BusinessTN

It’s hard to imagine Nashville without the Capitol and the state office buildings, let alone the annual spectacle known as the Tennessee General Assembly. But it almost turned out differently. In fact, thanks to Nashville’s reputation as a den of political iniquity, the Capitol nearly ended up in Murfreesboro, Kingston or some other place.

For the first few decades of Tennessee’s existence, the legislature couldn’t agree on a permanent Capitol. Knoxville was the first seat of government in 1796, followed by Nashville in 1812, Knoxville again four years later, Murfreesboro in 1819 and Nashville again seven years later.

Tennessee might have had a temporary Capitol for a lot longer had it not been for Governor William Carroll. Carroll, owner of a Nashville hardware store, served 12 years as governor in the 1820s and 1830s. Carroll led the fight to create a chancery court, the state’s first penitentiary and the state’s first insane asylum (as homes for the mentally handicapped and mentally ill were then called).

Carroll was also largely responsible for Tennessee’s Constitutional Convention of 1834, and this convention debated the idea of a permanent Capitol at some length. Unable to agree, the delegates recommended (and the voters later approved) a constitutional amendment requiring the legislature to pick a permanent seat of government by 1843.

When the legislature met at the Davidson County Courthouse in October 1843, it spent the first week arguing over where to put the Capitol. House and Senate members took turns espousing the virtues of their hometown, proposing that the government seat be placed there. Then the vote would be taken, the measure would fail, and another Representative or Senator would stand up and espouse the virtues of his hometown.

It went on and on. Over the course of the week, just about every organized community in Tennessee got its chance, and lost. During one Senate debate on Oct. 4, Kingston, Lebanon, Hamilton, Sparta, Knoxville, Clarksville, McMinnville, Shelbyville, Murfreesboro, Chattanooga, Franklin, Harrison and Woodbury were all considered. Every town put up for a vote in the Senate that day got between 7 and 13 votes—short of the 17 needed for passage.

After several days of gridlock, it came down to Nashville and Murfreesboro, and it was then that the debate got heated. Several legislators said Nashville was the logical choice. After all, the legislature was accustomed to meeting there; it had better road and water connections; and it contained institutions (such as the bank, arsenal, penitentiary and asylum) that the legislature needed to watch over. The city of Nashville was also offering the state a hill on which to build a Capitol building. Acquired by attorney William Campbell years earlier as a fee for a lawsuit he tried, several of Nashville’s wealthiest citizens had signed an option to buy Campbell’s Hill for $30,000 to donate it to the state.

Lawmakers advocating Murfreesboro did not go down easily. State Senator Samuel Laughlin of Warren County argued passionately against Nashville, pointing out that the geographic center of the state was in Rutherford County. He noted that since the legislature moved to Nashville 17 years earlier, the General Assembly was meeting for longer and the government had increased it annual expenditure and taken on tremendous debt. This, he said, could be attributed to the forces at work in Nashville, which he described as a “political Sodom.”

State Senator William Sneed, representing Rutherford and Williamson Counties, agreed with his colleague and added points of his own. “The people of Nashville are the creditor class,” he said, according to the Nashville Union. “They were traders, speculators…while the largest portion of the people elsewhere are farmers. The interests of the two classes are averse, and their opinions of course, at variance.” Sneed made reference to Nashville’s “voluptuousness” and “dissipation,” and he implied that the citizens of Nashville were bribing the legislature by offering it free land—an odd point, considering Murfreesboro was also offering the legislature a site free of charge.

On Friday, Oct. 6, 1843, the House voted 50-43 to make Nashville the state’s permanent capitol. The next day the Senate concurred with 17 votes in the affirmative, making the state capitol bill one of those rare pieces of legislation that passed both chambers without a single vote to spare. Nashville’s newspapers tried hard to restrain their excitement; the Republican Banner said it was delighted but asked that all thoughts and discussion about the controversy “be buried in the grave of oblivion.”