First Families of Tennessee is a tribute to these men and women who established the state.

The records in this book are on microfilm in the Tennessee State Library.

When John F. Baker Jr. was in the seventh grade, he saw a photograph of four former slaves in his social studies textbook—two of them were his grandmother's grandparents. He began the lifelong research project that would become The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation, the fruit of more than thirty years of archival and field research and DNA testing spanning 250 years. A descendant of Wessyngton slaves, Baker has written the most accessible and exciting work of African American history since Roots. He has not only written his own family's story but included the history of hundreds of slaves and their descendants now numbering in the thousands throughout the United States. More than one hundred rare photographs and portraits of African Americans who were slaves on the plantation bring this compelling American history to life. Founded in 1796 by Joseph Washington, a distant cousin of America's first president, Wessyngton Plantation covered 15,000 acres and held 274 slaves, whose labor made it the largest tobacco plantation in America. Atypically, the Washingtons sold only two slaves, so the slave families remained intact for generations. Many of their descendants still reside in the area surrounding the plantation. The Washington family owned the plantation until 1983; their family papers, housed at the Tennessee State Library and Archives, include birth registers from 1795 to 1860, letters, diaries, and more. Baker also conducted dozens of interviews—three of his subjects were more than one hundred years old—and discovered caches of historic photographs and paintings. A groundbreaking work of history and a deeply personal journey of discovery, The Washingtons of Wessyngton Plantation is an uplifting story of survival and family that gives fresh insight into the institution of slavery and its ongoing legacy today.

"Serepta Jordan ... kept her diary from 1857 to 1864. She is a lively writer whose insights into New Providence and Clarksville, Tennessee, in the years before and during the Civil War provide a fine-grained feel for Middle Tennessee daily life and culture. Wartime and the fall of Fort Donelson meant an early end of Confederate rule in her area, and she relates the hardships suffered by citizens cut off from what they considered their country. Not particularly given to romanticism, Jordan provides generally clear-eyed observations about the failures of the Confederate army, and her extreme hatred for upper-class people in Clarksville makes her voice unique indeed"--