| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Middle Tennessee, 1775–1825: Progress and Popular Democracy on the Southwestern Frontier. By Kristofer Ray. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007. xxviii, 236 pp. $41.00, ISBN 978-1-57233-597-4.)
In this slender volume, Kristofer Ray examines the nexus between political and economic developments in middle Tennessee over a fifty- year span. He divides the half century into a tripartite chronological framework: the 1780s and early 1790s; the formative statehood period, 1796–1815; and the decade thereafter.	1
During those fifty years, Ray depicts a familiar boom-and-bust economic cycle, during which land surveyors and speculators played an indispensable role. Although little economic expansion occurred in middle Tennessee during the 1780s and early 1790s, a boom cycle arrived after 1796, when cotton and tobacco (aided by slavery) became important cash crops for the region. But, as the author rightly notes, with that upsurge came the establishment of banks and the creation of high levels of personal debt. Indeed, the legislature responded to the latter problem by enacting a stay law in 1809 for debtor relief.	. . .

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