muskrat skin for signing a warrant, and I have never managed to trace that list to anything older than a nineteenth-century historian who did not say where he found it. The barter law is real; the muskrat may be a joke that got footnoted.

By 1786 there were two sets of courts, two sheriffs and two tax collectors operating in the same counties, one for Franklin and one for North Carolina. North Carolina offered to forgive all back taxes if the counties came home. Franklin's legislature said no. In 1787 a North Carolina colonel named John Tipton, who had been a Franklin man and fallen out with Sevier, reopened the North Carolina court at Jonesborough, a few hundred yards from the Franklin one.

Ten minutes in the snow

In February 1788 a North Carolina sheriff seized property from Sevier's farm to cover unpaid state taxes, including several of his enslaved workers, and took them to Tipton's house for safekeeping. Sevier gathered something over a hundred militiamen and on 27 February surrounded the house. Tipton had a few dozen men inside. For two days there was a standoff, and then on the morning of the 29th, in a snowstorm, a North Carolina relief column of about the same size as Sevier's came up the road. The shooting lasted around ten minutes. Three men were killed, several wounded or captured, and Sevier pulled back to Jonesborough. It is sometimes called the Battle of Franklin, which flatters it.

That was the end, in effect. Franklin's legislature had already stopped meeting. Sevier, who was now in talks with the Spanish governor of Louisiana about putting his state under the protection of Spain, was arrested for treason by Tipton in October 1788 and taken east across the mountains to Morganton for trial. Friends got him out of the courthouse before anything happened; the stories about how disagree. In February 1789 Sevier and the last Franklin holdouts swore allegiance to North Carolina, which, with striking good sense, pardoned him and sent him to Congress the next year.

What is left

North Carolina ratified the federal Constitution in November 1789 and handed the western counties to the new federal government in 1790 as the Southwest Territory. In 1796 the territory became the state of Tennessee, the sixteenth, not the fourteenth, and its first governor was John Sevier. He served six terms, and died in 1815 in what is now Alabama, surveying a boundary with the Creek nation. Tipton's farm is a Tennessee state historic site.

Jonesborough is Tennessee's oldest town and sells itself as the home of the National Storytelling Festival. Greeneville, the second capital, has a reconstruction of the log building where the legislature met. Johnson City has a State of Franklin Road running past East Tennessee State University. And every February and July, in the performance test that most American states use as part of the bar exam, candidates are handed a case set in the fictional State of Franklin, in the fictional Fifteenth Circuit, and asked to write a memo about its laws. The examiners chose the name because no such state exists. It did, for four and a half years, and the clerk of its house may or may not have been paid in raccoons.