Why Is Tennessee Called the Volunteer State? 30,000 Said Yes

In September 1813, Governor Willie Blount of Tennessee put out a call for 3,500 volunteers. Creek warriors had overrun Fort Mims in what is now Alabama on August 30, and Blount needed men in the field. Thomas Kanon, writing in the Tennessee Encyclopedia, records that the response to that call “initiated a tradition that gave the state its nickname.”

That call is where every version of the story starts. The words “Volunteer State” are not in it, and were not in circulation anywhere else during the war it is credited to.

Why is Tennessee called the Volunteer State?

Tennessee is called the Volunteer State for the turnout of its volunteer soldiers. State sources credit the War of 1812, when Governor Willie Blount called for 3,500 men in September 1813. The label was settled in 1846, when the Secretary of War asked Tennessee for 2,800 volunteers for the Mexican-American War and roughly 30,000 offered to serve.

That is the version the standard state-symbol references carry, and the second half of it holds up on paper. The first half has a dating problem the state itself has published.

The phrase is younger than the war it honors

The Tennessee State Library and Archives, the body that keeps the state’s records, addressed this directly in a Memorial Day post in 2015.

Most Tennessee historians now agree that the nickname “Volunteer State” is derived from the War of 1812, although the phrase was never actually used during that conflict. - Tennessee State Library and Archives

What Tennesseans did use during that war was the word “volunteer” inside unit names, as in Tennessee Volunteers and Mounted Volunteers. The nickname itself came later. The same archives post places Tennessee under the name “at least a decade before the Mexican-American conflict,” which puts the phrase in circulation by roughly the mid-1830s, twenty years after New Orleans and ten years before Polk’s war.

The battle most often attached to the nickname makes the dating stranger still. State Symbols USA, citing the Tennessee Blue Book, credits Tennessee’s volunteers “especially during the Battle of New Orleans.” Kanon’s chronology dates that battle to January 8, 1815 and the peace treaty ending the war to December 24, 1814, fifteen days earlier, with ratification following in February 1815. The victory the nickname leans hardest on was fought after the treaty had already been signed.

So the sequence runs backwards from the way it is usually told. The name arrived first, in peacetime, and the War of 1812 was fitted to it afterwards as an explanation. Credit gets reassigned to famous events long after the fact, which is more or less what happened when a very long wall picked up its reputation for stopping invasions.

Thirty thousand men answered a call for 2,800

The 1846 half of the story is documented and, on its own terms, extraordinary. The Tennessee Encyclopedia records that Secretary of War William Marcy requested 2,800 recruits from Tennessee, enough to fill two regiments of infantry and one of cavalry.

About 30,000 Tennesseans offered their services. The oversubscription was more than ten to one, and it created a problem nobody plans for: the state had to run a lottery to decide which volunteers were allowed to go to war. The Tennessee State Library and Archives exhibit on the conflict says the response “cinched the nickname.”

The official numbers do not agree with each other

Read four standard references and you get four slightly different versions of the same requisition, which is a fair sign of how much of this has been copied rather than checked.

Source	1846 request	Credited to	Responded
Tennessee Encyclopedia	2,800	Secretary of War William Marcy	30,000
Tennessee State Library and Archives exhibit	2,800	the Secretary of War	30,000
Tennessee Historical Society	2,600	President James K. Polk	30,000
State Symbols USA, sourced to the Tennessee Blue Book	2,800	the secretary of state	30,000

The 1812 figures scatter the same way. The archives exhibit credits the nickname to “sending 2,000 willing soldiers” to that war, while the Tennessee Encyclopedia records Blount’s call for 3,500. Names drift loose from their origins all the time, which is how a potato dish ended up sounding French.

The Bloody First went over the wall at Monterrey

The men who did go earned the reputation the nickname now carries. At the Battle of Monterrey in September 1846, the First Tennessee Infantry under Colonel William Bowen Campbell assaulted Fort Teneria and were, in the archives’ phrase, first over the walls and into the fort. The regiment came home as the Bloody First. The same war often gets credit for the word gringo, supposedly from a song American soldiers sang, but a Madrid dictionary had the word 59 years before the fighting began.

Tennessee raised more units than it could use. The archives exhibit records that the Third, Fourth and Fifth Infantries were recruited after the major fighting ended and served mainly as garrison troops and supply line guards.

Two true stories, three decades apart

Tennesseans turned out for both wars, and in 1846 they overshot the federal quota by more than ten to one, a record documented down to the fort walls at Monterrey. The nickname commemorating it was already in circulation between the two wars, a decade or more before 1846.

A state nickname is a compressed argument about the past, and this one folds a gap of two decades into a single word. Ordinary things keep receipts like this constantly, right down to the pigment that makes every roadside barn red. Tennessee has spent two centuries earning a name that was already in use before the war story now told to explain it. Strictly FYI.