State of Tennessee

Tennessee is a constituent State of the United Kingdom of America, running six hundred and eighty kilometres from the Smokies to the Mississippi, bounded by Kentucky and Virginia to the north, North Carolina to the east, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi to the south, and Arkansas and Missouri across the river to the west. Nashville is the capital and the largest city. The population is approximately 6.9 million, and Tennessee returns nine members to the federal House of Commons.

Tennessee is three polities and its constitution says so. East, Middle and West Tennessee are the Grand Divisions, they are named in the instrument, and they are legal entities rather than habits of speech: the polity’s supreme court must contain one judge resident in each and must sit in a city in each, and a series of other bodies are constituted the same way. It is the only polity of the Realm whose internal regions have standing in its own law, and the three white stars on its flag are them.

The article’s argument, however, is not about the divisions. It is about what Tennessee has done with the country around it.

This is the polity that recorded everybody else. The Register’s Mississippi article says the Delta produced the musicians and that Chicago, Memphis and Muscle Shoals recorded them, “because a place with no money has no studios.” Its Arkansas article says of that polity’s musicians that none of them could have made a living from music at home. Both are true, and Memphis is where a great many of them went. Tennessee took the raw material of four polities’ music, put it onto record, sold it to the world, and kept the proceeds, and it did the same thing at Nashville with a different repertoire and a much better contract.

That is the polity in one sentence, and it applies well beyond music. The river that made the valley runs out of Tennessee and back into it. The electricity that lit four polities is generated here. The material for the Realm’s atomic programme was made here, because the power was already here. Tennessee is where the region’s raw things are processed, and the processing is where the money is.

And it does not keep its own. Three Prime Ministers of the Realm have come out of this polity, and all three of them belonged to somewhere else by the end.

History

The nations, and the removal

The country was Cherokee in the east and the south, with Chickasaw territory west of the Tennessee river, and the Shawnee and Yuchi in the middle country. The Cherokee towns of the Overhill, on the Little Tennessee and the Hiwassee, were among the largest and most settled communities anywhere east of the Mississippi.

They were removed, and the polity’s own most famous son set it in motion.

The Cherokee had done everything the Realm had asked. They had adopted a written constitution modelled on the Realm’s own, a syllabary, a newspaper printed in two languages, courts, a legislature and a capital. Their case against removal was argued in the Realm’s courts and, on the law, they won it.

Andrew Jackson was Prime Minister, he had built his career in this polity, he is buried at the Hermitage twenty kilometres from where the Legislature now sits, and his ministry, having obeyed the judgment, obtained the Treaty of New Echota in 1835 from men who had no authority to sign it. The removal was carried out under that treaty after he had left office. Between 1838 and 1839 the Cherokee were taken west under military escort, and something between a fifth and a quarter of them died on the way or in the stockades before it.

The roads out began here, in the eastern hills, and the article states the connection because the polity cannot avoid it: the largest single act of removal in the Realm’s history was made possible by a government led by a man from Tennessee, against a nation whose towns were in Tennessee, and the polity has spent nearly two centuries deciding how much of that belongs to it. The modern answer, arrived at slowly and not universally, is that a good deal of it does.

A small number stayed in the mountains, evading the round-up in country the soldiers would not enter, and their descendants hold land on the North Carolina side of the Smokies.

Ceded, organised, admitted

Tennessee is a State and not a Province, and the reason is procedural rather than a matter of dignity.

The country was the western land claim of the Province of North Carolina, which ceded it to the federation in 1790. It was then organised as a federal Territory, governed under federal law for six years, and admitted by statute in 1796. Its convention chose to join as a State. The Realm has no single rule for its polity types, and each convention chose its own: Kentucky, which separated directly from the Province of Virginia by consent, chose to be a Commonwealth, and Tennessee, which had passed through the Realm’s hands, chose the standard federal form.

The polity’s own historians make rather more of this than outsiders think it deserves, on the ground that North Carolina ceded the country chiefly to be rid of a debt and a frontier, and that Tennessee was consequently the first polity of the Realm to be made by the federation rather than by anybody who wanted it.

The three Grand Divisions

The divisions are older than the polity and were recognised before they were written down.

East Tennessee is the Appalachian country: ridges and valleys, smallholdings, few enslaved people because the ground would not carry the crops that used them, settled largely from Pennsylvania and Virginia down the Great Valley. Middle Tennessee is the Nashville basin, limestone, fertile, settled from Virginia and North Carolina by planters with capital, and the polity’s political centre from the beginning. West Tennessee, between the Tennessee river and the Mississippi, was Chickasaw country until 1818, was settled last, and was cotton and enslaved labour on the Delta model.

Three societies, three economies and three sets of politics, and the constitution of 1834 recognised them formally: the supreme court to have one judge from each and to sit in three cities, and the same principle extended over the following century to a range of boards, commissions and appointments.

No other polity of the Realm has anything like it. Idaho’s three regions are a geographical fact and its flag says so; Tennessee’s are legal persons, and its flag says that.

The vote of 1861

Five polities rose against the Crown and Tennessee, on the plain arithmetic of its own divisions, was not among them.

