The Right of Exercising Sovereignty and Right of Soil: Settler Colonialism and American Federalism in the Tennessee River Valley

In 1797, federal troops forcibly evicted Judge David Campbell and his white neighbors from their homes in the Tennessee River Valley because their settlements were on land determined to be in Cherokee territory by an earlier treaty. In its enforcement of the boundary line, the federal government was, according to Campbell, guilty of “injustice to her own citizens of the state of Tennessee.” John Sevier, Tennessee’s first governor agreed with Campbell, and he and early legislators pressured the federal government to negotiate a new boundary with the Cherokees, which it did in the fall of 1798.

Campbell’s protest and the ensuing Cherokee treaty reveals the connection between American federalism, land policy, and the territorial dispossession of American Indians at the heart of the expanding American empire. By analyzing the transition from territorial governance to state governance within the Tennessee River Valley, this paper will argue that historians must locate the emerging operations of American federalism in the early trans-Appalachian West and recognize the centrality of land policy and Indian affairs to that process. Most studies of federalism and divided American sovereignty have focused on their antecedent paradigms within the British Empire, their emergence from the political culture of established Eastern states, or their ideological dimensions. Few historians, however, have explored the restrictive territorial governance and how the divided sovereignty of American federalism allowed new state governments, like the state of Tennessee, to translate regional demands from the local level to the federal level and then act on those demands. Indeed, statehood in 1796 became the vehicle for early white Tennesseans to challenge federal authority. Over the next decade, Tennessee leaders and federal officials created a working relationship as the national government grew receptive to settlers’ demands for indigenous lands and the permanent dispossession of the state’s indigenous population.