The 1st has generally been a very secure voting district for the Republican Party since the American Civil War, and is one of only two ancestrally Republican districts in the state. Republicans have held the seat continuously since 1881 and for all but four years since 1859, while Democrats have held the congressional seat for all but eight years from when Andrew Jackson was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1796 up to the term of Albert Galiton Watkins ending in 1859. Andrew Johnson, the seventeenth President of the United States, represented the district from 1843–1853. The 1st was one of four districts in Tennessee whose congressmen did not resign when Tennessee seceded from the Union in 1861. Thomas Amos Rogers Nelson was reelected as a Unionist to the Thirty-seventh Congress, but he was arrested by Confederate troops while en route to Washington, D.C. and taken to Richmond. Nelson was paroled and returned home to Jonesborough, where he kept a low profile for the length of his term. Like the rest of East Tennessee, slavery was not as common in this area as the rest of the state due to its mountain terrain, which was dominated by small farms instead of plantations. The district was also the home of the first exclusively abolitionist periodicals in the nation, The Manumission Intelligencer and The Emancipator, founded in Jonesborough by Elihu Embree in 1819. Due to these factors, this area supported the Union over the Confederacy in the Civil War, and identified with the Republican Party after Tennessee was readmitted to the Union in 1867, electing candidates representing the Unionist Party—a merger of Republicans and pro-Union Democrats—both before and after the war. This allegiance has continued through good times and bad ever since, with Republicans dominating every level of government. While a few Democratic pockets exist in the district's urban areas, they are not enough to sway the district. The district typically gives its congressmen very long tenures in Washington; indeed, it elected some of the few truly senior Southern Republican congressmen before the 1950s. Only eight people have represented it since 1921. Two of them, B. Carroll Reece and Jimmy Quillen, are the longest-serving members of the House in Tennessee history. Reece held the seat for all but six years from 1921 and 1961, while Quillen held it from 1963 to 1997.