Middle and West Tennessee were for it. The planters of the basin and the cotton counties of the west had the numbers, the money and the newspapers, and in the ordinary course they would have carried the polity out as Alabama went out.

East Tennessee stopped them, and it stopped them because it was organised.

The eastern counties were not merely unenthusiastic. They were a mobilised political bloc with their own conventions, their own press, their own leadership and a settled position arrived at in advance, and they held about a third of the polity’s population in a bloc that voted almost without dissent. When the ordinance was put, the east carried it against Middle and West Tennessee combined.

And they had a threat, which they stated publicly and which everybody believed. The Greeneville conventions of that spring resolved that if Tennessee left the Union, East Tennessee would leave Tennessee: it would petition Parliament for separation as a distinct polity, on the precedent of every division of a province the Realm had ever allowed, and it had the population, the boundary and the case to make it stick.

That threat is why the vote was not put again. The rebel interest in Middle Tennessee understood that carrying the polity out would cost it a third of the polity permanently, and that the resulting rump would be a cotton republic with no mountains, no river head and no defensible eastern flank. Tennessee stayed in the Union because leaving would have destroyed it, which is a colder reason than Kentucky’s paralysis and a more calculating one than Mississippi’s commercial self-interest, and Tennesseans say so without much discomfort.

The polity was garrisoned, supplied the Realm’s armies heavily from the east and the rebellion’s irregulars from the middle and west, and had a bitter internal war of bushwhacking and reprisal that the formal history mostly omits. It was never reconstructed, having never rebelled, which had the same consequence here as in Kentucky: no imposed government to overthrow, no disenfranchising convention, and a Black electorate that voted continuously from 1870 without ever being formally excluded, in a polity that segregated by statute as thoroughly as any that had rebelled.

The war inside the polity

Tennessee did not rebel and Tennessee was not at peace, and what happened here between 1861 and 1863 is the least written-about part of the polity’s history because there is no clean way to tell it.

The formal position was straightforward. The polity remained in the Union, its government sat, its courts functioned, and it raised regiments for the Realm in large numbers, disproportionately from the east. It was garrisoned heavily, because it lay across the routes into the rebel polities and because the Realm did not entirely trust the middle and the west.

The actual position in the countryside was not straightforward at all. Middle and West Tennessee contained a substantial population that had voted to go out and had lost, and a proportion of it did not accept the result. Irregular companies were raised privately and rode into the eastern counties; the eastern counties raised home guards and rode back. Bridges were burned. Men were taken from their houses at night. The Realm’s provost courts tried some of it and could not reach most of it.

It was neighbours’ work and it was recorded thinly on purpose. The polity’s own nineteenth-century histories are notably vague about the period, and the reason given at the time, in a phrase that recurs in several county histories, was that the people concerned had to go on living beside one another. Modern reconstruction of it depends on federal claims files, church minutes and pension applications rather than on any narrative anyone wrote down.

The consequence for the polity’s politics was long. East Tennessee had been right and had been burned for it, and it drew from that a settled distrust of the middle that has outlasted every issue it was originally about. The Grand Divisions were forty years old in 1861 and they were a good deal harder afterwards.

The mountains, and the fourth clearance

The Great Smoky Mountains were protected in 1934 as a park shared with North Carolina, and the way it was assembled is unlike any of the great western parks.

There was no public land to reserve. Everything in the western Realm’s parks was carved out of a federal estate that already existed; the Smokies were owned, in about six thousand separate parcels, by farming families, church congregations, small landowners and above all by timber companies, which had bought the high forest wholesale after 1900 and were cutting it at a rate that would have finished it within twenty years.

So the park was bought. Two polities appropriated, private subscription raised more, a very large single gift completed it, and the land was acquired parcel by parcel over about a decade.

Between four and five thousand people were bought out and moved off, which is the part the Realm’s own park service now interprets and did not for fifty years. Some were tenants with nothing to sell and received nothing. A number of elderly residents were granted lifetime leases and stayed, the last of them dying in the 1960s. Whole communities in the coves went, their churches were closed, and their cemeteries remain inside the park and are visited by descendants on days set aside for the purpose.

It is the fourth time this polity has been emptied for a national purpose. The Cherokee went in 1838. The valley families went under the water from 1933. The Oak Ridge families went behind the fence in 1942. And the mountain families went out of the coves in the 1930s so that the rest of the Realm could have the most visited park in the Union, which is what it now is.

The polity holds this alongside the fact that it wanted the park, campaigned for it, and paid for a third of it. Both things are true and Tennessee has become better at saying so together.

The valley authority

The largest thing the Realm has ever built in a single place was built here, and it is still running.

The Tennessee river drains an enormous basin across four polities, and until the 1930s it did two things reliably: it flooded, and it was unnavigable in stretches. The valley around it was among the poorest country in the Realm, with soil exhausted by a century of cotton and maize, no electricity outside the towns, and a rate of malaria and hookworm that federal surveys of the period compared to the tropics.

