irginians in their
nullification agitation against the alien and sedition laws.

Its Gradual Change of Tone.

Gradually, however, the tone of the paper changed, as did the tone of
the community, at least to the extent of becoming Democratic and
anti-Federal; for the people felt that the Easterners did not sympathize
with them either in their contests with the Indians or in their desire
to control the Mississippi and the farther West. They grew to regard
with particular vindictiveness the Federalists,--the aristocrats, as
they styled them,--of the Southern seaboard States, notably of Virginia
and South Carolina.

One pathetic feature of the paper was the recurrence of advertisements
by persons whose friends and kinsfolk had been carried off by the
Indians, and who anxiously sought any trace of them.

Queer Use of the "Gazette."

But the _Gazette_ was used for the expression of opinions not only by
the whites, but occasionally even by an Indian. One of the Cherokee
chiefs, the Red Bird, put into the _Gazette_, for two buckskins, a talk
to the Cherokee chief of the Upper Towns, in which he especially warned
him to leave alone one William Cocke, "the white man who lived among the
mulberry trees," for, said Red Bird, "the mulberry man talks very strong
and runs very fast"; this same Cocke being afterwards one of the first
two senators from Tennessee. The Red Bird ended his letter by the
expression of the rather quaint wish, "that all the bad people on both
sides were laid in the ground, for then there would not be so many mush
men trying to make people to believe they were warriors." [Footnote:
_Knoxville Gazette_, November 3, 1792.]

Efforts to Promote Higher Education.

Blount brought his family to Tennessee at once, and took the lead in
trying to build up institutions for higher education. After a good deal
of difficulty an academy was organized under the title of Blount
College, and was opened as soon as a sufficient number of pupils could
be gotten together; there were already two other colleges in the
Territory, Greeneville and Washington, the latter being the academy
founded by Doak. Like almost all other institutions of learning of the
day these three were under clerical control; but Blount College was
chartered as a non-denomination institution, the first of its kind in
the United States. [Footnote: See Edward T. Sanford's "Blount College
and the University of Tennessee," p. 13.] The clergyman an