Watauga Association - Legacy

Legacy

The Articles of the Watauga Association likely influenced the Cumberland Compact (drafted in 1780), the main link between the two pacts being James Robertson, who in 1779 led a group of colonists into what is now the Nashville area. The Clarksville Compact, drafted for the Clarksville settlement in 1785, may have also been inspired by the Watauga Association (the Clarksville Compact even adopted the laws of Virginia, even though the settlement was clearly within the territory of North Carolina). In the mid-1780s, some former Wataugans (especially John Sevier) played a key role in the establishment of the failed State of Franklin.

Numerous historians in the 19th and early 20th centuries romanticized the Watauga Association as the first democratic or constitutional government formed by American-born colonists. Historian Andrew C. McLaughlin, in his first major work on the history of the U.S. Constitution, wrote of the Wataugans, "one can find no more striking fact in American history, nor one more typical, than the simple ease with which those frontiersmen... formed an association and extended the rights and privileges of self-government." McLaughlin's colleague Claude Van Tyne wrote of the Wataugans, "like the Pilgrim Fathers they were without formal laws and institutions, and they made them." In The Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt treated the Watauga Association as a microcosm of the subsequent American Revolution, writing, "the Watauga settlers outlined in advance the nation's work. They tamed the rugged and shaggy wilderness, they bid defiance to outside foes, and they successfully solved the difficult problem of self-government." Recent historians point out that while the Watauga Association was one of the first constitutional governments west of the Appalachians, it was not intended as a government separate from the English colonies.