The earliest dated example of Tennessee printing in the Library is the Knoxville Gazette for June 1, 1793, issued a month after Ferguson retired from the paper. The issue begins with a lengthy selection by Benjamin Franklin, which is prefaced in this way:
Messrs. Printers,
I beg you to publish in your next number of the Knoxville Gazette, the following extracts, from a narrative of the massacres in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania; of a number of friendly Indians, by persons unknown; written by the late Dr. Benjamin Franklin, whose many benevolent acts, will immortalize his memory, and published in a British Magazine,[45] in April 1764.
I am your obedient servant,
W.B.
The subscriber was undoubtedly William Blount, the Territorial Governor appointed by President Washington in 1790, who perhaps hoped that the sympathy towards Indians expressed by Franklin might temper public reaction against Indian raids figuring so large in the local news. Readers of the same June 1 issue learned of such crimes as the scalping of a child near Nashville, and they may have been moved by the following paragraph which the editor interjected in the news reports:
The Creek nation must be destroyed, or the south western frontiers, from the mouth of St. Mary's to the western extremities of Kentucky and Virginia, will be incessantly harassed by them; and now is the time. [Delenda est Carthago.][46]
Both this issue and the June 15 issue, the sole Library of Congress holdings of the Gazette for the year 1793, are inscribed "Claiborne Watkins, esqr." They probably belonged to the person of that name residing in Washington County, Va., who served as a presidential elector in 1792.[47]
[44] Early Printing in Tennessee (Chicago, 1933), p. 21.
[45] The Gentleman's Magazine. Franklin's A Narrative of the Late Massacres was published separately at Philadelphia in the same year.
[46] Brackets in text. Several issues carried this paragraph. See William Rule, ed. Standard History of Knoxville, Tennessee (Chicago, 1900), p. 74.