James Gettys McGready Ramsey was the fourth of the seven children of Peggy Alexander, daughter of John McKnitt Alexander of North Carolina, and Francis Alexander Ramsey, a native of Pennsylvania who had moved to the future Tennessee at the close of the Revolution. James was born on March 25, 1797 near Knoxville, where his father was a man of considerable local importance.
He was educated by tutors, at Ebenezer Academy, and at Washington College, in Tennessee, where he received the degree of B. A. at the age of nineteen. The honorary degree of M. D. was awarded him by the Medical College of South Carolina in 1831.
He read medicine in the office of a local physician, spent one year in professional study at the University of Pennsylvania, and began practice at Knoxville in 1820.
Like many contemporaries in his profession he had many interests and his activities were broadly diversified. He gave support locally to the early movement for public schools. He was probably the first East Tennessean to advocate (in 1828) the establishment of connection by rail between the Tennessee River and the South Atlantic Seaboard. He was prominently associated in the promotion of the Louisville, Cincinnati, & Charleston Railroad, and served as one of its directors. Later he gave support to other railroads, and acted as agent for the state in financing the completion of the East Tennessee & Georgia Railroad. Ramsey also, like his father, was a banker, serving as president of the Knoxville branches of the short-lived South Western Railroad Bank and the Bank of Tennessee.
An accomplishment in which he took particular pride was the writing of The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century (1853), which was reprinted with a critical index by J. T. Fain in 1926. This substantial volume on the pioneer period of the history of this state was the first in which an attempt was made to give a detailed narrative on the basis of a careful collection and examination of public and private papers. The manuscript of a second volume and many records which Ramsey had collected were destroyed by fire during the Civil War. In this war Ramsey was an ardent supporter of the Confederacy.
He had been a Democrat and a champion of slavery and of the reopening of the African slave trade. He served the Confederacy in minor civil office and was compelled to flee from Knoxville when Federal troops occupied the city. For some years after the war he remained "in exile" in North Carolina, but ultimately (1872) returned to Knoxville. Two years later he was chosen president of the reorganized Tennessee Historical Society and held this office until his death.
Ramsey is perhaps best known for his book, The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century, a seminal work documenting the state's frontier and early statehood periods. Ramsey was also a major advocate for development in East Tennessee, leading efforts to bring railroad access to the region, and helping to organize the region's first medical society.
He believed the South was morally superior to the North, and detested the idea that Knoxville would become industrialized along the lines of northern manufacturing centers. This brought him into conflict with Brownlow and business leaders such as Perez Dickinson, who believed the region's abundant coal and iron resources made industrialization Knoxville's most lucrative option. Ramsey was also radically pro-slavery, going so far as to call for the reopening of the Atlantic slave trade.
In 1821 he married Margaret Barton Crozier, by whom he was the father of eleven children.
