Mississippi, at first agreed to cede to the United States her claim to territory west of the Alleghanies; then withdrew that assent; but finally ratified the cession in 1789, when the Federal Constitution was framed. In 1796, while Washington was yet President, Tennessee was admitted as a State into the Union, Vermont in 1791, and Kentucky in 1792 having preceded it. Unlike those two States, however, a large part of its territory was occupied by Indians in undisturbed possession; the Chickasaw tribe occupying Western Tennessee until 1819. It was in this condition of the country that young Houston had come into the territory; his boyhood being spent at the Indian agency, his youth in Indian wars, and his early manhood on the border of Indian settlements. It was amid the rush of fresh settlers, coming in from every section, and dependent on their own hands'-toil and personal enterprise for success, that Houston came to the Federal City to represent a hardy and independent yeomanry.
The spirit of the people of Tennessee at the time of Houston's election to Congress is indicated by this coincidence. Houston had been elected in a new district, September 13, 1823. At the September term of the Blount County Court the grand jury brought in a presentment against certain parties for "treating" voters with intoxicating liquors at the recent election, in which presentment this sententious statement appears: "That the custom complained of brings into offices of trust 'men who are not preferred for their virtues, and who consequently prefer not virtue.'"
It was under quite another heading that Houston's election was classed. While in the Seventeenth Congress Tennessee had but six representatives in the House, the new apportionment, which suddenly added three more Congressional districts, seemed to have had a more demoralizing influence in the old counties under the mountains than upon the new section, whose centre, at Nashville, Houston represented.
There were at this era five specially exciting questions which had agitated and were still dividing the people of the east and west, of the north and south; which questions not only awakened conflicting opinions in the different sections, but which in the same section, made up as was the population of the new States, aroused warm debate in Tennessee. These related to governmental policy; first, as to efforts to civilize the Indians; second, as to a tariff for protection of home manufactures; third, as to internal improvements; fourth, as to the restriction of slave labor as opposed to free labor; fifth, as to armed interference of European Governments in Mexico to recover political power over former colonists who had secured their independence. The heat and violence of
