Especially our Whiggish history going back to Hugh Lawson White (descendant of James White, one of the founders of Knoxville). H. L. White built a sizable anti-Jackson coalition that merged with Henry Clay's Kentucky-based anti-Jackson party to form the Southern axis of the new Whig Party. Anti-Masonic activists, evangelical revivalists (many of them abolitionists) in the Second Great Awakening, and old school Federalists from New England joined with Clay and White to round out the new anti-Jackson party. The Whigs supported Federal investment in improving the Tennessee River harbor and building roads that would connect East TN with the rest of the country.

In the Civil War, East TN Whigs were the most Unionist of all (with the exception of Andrew Johnson). Representative of them was Parson Brownlow, who funneled the anti-Confederate, anti-Democratic East TN populace into the Republican Party during Reconstruction. After violently cleansing the region of Confederate sympathizers, East TN continued on as a one-party Republican fiefdom. The "grand bargain" wherein East TN Republicans refused to run statewide while Middle and West TN Democrats refused to contest races in East TN solidified political patterns here over the next century.

It will take a massive influx of non-natives into East TN in order to change that Republican tradition in this district.