In 1933 Parliament created a public authority to take the whole basin as one problem. It was given the river, and the power to dam it, and it built: a system of dams and locks along the main stem and the tributaries, a navigable channel from the Ohio to the head of the valley, flood control across the basin, and a generating system that within twenty years was the largest publicly owned electrical undertaking in the Realm.

It also did what nobody expected a river authority to do. It ran demonstration farms, replanted several million hectares of eroded hillside, manufactured fertiliser, drained malarial ground, built model towns for its own workers, and electrified the countryside at a rate the private companies had declared impossible and then, when the authority did it, declared unfair.

It remains the Realm’s largest experiment in public ownership, it still generates, and it is a genuine and contested achievement. The contest has two sides and Tennessee argues both. The first is that a region was lifted out of destitution in a generation by a public body doing what no private one would attempt, which is true. The second is the cost.

The cost was paid by the people who lived in the valleys. Something over sixty thousand people were moved off land their families had farmed for a century, and about twenty towns went under water, including graveyards that were disinterred and moved and a considerable number that were not. Compensation was assessed on agricultural value in a region where agricultural values were destitute, and the Realm’s own inquiry of 1971 found the payments inadequate, the appeal machinery inaccessible to the tenants who formed the majority of the displaced, and the record-keeping deliberately thin.

Tennessee holds both propositions at once and its schools now teach them together, which took until about 1990.

Oak Ridge

In 1942 the Realm needed somewhere to make the material for an atomic weapon, and it needed a great deal of electricity to do it.

The valley authority already had the electricity, so the site chosen was a set of ridges and hollows in the eastern hills about forty kilometres from Knoxville, where about a thousand families were given between two weeks and two months to leave and were paid at agricultural rates for land the Realm did not explain the purpose of.

What was built there went from nothing to about seventy-five thousand people in three years and appeared on no map. It had shops, schools, cinemas, a bus system and a newspaper, and it was surrounded by a fence with gates. The overwhelming majority of those who worked there did not know what they were making: the plants were compartmented so completely that women operating the separation machinery were told to keep a dial between two marks and nothing else, and learned what they had been doing from the wireless in August 1945.

It is the other half of the Nevada story, and the Realm’s atomic history accordingly runs through two polities that could hardly be less alike: the material was made in a wet eastern valley with the Realm’s cheapest public power, and it was tested in a desert on ground a treaty had never ceded.

The aftermath here is chemical rather than radiological in the main, and it is large. The site holds the Realm’s most complex remediation problem outside Idaho’s silver valley: mercury lost from a lithium separation process in the 1950s, in quantities the operators did not record and the polity did not learn of until 1983; buried waste in unlined trenches; and a creek that runs through a town.

The workers were not told what they were handling, and a compensation scheme for them was not enacted until 2000, by which time a substantial proportion of the people it was written for were dead. It is administered federally, it pays on a schedule of listed illnesses and listed job categories, and Tennessee’s members have been trying to widen the categories in every Parliament since.

Memphis, and the recording of everybody else

Memphis sits on the bluff above the Mississippi at the point where four polities’ country converges, and from about 1910 it was where the music of all of them arrived.

The Delta came up the highway and the Illinois Central. Arkansas came across the bridge. The hill country of northern Mississippi and western Tennessee came in on foot and by wagon. Beale Street was the market, and what was traded there was labour: musicians came to be heard, hired and paid by the night.

Then somebody put a microphone in it. From the 1950s a handful of small studios in Memphis began recording what walked through the door, and what walked through the door was the accumulated musical invention of one of the poorest regions on the continent. What came out was the blues on record, then rhythm and blues, then rock and roll, then a body of soul music made in a converted cinema by a racially mixed house band in a city that was still segregated in every other respect.

And the terms were the terms of the period. Artists were commonly paid a flat fee for a session, signed away the composition along with the performance, and received royalties calculated on a basis they were not shown. The men who owned the studios became wealthy and the great majority of the musicians did not, and a substantial number of the songs that made the Realm’s postwar popular music are owned today by companies with no connection to anybody who wrote or played them.

The Register states this plainly because it is the polity’s spine. Tennessee did not produce most of that music. It provided the equipment, the contract and the distribution, and it took the margin, and the neighbouring polities’ articles in this corpus say the other half of the same sentence: that their musicians could not have made a living at home.

The reckoning has been partial. Some catalogues have been reassigned by litigation, a number of estates have recovered rights, and Memphis has built museums that are unusually honest about the arrangement. Nashville, which had the better contract from the beginning, has faced less of a reckoning because it needs one less, which is discussed below and is not entirely to its credit either.

Nashville, and the ownership of songs

Nashville built the other music industry and built it on a different asset.

Its business was never principally records. It was publishing: the ownership and licensing of songs, administered from an eighth of a square kilometre of converted houses, with the recording studios attached as a service rather than as the centre. A publisher owns a copyright and a record company owns a master, and over a long enough period the copyright is worth much more, because it earns every time anybody anywhere performs, broadcasts or covers the song.

The consequence is that Nashville kept its money and Memphis did not, and the difference is not a matter of virtue but of which end of the business each city happened to be at.

