Tennessee Summary

Tennessee is imbued with a rich frontier heritage, Civil War history, and America’s homespun sound of blues, country, bluegrass, and rockabilly music. Tennessee was once the ancestral homeland of the Cherokee and Chickasaw people. It was also home to the nation’s music king, Elvis Presley.

Although Tennessee joined the Union in 1796, the state was divided—in the east the inhabitants largely supported the dissolution of slavery, while the slave-holding plantation owners of middle and west Tennessee did not. By only a marginal vote, the state was the last to join the Confederacy in April 1861, and the first to rejoin the Union in 1865. Tennessee was the site of several major Civil War battles including Shiloh and Franklin. Tennessee abolished slavery in 1865, but in that same year a group of former Confederate officers established the Ku Klux Klan as a political club. The club was soon abandoned by its founding members, but the Klan movement, wrapped in secrecy, evolved into a powerful fraternity of bigotry and violence. During the 1960s, Nashville, the state’s capital, was at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement.

Nashville today is synonymous with country music, while Memphis, Tennessee’s largest city, is home to the blues. Each year, thousands flock to the honky-tonk shows of The Grand Ole Opry or pay homage to Elvis at Graceland.

Nevertheless, Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains remain its number one attraction, with over 9 million visitors to the region each year. Tennessee covers 42,146 square miles of varied terrain, from the Appalachian ranges in the east, to the delta flatlands, bordering the Mississippi River. The Tennessee River slices through the Cumberland Plateau, dividing the state into west, middle, and east Tennessee. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Depression saw the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933, and the transformation of the state’s agricultural economy into an industrial one.