 This 1983: Doomsday page is a Proposal.
|
The Provisional Republic of East Tennessee is a nation of approximately 80,000 people located in the eastern portion of the former U.S. state of Tennessee.
Its capital, and largest city, is Morristown, northeast of Knoxville and north of the former Great Smoky Mountains National Park. East Tennessee's government and constitution is modeled primarily on the former United States and secondarily on the state of Tennessee. Its head of state is a governor, with a bicameral congress consisting of a House and Senate. Though Knoxville is abandoned, the Morristown government still considers the city part of East Tennessee.
Its borders extend west past Knoxville and northeast into Johnson City and Kingsport, and south to Cleveland; its eastern border with the Provisional Blue Ridge Republic mirrors that of former Tennessee's border with former North Carolina.
Morristown is also home to the reconstituted University of Tennessee, which is located in a number of former office buildings downtown and has many items salvaged from the UT campus in Knoxville. Other important towns include Johnson City, Kingsport, Gatlinburg and Cleveland.
History
East Tennessee has been allies with Blue Ridge since 1985. The two nations have cooperated together numerous times, including in conflicts with rebel militia based out of Johnson City and white supremacist guerrillas who briefly formed a breakaway nation-state in the Smoky Mountains in 1994. It was discovered by League of Nations scouts in the late 2000s; since then, the LoN has established relations with Morristown. Though no official announcement has ever been made, Morristown has increasingly referred to itself in official documents as "East Tennessee" or the "Republic of East Tennessee" (the LoN designates the nation as the Provisional Republic of East Tennessee).
Doomsday
News of the surprise nuclear attack on America by the Soviet Union came via television and radio stations. An initial state of shock in the region led to mass panic, especially for people in the Knoxville area within 30 miles of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Everyone in the area expected some type of hit either on downtown Knoxville or Oak Ridge, if not both, and braced themselves for impact.
At 8:18 p.m. local time, a low-yield nuclear weapon detonated over Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The town of Oak Ridge was severly damaged by the subsequent winds and fire from the blast, which could be seen as far as the Smoky Mountains. It turned out to be the only missile that exploded in the region, but it was more than enough to cause mass chaos.
The foreboding sense of doom gave way to shock as no missiles ever came to the region.
Knoxville mayor Randall Tyree and the city council were escored out of town by city police who had hotwired their cars to operate without the computers that were rendered inert by the EMP blast right before the hit on Oak Ridge. Tyree met with the city council in a 8:48 a.m. meeting Monday, September 26, in a secured location near Lake City, northwest of Knoxville off Interstate 75; together they declared martial law for the foreseeable future. Tyree insisted on returning to Knoxville, and over the next eight days, Tyree met with city government, police and fire department officials and leaders of the area National Guard units to ensure public safety, provide food for residents and defend the city against "invaders".
The resources of the University of Tennessee were utilized to find ways to monitor and protect the public and food and water supplies from the fallout from the Oak Ridge blast; fortunately, the low-yield of the blast (just enough to destroy the complex) and the airburst put the threat from radiation and fallout to Knoxville and surrounding areas to a minimum. Oak Ridge and the immediate area around the blast site was evacuated, and eventually abandoned.
A series of actions by the police and the National Guard against looters and refugees from outlying areas throughout September, October and November proved to be controversial but also helpful in the long-term; those actions helped stabilize Knoxville and in turn all of eastern Tennessee.
Knoxville's independence
Knoxville declared its "provisional" independence from the United States in April 1985.
More to come...
First contact with other communities
Over the next several months, between contacts made by policemen and civilians from area towns and excursions by Knoxville representatives out into the state, Knoxville made contact with surviving communities across eastern Tennessee. In a famous meeting in March 1986, Tennessee state patrolmen on horseback made contact with explorers from Asheville, North Carolina, 12 miles west of the Tennessee-North Carolina border.
More to come....
The coup of 1986
Rogue elements within the National Guard and Knoxville Police Department joined up with local criminals to effectively produce a coup d'etat of the Knoxville city government.
On May 5, 1986, these elements emptied the Knox County Jail and armed the inmates, ordering them to ambush Tyree, the city council members and anyone else associated with law enforcement or the provisional government. By the end of the day, over 200 people were dead, and a rogue criminal government effectively ruled at least downtown Knoxville.
More to come....
War with Asheville
The new Knoxville "regime" informally signed a mutual offense/defense treaty with allies who had taken over the government of nearby Johnson City. Over the next two months the regime sent fighters to assist Johnson City in its war against the towns of Kingsport, Tennessee and Bristol, Virginia.
The Knoxville/Johnson City forces got the upper hand on their opponents after launching an overnight attack on Kingsport, followed by a series of attacks in that city and in Bristol. Those sympathetic to the regime helped the Johnson City forces take control of Bristol, with the resistance forces, and surviving Bristol residents, falling back to Kingsport.
With their power base as stable as possible, the Johnson City/Kingsport/Knoxville forces looked to go on the offensive to survive. Perceiving a threat from the more democratic, and stable, government based out of Asheville, the rogue governments declared war on Asheville.
More to come....
The battle of Knoxville
Military advisors from Asheville helped the resistance forge a strategy to attack and defeat the rogue government forces.
Battles raged across the area through summer of 1987, with the two biggest battles at the University of Tennessee and downtown Knoxville.