Around it grew the rest: a live institution broadcasting weekly since 1925, which is the longest continuously running radio programme in the Realm; a session-musician economy of unusual depth; and a body of songwriting craft that is taken more seriously here than anywhere else in the Union, being the thing the whole apparatus is built to own.

Bristol, and the eastern claim

The first commercial recordings of the music that became country were made not at Nashville but at Bristol, in the Tri-Cities on the Virginia line, in 1927, when a talent scout took portable equipment into a hat warehouse for a fortnight and advertised in the local paper for musicians.

What he recorded in those two weeks is generally regarded as the founding document of the form. The eastern hills have been more or less ignored by the industry they started ever since, which is the article’s smallest instance of its largest theme: the raw material came from the mountains and the money went to the basin, a hundred and sixty kilometres west, where the publishing houses were.

Memphis, 1968

In February 1968 the sanitation workers of Memphis went on strike.

The immediate cause was that two of them, sheltering from rain in the back of a compactor truck because they were not permitted to shelter in the buildings on their route, were crushed when the mechanism started. They had no insurance, no compensation and no sick pay, the city had refused for years to recognise their union, and the pay of a full-time man was below the level at which his family qualified for public assistance.

The strike ran for two months. The city refused recognition, obtained injunctions, and used police against marches. The dispute became the largest labour and civil rights confrontation in the Realm’s postwar history, drawing national leadership to the city in support.

And on 4 April 1968 the most prominent of those leaders was shot dead on the balcony of a motel a mile from the picket line.

The article carries both, and the aftermath is the part that has never sat comfortably. The city settled within a fortnight, granting recognition, a grievance procedure and a pay increase, having refused all three for two months and having spent the preceding decade refusing them. Memphis has never been able to argue that the settlement was not bought with a death, and the polity’s own historians do not attempt to.

The three Prime Ministers, and what happened to them

Tennessee has produced three Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom of America, which no other polity of the Realm has done, and all three of them ended up belonging to somewhere else.

Andrew Jackson, the seventh, made his career in the frontier courts of this polity from 1788, was its most consequential figure for forty years, and is buried at the Hermitage. He is also, by the time the Realm assesses him, a national figure whose defining acts, the removal above all, were done from the capital and are argued about everywhere.

Sam Houston, the tenth, was raised at Blount County from about 1806 and left. He went west, became the central figure of another polity entirely, negotiated the Treaty of Austin that brought Texas into the Union, and returned to the Realm’s politics as a Texan. Tennessee raised him and Texas has him.

Al Gore, the thirty-third, sat for Middle Tennessee from 1976 to 2006, was born in the capital because his father was a Tennessee parliamentarian working there, and was Prime Minister during the May Day Bombings. His career was made in this polity and conducted for the Realm.

The pattern is the polity’s own complaint about itself, and it is made in the same terms as the complaint about the music. Tennessee produces the thing, somebody else acquires it, and what the polity is left with is the birthplace and the grave.

Geography

Tennessee is six hundred and eighty kilometres long and about a hundred and ninety wide, and it crosses six distinct countries on the way, which is why the divisions exist.

The Unaka and Smoky mountains on the eastern boundary are the highest in the eastern Realm, hold the greatest diversity of trees and salamanders anywhere in the temperate world, and are shared with North Carolina as the Great Smoky Mountains park, protected in 1934.

West of them the Great Valley of East Tennessee is a corridor of long parallel ridges and fertile valleys running south-west, which carried the settlement, then the railways, then the valley authority’s dams, and which holds Knoxville, Chattanooga and the Tri-Cities.

The Cumberland Plateau is a wall across the middle of the polity, three hundred metres above the country either side, thin-soiled, coal-bearing, and the reason East and Middle Tennessee developed as separate societies.

The Nashville basin beyond it is a limestone bowl, some of the best farmland in the interior, ringed by the Highland Rim.

Then the Western Valley of the Tennessee river, the Gulf coastal plain, and finally the Mississippi bottoms, flat delta country continuous with Arkansas and Mississippi, holding Memphis on the last bluff before the river.

The Tennessee river is the polity’s oddity. It rises in the east, runs south-west out of Tennessee into Alabama, turns, comes back north across the whole width of the polity and leaves again into Kentucky to join the Ohio. A polity named for a river that leaves it, crosses another polity and returns is a fact Tennesseans produce for visitors with some satisfaction.

Recording everybody else

The polity’s economy has been built four times on the same principle, and the principle is that Tennessee is where the region’s raw material gets processed.

The music is the clearest case. Four polities’ worth of invention arrived at Memphis and Nashville, was recorded, published, pressed and distributed from here, and the margin stayed. The Mississippi and Arkansas articles say the same thing from the other end: their musicians could not make a living at home, and had to come to a place with studios.

The electricity is the same shape. The valley authority’s dams are on a river that four polities drain into, its power goes to four polities, its headquarters, its engineering and its employment are here.

So is the atomic work. The material was made at Oak Ridge because the power was already at Oak Ridge, and the power was there because the valley authority had built it.

