\ My SH Headcanons /

TN

Tennessee

So uh-  This is my home state. If you've read my stories, I'm sure it's kinda obvious it was TN or somewhere nearby. I tend to stray back to him all the time :,)

Tennessee is a rough state to come up with headcanons for, when you're looking at it as a whole. The state itself seems to always be confused (history-wise) or just doing its own chaotic thing in the corner while everything turns to shit. An East Tennesseean is more likely to disagree with my headcanons than a West/Middle Tennesseean, as I have lived all over Tennessee yet have never stepped foot in the mountains. This being said, I did try to compensate and settle for fair headcanons regardless given historical views. I hope that this POV is one that's easy to understand. Feel free to leave comments stating what you think, I would love to hear your opinions.

Please prepare yourself for 900+ words in the pre-statehood section. I wanted to be thorough because you can't find much on Tennnessee's history on Google. I used physical books to study Tennessee's origins.

Pre-Statehood

A lot of people tend to leave this part of Tennessee out when they're making Tennessee original characters, and in all honesty I see how they could. The Watauga Settlement, the State of Franklin and Tennessee's pre-revolution origins are kind of blurry and hard to research given their lack of coverage and only partial factuality due to the first of Tennessee's European inhabitants being mainly illiterate. 

Let's start with the Watauga and Holston Settlements. Keep in mind, these descriptions are loose because this isn't mainly about them. The settlements of Watauga and Holston were respectively made by settlers from the colonies of North Carolina and Virginia before the American Revolution actually kicked into gear. The settlers got tired of the colonies taxing them all the time, so they fled to lands which were illegal to settle at the time due to the fact that natives currently inhabited them. Obviously, the colonies couldn't just not pass taxes- that was what Britain wanted. But the settlers were poor, unheard, and low in status and in their eyes somebody had to pay- this being Virginia and NC. These settlers were so determined that they could pull it off that they named their settlements and began plotting to form colonies. These were unrealistic goals given their circumstances. 

When the settlers discovered each other, they decided that if they wanted a chance to make a colony that they had to get big, get buff and had to to it before they were dismantled by the natives who they were disrespecting by barging into their territory. The settlements of Holston and Watauga merged to create the Watauga Association in 1772, and finally they created a set of rules for the people dwelling there to follow. This was Tennessee's first ever European set of law or organization, even if they were blatantly breaking the law to begin with.

Up until the American Revolution, the Colony of North Carolina acted on the reports from frustrated natives who wanted their land back. They didn't want to lose their peace with the natives all because some illiterate hooligans were running around in the mountains. They wrote more laws, but nobody listened. So NC attempted to send troops through Appalachia- that didn't work, because Appalachia is horrid to those who are unfamiliar. More European soldiers were killed naturally by the mountains than were killed by the actual rebels in the dispute.

The natives and Watauga would war on and off for years throughout the creation of Watauga and the American revolution because of North Carolina's inability to assist. This really put a strain on the natives' relationship with the Europeans.