Knoxville Founded. 
  The “Knoxville Gazette.”

On the ground where the treaty was held Blount proceeded to build a little town, which he made the capital of the Territory, and christened Knoxville, in honor of Washington’s Secretary of War.  At this town there was started, in 1791, under his own supervision, the first newspaper of Tennessee, known as the Knoxville Gazette.  It was four or five years younger than the only other newspaper of the then far West, the Kentucky Gazette.  The paper gives an interesting glimpse of many of the social and political conditions of the day.  In political tone it showed Blount’s influence very strongly, and was markedly in advance of most of the similar papers of the time, including the Kentucky Gazette; for it took a firm stand in favor of the National Government, and against every form of disorder, of separatism, or of mob law.  As with all of the American papers of the day, even in the backwoods, there was much interest taken in European news, and a prominent position was given to long letters, or extracts from seaboard papers, containing accounts of the operations of the English fleets and the French armies, or of the attitude of the European governments.  Like most Americans, the editorial writers of the paper originally sympathized strongly with the French Revolution; but the news of the beheading of Marie Antoinette, and the recital of the atrocities committed in Paris, worked a reaction among those who loved order, and the Knoxville Gazette ranged itself with them, taking for the time being strong grounds against the French, and even incidentally alluding to the Indians as being more blood-thirsty than any man “not a Jacobin.” [Footnote:  Knoxville Gazette, March 27, 1794.] The people largely shared these sentiments.  In 1793 at the Fourth of July celebration at Jonesborough there was a public dinner and ball, as there was also at Knoxville; Federal troops were paraded and toasts were drunk to the President, to the Judges of the Supreme Court, to Blount, to General Wayne, to the friendly Chickasaw Indians, to Sevier, to the ladies of the Southwestern Territory, to the American arms, and, finally, “to the true liberties of France and a speedy and just punishment of the murderers of Louis XVI.”  The word “Jacobin” was used as a term of reproach for some time.

    The “Gazette” Sound in its Politics.

The paper was at first decidedly Federalist in sentiment.  No sympathy was expressed with Genet or with the efforts undertaken by the Western allies of the French Minister to organize a force for the conquest of Louisiana; and the Tennessee settlers generally took the side of law and order in the earlier disturbances in which the Federal Government was concerned.  At the Fourth of July celebration in Knoxville, in 1795, one of the toasts was “The four western counties of Pennsylvania; may they repent their folly and sin no more”; the Tennesseeans sympathizing as little with the Pennsylvania whiskey revolutionists as four years later they sympathized with the Kentuckians and Virginians in their nullification agitation against the alien and sedition laws.