And so is the modern economy. Memphis is the Realm’s principal air freight hub, which is to say it is where other polities’ parcels are sorted at three in the morning. Nashville holds the largest concentration of hospital companies in the Union, which is to say it owns hospitals in polities it has no other connection to. The motor plants assemble components made elsewhere.

None of this is a complaint and Tennessee does not make it as one. Processing is where the value is, and a polity that positioned itself at the processing end of four different industries has done well out of it: Tennessee is the wealthiest polity of the interior south by a clear margin, its growth has outpaced the Realm’s for thirty years, and its capital is among the fastest-growing cities in the Union.

The complaint, where the polity makes one, is about the terms of the earliest and most famous case. The men who owned the Memphis studios became rich, the musicians who walked in mostly did not, and Tennessee is aware that its signature industry was founded on contracts that would not now be enforceable.

Constitutional system

Tennessee is governed under the Constitution of Tennessee of 1870, its third, deposited under the Polity Instruments Act 1889 in 1890, amended forty-one times, and never replaced.

It is a short instrument and a deliberately restrictive one, written by a convention that had watched a decade of emergency government and wanted a legislature that could do less. It caps the rate of taxation on property, requires a two-thirds vote for a range of ordinary measures, and forbids the polity to lend its credit to any person or corporation, a clause that has been litigated in every decade since and is the reason Tennessee’s public works are financed through authorities.

Its distinguishing feature is the Grand Divisions. East, Middle and West are named in the instrument. The supreme court must have one judge resident in each and no more than one may be from any one division; it must sit at Knoxville, Nashville and Jackson; and the same principle of tripartite composition has been extended by statute to a long list of boards, commissions and appointments. The convention of 1870 did not invent this, having inherited it from 1834, but it wrote it down more firmly.

The Governor

The Crown is represented by a Governor, appointed on the advice of the ministers of the Realm after consultation with the Premier, for five years. The incumbent is Odessa Hollis, formerly the polity’s chief medical officer, appointed in 2025.

The office follows the divisions like everything else here: the unwritten convention is that the Governorship rotates among the three, and the Realm’s ministers have observed it since 1931 without ever acknowledging that they are doing so. A Governor appointed out of turn is the one thing that reliably produces a joint protest from the other two divisions, and it has happened twice, in 1954 and 1988.

The Premier

The head of government is the Premier of Tennessee, holding office on the confidence of the House of Representatives and governing from Nashville. The office has been held since 2023 by Grady Sisk, Conservative and Crown Union, with a majority of twenty-six.

Tennessee’s politics have been conservative for forty years and are becoming less uniform, for the ordinary reason: Nashville and its ring have added something over a million people since 1990, largely from other polities, and they do not vote as Middle Tennessee has historically voted. The result is the pattern the Realm now sees in several polities, a growing metropolitan area and a Legislature apportioned to counties that are not growing, and the friction is described below.

The Legislature

The legislature is the Tennessee Legislature: a House of Representatives of ninety-nine members elected for two years and a Senate of thirty-three elected for four, half retiring every two.

It sits in the oldest working capitol in the Realm, a Greek revival building of 1859 whose architect is buried in one of its walls at his own request, and it meets in a session running from January to about April.

Its characteristic instrument is preemption, and Tennessee uses it as heavily as Indiana: a long series of statutes forbidding municipalities to legislate in named fields, almost every one passed after Nashville or Memphis did something the Legislature disliked. The polity’s cities describe this as government by veto and the Legislature describes it as uniformity, and the exchange is now so routine that both sides use the same words each time.

Counties and local government

Tennessee has ninety-five counties, a number fixed by the constitution of 1870, which forbids the creation of new ones without conditions so restrictive that none has been made since. The instrument also fixed their boundaries against alteration, so the map has been effectively frozen for a hundred and fifty-eight years.

Twenty-two have fewer than fifteen thousand residents and maintain the full apparatus of a courthouse, a sheriff, a trustee, a register, a clerk and a county mayor. The smallest spend a majority of revenue on the offices the constitution obliges them to keep.

The polity’s distinctive local form is the metropolitan government. Nashville and its county merged in 1963, the first such consolidation in the Realm, and it worked well enough that it is still studied; Memphis and Shelby County have attempted it four times and failed four times, most recently in 2010, on a division that was substantially racial and which nobody in the polity describes in any other terms.

The counties follow the divisions in everything. County officials organise regionally, the polity’s association of counties has three sections, and a bill affecting the east is understood not to concern the west unless somebody says otherwise. This is how Tennessee actually governs itself: not through the two parties, which are provincial extensions of national ones, but through three regional blocs that negotiate.

Law and the courts

The Supreme Court of Tennessee has five justices, and its composition is fixed by the constitution rather than by convention: one must be resident in each Grand Division and no more than two may come from any one of them. It sits at Knoxville, Nashville and Jackson, a circuit of six hundred kilometres, and hears cases in each according to where they arose.

