Introducing Mountain Republicans: A Dissertation in the Foothills of Jefferson
How can one be a Jeffersonian in a region that resisted both secession and the slaveholding planter elites? This dissertation, Mountain Republicans: Jeffersonian Political Thought from Franklin to Secession , will investigate how the Jeffersonian ideology grew and persisted from the beginning of the Franklin movement through the onset of the Civil War. This blog will serve as a conduit for sharing the research process and reflections through an exploration of the intellectual and political legacy of Jeffersonian thought in the Appalachian South. From the creation of the State of Franklin to the fiery secession debates of 1861, East Tennessee consistently maintained an ideology focused on local control, a deep skepticism of centralized authority, and a persistent resistance to both political and economic elites. This research argues that those East Tennessee values were not just geographic isolation or ba...