Slavery

Negroes in Tennessee

Little is known concerning the coming of the first Negroes to Tennessee, but there is reason to believe that they were in the territory much earlier than is commonly supposed. It is probable that Negroes were with De Soto when he camped near the present site of Memphis in 1541, since they were known to have been with him when he left Spain the previous year. A century later the French are reported to have sent “an army of 1,200 white men and double that number of red and black men who took up their quarters in Fort Assumption, on the bluff of Memphis.” The next Negro to set foot on Tennessee soil seems to have been with Colonel James Smith and a group of Long Hunters who explored the Cumberland country in 1766. Known to history merely as “Jim” this “mulatto lad” inspired a stanza in Colonel Smith’s diary. Another “negro fellow” accompanied James Robertson in 1779 when he came down from the Holston Settlement to the site of what is now Nashville.

The new settlers brought Negroes with them and by 1790, when the first census was taken, there were 3,417 slaves in the Territory. Six years later, when Tennessee became a State, there were 10,613 Negroes in a population of 77,282. As a result of the invention of the cotton gin and the rapid growth of the cotton industry, slavery was widely expanded between 1790 and 1835. By 1840 Tennessee had 183,057 slaves whose per capita value was about $550 as compared to less than $100 in 1790. – TENNESSEE: A GUIDE TO THE STATE – New Deal Network – Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Institute