Throughout these years of Indian warfare the influx of settlers into the Holston and Cumberland regions steadily continued.  Men in search of homes, or seeking to acquire fortunes by the purchase of wild lands, came more and more freely to the Cumberland country as the settlers therein increased in number and became better able to cope with and repel their savage foes.  The settlements on the Holston grew with great rapidity as soon as the Franklin disturbances were at an end.  As the people increased in military power, they increased also in material comfort, and political stability.  The crude social life deepened and broadened.  Comfortable homes began to appear among the huts and hovels of the little towns.  The outlying settlers still lived in wooden forts or stations; but where the population was thicker, the terror of the Indians diminished, and the people lived in the ordinary style of frontier farmers.

    The South-western Territory Organized.

Early in 1790, North Carolina finally ceded, and the National Government finally accepted, what is now Tennessee; and in May, Congress passed a law for the government of this Territory Southwest of the River Ohio, as they chose to call it.  This law followed on the general lines of the Ordinance of 1787, for the government of the Northwest; but there was one important difference.  North Carolina had made her cession conditional upon the non-passage of any law tending to emancipate slaves.  At that time such a condition was inevitable; but it doomed the Southwest to suffer under the curse of negro bondage.

    Blount Made Governor.

William Blount of North Carolina was appointed Governor of the Territory, and at once proceeded to his new home to organize the civil government. [Footnote:  Blount MSS.  Biography of Blount, in manuscript, compiled by one of his descendants from the family papers.] He laid out Knoxville as his capital, where he built a good house with a lawn in front.  On his recommendation Sevier was appointed Brigadier-General for the Eastern District and Robertson for the Western; the two districts known as Washington and Miro respectively.

Blount was the first man of leadership in the West who was of Cavalier ancestry; for though so much is said of the Cavalier type in the southern States it was everywhere insignificant in numbers, and comparatively few of the southern men of mark have belonged to it.  Blount was really of Cavalier blood.  He was descended from a Royalist baronet, who was roughly handled by the Cromwellians, and whose three sons came to America.  One of them settled in North Carolina, near Albemarle Sound, and from him came the new governor of the southwestern territory.  Blount was a good-looking, well-bred man, with cultivated tastes; but he was also a man of force and energy, who knew well how to get on with the backwoodsmen, so that he soon became popular among them.

    Retrospect:  What had been Accomplished during the Seven Years.