The first free state project: the brief, tumultuous history of Franklin.

• Author: Kuhl, Jackson

Never heard of the state of Franklin? Its existence was brief, from 1784 to about 1788, though as with such still-existing post-Revolution states as Maine and Vermont, self-rule had been the norm there for years beforehand. In 1769 Virginians began settling the Watauga River in what is now the northeastern tip of Tennessee. Three years tater the Articles of the Watauga Association bound these settlements together for mutual defense and negotiation with the surrounding Cherokee. When a survey revealed Watauga Association lands to be within North Carolina's claim west of the Appalachian Mountains, the settlers petitioned to join the state, pledging to assist in the Revolutionary effort.

Republicanism was all the rage in the dusty days after the war. Citizens who weren't gentry demanded the titles Mr. and Mrs., servants refused to address their employers as superiors, and independence, both as a person and as a people, was seen as the highest virtue. The inhabitants of North Carolina's western Greene, Sullivan, and Washington counties (the last having been created expressly out of Watauga Association lands) craved self-government.

Settlers refused to pay taxes when North Carolina failed to build roads or appoint judges and militia to protect them from hostile Indians. Their land was taxed at the same rate as that east of the Blue Ridge, they complained, even though it was valued only a quarter as much. Yet it was impossible for the bankrupt state to build infrastructure without tax money, which couldn't be collected in the western counties where shooting tax collectors was seen as simple Christian charity. Meanwhile, the settlers were building on [ands promised to the Cherokee and Choctaw in their treaties with North Carolina. These incursions sparked Indian attacks.

North Carolina had other money problems. Article 8 of the pre-constitutional Articles of Confederation specified that each of the 13 states would pick up the war tab by paying a tax proportional to an assessment on its land--essentially, a real estate tax on the states. The bad news for North Carolinians was that not only were they broke, they also had a lot of land (their claim stretched to the Mississippi River) and hence a higher tax bill. In response, the North Carolina delegates to Philadelphia wanted to cede the state's western counties to Congress, thereby reducing their assessment.

The North Carolina legislature was wary--it knew and resented the discontent of the state's...