No other final court in the Realm is constituted geographically, and the arrangement is defended and attacked in the same terms it has been since 1834. Its defenders say that a polity of three societies needs a court that cannot be captured by one of them, and that the requirement has prevented the Nashville bar from dominating the bench as the Boston bar dominates Massachusetts Bay’s. Its critics say that a five-member court chosen partly by postcode is a court chosen partly by postcode, and that the polity has twice had to appoint a less qualified candidate because the better one lived in the wrong division.

Below it sit a Court of Appeals, a Court of Criminal Appeals, and trial courts including chancery courts, which Tennessee retains as separate equity courts, one of only three polities of the Realm to have kept the division alongside Mississippi and Delaware.

Economy

Tennessee has the largest economy of the interior south and the most diversified, and almost every part of it is a processing industry.

Motor assembly is the largest manufacturing employer. Plants at Smyrna, Spring Hill and Chattanooga, arriving from 1983 onward, assemble vehicles from components made across the region, and the sector employs something over a hundred and thirty thousand across assembly and supply.

Health care as an industry, rather than as a service, is Nashville’s and is unique in the Realm. The city holds the headquarters of the majority of the Union’s investor-owned hospital companies, which between them own or manage hospitals in every polity, and the sector employs about two hundred thousand people here in management, billing, analytics and finance. Tennessee does not have unusually good hospitals. It owns other polities’ hospitals, which is the same relationship it has to their music.

Music and publishing at Nashville is a smaller employer and a larger cultural export, resting on copyright rather than on manufacture, and it has proved far more durable than the recording business at Memphis because a catalogue does not wear out.

Logistics. The air freight hub at Memphis is the busiest cargo airport in the Realm and among the busiest on earth, sorting through the night the parcels of polities that will never see the inside of it, and it has drawn a warehouse and distribution economy across the west of the polity.

The valley authority remains a substantial employer and the region’s electricity supplier, and its rates are a permanent political fact: cheap power was the whole promise of 1933, and the authority’s pricing decisions are argued about in four polity legislatures.

Chemicals and agriculture complete it: soya, maize and cotton in the west, cattle and hay in the middle, and tobacco much reduced since the quota went.

Whiskey deserves its own paragraph, because the polity’s arrangements around it are genuinely peculiar. Tennessee whiskey is a distinct thing in the Realm’s law, defined by a filtration through sugar maple charcoal before barrelling, and the definition is statutory rather than merely customary, which no other polity’s spirit has managed. The distilling counties are in the middle and the east, along a belt of limestone springs, and the industry has grown fourfold since 2000.

And a great many of those counties are dry. Local option survived the Realm’s prohibition and outlived it, so the polity’s largest distillery has stood for most of the last century in a county where its product could not lawfully be sold, offering tours at which nothing could be tasted. The county voted to permit sale at the distillery gate and nowhere else in 1995, which is the sort of compromise Tennessee arrives at, and about a quarter of the polity’s counties remain dry or nearly so.

Transport

Tennessee is the most crossed polity of the interior after Indiana, and for the same reason: it lies across the routes between the north-east and the south-west, and between the seaboard and the river.

Three of the Realm’s principal interstate corridors cross it and two meet at Nashville. Memphis is the freight capital: the air hub, five class-one railways, the river port, and the road corridors converging on the bridges, which together make it one of the very few places in the Realm where all four modes meet at scale.

The river system is the valley authority’s other achievement, a navigable channel from the Ohio to Knoxville with a lift of some hundred and fifty metres through nine locks, carrying coal, grain, chemicals and aggregate.

Passenger rail is thin and the polity has campaigned for improvement for forty years without success. The Cumberland Plateau remains the obstacle it always was: the road and rail crossings of it are the constraint on everything moving between the east and the middle, and the polity’s transport budget has been dominated by that one climb since 1830.

Welfare, health and education

Tennessee’s health outcomes are poor and its health industry is enormous, and the article states the two together because the polity does.

Life expectancy is below the Realm’s median, the burden of cardiovascular disease and diabetes is heavy, and the rural counties of the west and the plateau have the worst outcomes in the polity by a wide margin, with sixteen counties lacking an obstetric unit and eight lacking a hospital. The NHSA guarantee applies as everywhere and the shortfall is delivery: the rural closures of the last twenty years have been more numerous here than in any polity except Alabama.

That is happening in the polity that houses the head offices of the companies which own hospitals across the Union, and the juxtaposition is the single most cited fact in Tennessee’s health politics.

Education is at or slightly below the Realm’s median, funded from a base that the constitution’s tax cap constrains, and has improved measurably on early reading since a programme begun in 2015, which the polity cites and which has not yet reached the secondary figures.

Higher education is distributed by division in the polity’s usual manner: the principal university in the east at Knoxville, the largest research institutions in the middle at Nashville including a private university of the first rank and a historically Black university of national standing, and the western institutions at Memphis and Martin. Tennessee’s historically Black colleges are the densest concentration in the Realm outside Georgia, and the medical and dental training they have supplied to the whole Union is out of all proportion to their size.

Cities

Tennessee’s cities are one per division and a half, which is the polity all over.

Nashville

Nashville is the capital and the largest city, about seven hundred and fifty thousand in the consolidated city and county and two and a half million in the region, and it is among the fastest-growing places in the Realm.

