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This scarce work should be of interest to all researchers with early Tennessee ancestors inasmuch as it covers the period prior to statehood when the settlement in eastern Tennessee was under quasi-independent rule.

During the decade of the 1780s, one of the thorniest issues facing the new nation was the disposition of territorial lands held along the frontier by some of the original 13 states. By the time the Constitution had been ratified in 1788, this issue had largely been resolved in favor of the federal government, and states like Connecticut, Virginia, and North Carolina had agreed to cede their western lands to the national government. The question of the western lands was not sorted out without some conflict, however, because many of the inhabitants of the western territories distrusted the motivations of their parent state legislatures, which, for the most part, reflected the interests of the eastern establishment and not those of the pioneering Germans and Scotch-Irish on the frontier.

One such controversy involved the creation in 1784 by John Sevier and others of a separate, self-governing territorial unit from lands in western North Carolina known as the State of Franklin. Prior to the adoption of the Constitution, Sevier and his associates had assembled all the apparatus of a functioning self-government for Franklin, including a court system. Ultimately, when the North Carolina legislature voted to cede its western lands to the federal government in 1788, the government of Franklin was compelled to disband, and its territory was reorganized as part of eastern Tennessee.

Samuel Williams's History of the Lost State of Franklin is a masterly account of this separatist movement, which portrays the figures on both sides and their motivations, chronicles the various meetings of the legislative assemblies concerned with the movement for a separate government in the west, clarifies the role of the Spanish government in fostering the separatist cause, and discusses the way of life and people of Franklin and the survival of the "spirit of Franklin" among eastern Tennesseeans. A full 60 pages of the work, moreover, are devoted to biographical sketches of John Sevier (who would become the first governor of Tennessee), Arthur Campbell, and scores of other personalities who took part in the Franklin episode. In addition, researchers will find a list of the names of all the signatories to the 1784 petition for a free Franklin as well as a complete index.