More to come....
Flight to Morristown
The government-in-exile in Wooddale made the decision on October 19, 1987 to flee Knoxville for Morristown. A total of 25,000 people were able to flee the Knoxville area over the next several days, always guarded by resistance forces and sometimes fleeing under enemy fire.
While fighting raged in Knoxville proper, resistance forces fortified Wooddale, Seiverville, Pigeon Forge and Jefferson City. Resistance forces out of Cleveland fortified Interstate 75 and state roads 2, 307 and 411 going north towards Knoxville.
More to come....
The Johnson City War
The Knoxville government, being in a treaty with rogue elements in Johnson City, called upon their allies for support for a push Knoxville felt could break the back of the resistance: Knoxville would move east into Morristown, while Johnson City moved south, putting the resistance in the position of fighting on two fronts.
Knoxville did not count on a harsh winter, though, nor of the resistance's own resolve to fight and win. Several decisions by Knoxville militia backfired on them, and by March 1988 the resistance had gained the upper hand in the mostly devastated city. With enough forces to occupy Knoxville, the resistance was able to bolster its forces in the Morristown area.
When Johnson City forces went into the Morristown region to finish off the resistance, they instead found an army four times stronger, and bigger, than anticipated. This led to resistance forces putting the rebels on the run, leading up to the Johnson City War of May-June 1988. With resistance forces picking off the rebels from outside and resistance forces within Johnson City picking them off from inside the city, the rebels finally backed down on June 19th and sued for peace.
More to come....
Treaty of Morristown
The resistance, now calling itself the Provisional Government of the State of Tennessee, agreed to a treaty with the rebel forces in Morristown proper. On July 29th, both sides signed a treaty of peace, with terms severely favorable to the Morristown government. All territory, arms, goods and revenue earned or taken by the rebels would revert to Morristown; some rebel individuals were given pardons, to work in civilian life, the clergy, or the military; others were sentenced to hard labor, helping to rebuild Morristown, Johnson City, Seiverville and Pigeon Forge.
More to come....
A "hard decision"
In 2001, Edward Sorrell, a Knoxville policeman on Doomsday and a Vietnam War veteran, made his way back to Knoxville. Sorrell had volunteered back in 1985 to travel into Virginia to find potential survivor communities; the last time he had been seen was by Tennessee State Policemen as he left the town of Harrogate, headed towards Cumberland Gap National Park.
Sorrell was spotted traveling by foot down old Dixie Highway into Morristown. He flagged down civliians, telling his story to them. They found Morristown police officers who, after interviewing him for two hours, ran his story by veteran officers; it checked out. Subsequent contact with Sorrell's surviving relatives confirmed that he was who he claimed to be - his story was given greater legitimacy, as one officer put it, "because you'd have to be a damned good actor to pull off a fakery, and there aren't a lot of us left anymore."
Sorrell said he had been lost after running into survivalists in former VIrginia north of the Tennessee border; Sorrell decided to finish his "mission" no matter how long it took. He said he had survived over the years due to skills he learned during his tour in the U.S. Army; his subsequent post-Vietnam career as a farm hand, then as a policeman; and from his hunting and fishing hobbies. He also told officials his story of survival - several periods of months without seeing other humans, wandering from town to town in parts of Virginia, joining and going AWOL from a group called the Virginian Republic, and ultimately making his way to Washington, D.C. to see for himself what had happened.
Sorrell confirmed what everyone had long assumed, that Washington no longer existed. He described it as "ruins and a sea of glass". Sorrell said he spoke with local survivalists who somehow had been able to stay alive outside the ruins of the D.C. area, seeing photographs taken by long-dead people who had gone into the ruins for any number of reasons to take pictures. Sorrell said he got as close as former Fairfax, outside D.C., in northern Virginia; he didn't dare get closer, even with equipment the survivalists claimed to offer protection from radiation.
After leaving the region, Sorrell decided to get back to Knoxville as best he could. He eventually ran into Virginia military, who had been looking for him since he went AWOL, in Lynchburg. After a lengthy interrogation, in which Sorrell offered up what he knew about the Knoxville provisional government and his experiences outside D.C., Sorrell said he was released into the custody of a colonel in Lynchburg, and held at an installation on the former campus of Liberty University. Sorrell said with help from locals, he was able to escape, and made his way out of Virginian territory, eventually finding his way into Tennessee, into Knoxville and eventually into Morristown.
With no reason not to believe Sorrell, and having heard nothing from the U.S. government or military since Doomsday, Morristown leaders decided on July 4, 2001 to formally declare the region's independence from the United States. Leaders said it was "a hard decision" despite how much sense it made; the people, and their leaders, still considered themselves Americans first and foremost. The now-formally-independent regional government conducted its business under the Morristown banner, although residents informally referred to themselves as Tennesseeans or East Tennesseeans.
Contact with the outside world
More to come....
Economy
More to come....
Demographics
More to come....
Culture
More to come....
East Tennessee is predominantly culturally conservative. Christianity and a form of agnosticism are the only observed religions in East Tennessee.
Alcohol use was banned for a time in the early 1990s, but widespread use of moonshine led to a lifting of the ban in 1997
International relations
East Tennessee was granted observer status in the League of Nations in January 2010.