It is the seat of the government, the publishing industry, the hospital companies, a private university of the first rank, a historically Black university of national standing, and the broadcast that has run weekly since 1925. It consolidated with its county in 1963, the first such merger in the Union, and the arrangement is the reason it has been able to grow without the fiscal collapse that hollowed comparable cities elsewhere.

Its relationship with the Legislature sitting inside it is poor and getting worse. Nashville has added a million people to its region in a generation, most of them from other polities, and it now votes unlike anywhere else in Tennessee; the Legislature legislates about it constantly, and the preemption statutes described above are very largely about this one city.

Memphis

Memphis is the second city, about six hundred and twenty thousand, on the fourth Chickasaw bluff above the Mississippi at the point where Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi meet.

It was a cotton market, then a river port, then the recording city, and it is now the Realm’s freight capital. It is also the poorest large city in the interior of the Union, with a child poverty rate above a third, and the gap between what came out of it culturally and what remains in it materially is the sharpest thing in this article.

The city is about two thirds Black, has had Black mayors continuously since 1991, and its consolidation with its county has failed four times. Memphis produced the music the world knows Tennessee for and holds the polity’s worst poverty, and the transfers that reach it are voted by a Legislature in which it is a permanent minority.

Knoxville and Chattanooga

Knoxville, about a hundred and ninety-five thousand, is the east’s city: the principal university, the valley authority’s headquarters, and the gateway to the Smokies. It was the polity’s first capital and lost it to the middle in the 1820s.

Chattanooga, about a hundred and eighty-five thousand, sits where the river cuts through the plateau, was the railway junction that made it a strategic prize, spent the twentieth century as a foundry town with air so bad that a federal survey in 1969 called it the dirtiest in the Realm, and has since remade itself more successfully than any comparable city in the Union, on the river, the cleaned air and a municipally owned fibre network that is the fastest in the Realm.

The Tri-Cities and Jackson

Bristol, Kingsport and Johnson City in the far north-east hold about half a million between them, are chemical and manufacturing towns, and are where recorded country music began.

Jackson, in the west, is the smallest of the three supreme court seats and exists in this article chiefly because the constitution requires the court to sit there.

Demographics

Tennessee’s population is approximately 6.9 million, and its distribution follows the divisions almost exactly into thirds, which is the reason the arrangement has survived: no division has ever been able to outvote the other two.

The polity is about seventeen per cent Black, and the distribution is historical: heavily concentrated in Memphis and the western cotton counties, substantial in Nashville and Chattanooga, and very thin in the eastern mountains, which had few enslaved people because the ground would not carry the crops that used them. East Tennessee’s Black population has never exceeded three per cent, and that fact explains a great deal about 1861.

Hispanic residents are about seven per cent and are recent, in the poultry counties, the construction trades and Nashville. The polity holds the Realm’s largest Kurdish community, settled at Nashville from the 1970s, and a substantial Somali and Egyptian presence in the same city.

Tennessee is among the most religiously observant polities of the Realm, overwhelmingly Protestant and predominantly Baptist, with the headquarters of several national denominations at Nashville, which is why the city has printed more Bibles than anywhere in the Union and has for a century.

Society and culture

Music is the polity’s identity and the article has already made the argument about it. What remains to say is that the traditions are three and correspond to the divisions: the ballad, gospel and string-band inheritance of the eastern mountains; the songwriting and publishing craft of the middle; and the blues, rhythm and soul of the west. Tennesseans will tell you these are three separate musical cultures that happen to share a legislature, and they are right.

Barbecue divides on the same line. The west is pork shoulder with a tomato and vinegar sauce and is dogmatic about it; the middle and east lean toward ribs and a sweeter dressing; and the Realm’s own account of its barbecue schools as mutually contemptuous is nowhere better illustrated than inside this one polity.

College football organises the eastern and middle calendar to a degree that surprises visitors, and the polity’s professional teams at Nashville and Memphis are recent arrivals that have been adopted with more enthusiasm than anybody expected.

Whiskey, the Smokies, and a crafts tradition in the eastern hills that has been supported by institutions founded to sustain it since the 1900s complete the picture.

Political tensions

Nashville against the Legislature. A city growing faster than anywhere in the interior, voting unlike the polity around it, and legislated about constantly. This is Tennessee’s central modern argument and it has no settlement in view.

Memphis. The poorest large city in the Realm’s interior, in the polity that grew wealthy on its music, dependent on transfers the rest of Tennessee votes for without enthusiasm, and unable to consolidate with its county after four attempts.

The valley authority. Publicly owned, ageing, and facing a decision about what replaces its generating fleet that no government in four polities wants to make. Its rates are argued about in four legislatures and its board is appointed federally, so nobody who pays the bill elects anybody who sets it.

Oak Ridge. Mercury the operators did not record, waste in unlined trenches, a creek through a town, a compensation scheme enacted in 2000 for workers who were mostly dead by then, and no agreed answer about whether the site has a future beyond cleaning itself up.

The Grand Divisions. An arrangement inherited from 1834 still distributes the polity’s institutions in threes, requires a supreme court to sit six hundred kilometres apart, and occasionally produces a worse appointment than the alternative. Every generation asks whether it should continue and every generation declines to change it, because the two divisions that would lose by any given reform can always outvote the one that would gain.

Who owns the songs. Catalogues assembled in Memphis in the 1950s on terms that would not now be enforceable, estates litigating, and a reckoning that Memphis has largely faced and Nashville has largely not needed to.

Water. The river serves four polities, the authority allocates it, and every drought turns an engineering question into a political one.

Assessment

Tennessee is the polity that processes what its neighbours produce, and it has done very well out of it.

The pattern is consistent across two centuries and four industries. The music of the Delta, the hill country and the Arkansas bottoms was recorded here, published here, pressed here and sold from here. The electricity of a four-polity basin is generated here. The material for the Realm’s atomic programme was made here because the power was. Other polities’ parcels are sorted at Memphis in the small hours and other polities’ hospitals are owned from Nashville. A polity that positions itself at the processing end of everything around it captures the margin on all of it, and Tennessee is the wealthiest polity of the interior south by a clear margin because that is precisely what it did.

The Register does not present this as a swindle, and the neighbouring articles support the point rather than undercutting it: a place with no studios cannot record anybody, and the studios were a genuine contribution. But it does state the terms. The men who owned the Memphis studios became rich and the musicians who walked into them mostly did not, and a body of songs that made the Realm’s postwar music is owned today by entities with no connection to anybody who wrote or played it. Nashville escaped that reckoning by having been at the copyright end from the start, which is a matter of business model rather than of conscience, and the polity knows it.

And against the capture sits something harder than the loss. Tennessee has been emptied for national purposes four times: the Cherokee in 1838, sixty thousand people under the valley authority’s water from 1933, a thousand families behind the Oak Ridge fence in 1942, and four to five thousand out of the mountain coves so that the Realm could have its most visited park. A polity that positions itself where the region’s value is processed is also a polity where the Realm builds the things it needs and does not want next door, and the two facts are the same fact seen from different ends. Tennessee took the margin on other people’s music and the Realm took the ground for other people’s electricity, and the polity has grown fairly practised at holding both.

Against the capture sits the loss, and this is the article’s other half. Tennessee has produced three Prime Ministers of the Realm, which no other polity has, and all three belong to somewhere else in the end: Jackson to the Realm and to the removals his ministry ordered, Houston to Texas, Gore to the Union he governed through its worst day. The polity produces the thing and somebody else acquires it, which is exactly what its musicians say about the studios, and Tennessee has never quite noticed that it makes the same complaint in both directions.

The divisions are what holds it together, and they hold because none of them can win. East, Middle and West are about a third each, they are written into the constitution, they choose the supreme court and rotate the Governorship, and the polity’s real politics are a permanent negotiation among three blocs rather than a contest between two parties. It is a cumbersome arrangement that produces some poor appointments and a court that travels six hundred kilometres, and it has kept a polity of three irreconcilable societies in one piece for a hundred and ninety years, including through the year when the other five went out.

East Tennessee is the reason for that last fact and deserves the final word. In 1861 the eastern counties held about a third of the polity, almost no enslaved people, a mobilised press and a settled position, and they carried the vote against the other two divisions combined. What made it stick was not the vote but the threat behind it: that if Tennessee left the Union, East Tennessee would leave Tennessee, and everybody understood that it could. A polity was kept in the Realm by the credible promise of its own dismemberment, which is the most Tennessean thing in this article and the reason the divisions are in the constitution rather than merely in the geography.

Chronology

Symbols

The flag of Tennessee is a crimson field bearing a blue disc edged in white, on which are three white five-pointed stars, with a narrow white stripe and a blue bar at the fly. The proportion is 3:5.

The three stars are the three Grand Divisions, and the circle is the point of the design rather than a frame for it. The polity’s own account, set down by the flag’s designer in 1905 and quoted in every Tennessee schoolroom since, is that the stars are bound together in an endless circle, that no one of them is above the others, and that this is the whole of what the flag has to say about a polity in three parts.

The arrangement is deliberate in a way that repays looking at. The three stars are set at the points of a triangle inside the disc and each is rotated, so that none of them stands upright and none can be read as the first. In a polity whose constitution requires the supreme court to sit in three cities and whose Governorship rotates among three regions, a flag on which no star is at the top is not a decorative choice.

The bar at the fly has no symbolic meaning whatever and the designer said so: it is there because a flag with a plain field looks wrong when it hangs limp, and a bar at the fly gives it something to show.

The motto, Agriculture and commerce, was adopted with the seal and is the plainest in the Realm, naming two industries and no virtue at all.

The polity’s tree is the tulip poplar, its flower the iris, its bird the mockingbird, and its official musical instrument the fiddle, which is the only such designation in the Union and was adopted in 1983 after an argument about whether it should be the guitar.

Trivia

See also

• Commonwealth of Kentucky
• State of Mississippi
• State of Arkansas
• Province of North Carolina
• State of Nevada
• Andrew Jackson
• Sam Houston
• Al Gore