Tennessee's 1st congressional district is the congressional district for northeast Tennessee, including all of Carter, Cocke, Greene, Hamblen, Hancock, Hawkins, Johnson, Sullivan, Unicoi, Washington, and Sevier counties, as well as parts of Jefferson County.

Republicans (or their antecedents) have held the seat continuously since 1881 and for all but four years since 1859, while Democrats (or their antecedents) 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 (as the state's single at-large representative) up to the term of Albert Galiton Watkins, which ended in 1859.

[8] 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.

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.

Franklin D. Roosevelt turned in respectable showings in the district during his four runs for president, as did Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Two of them, B. Carroll Reece and Jimmy Quillen, are the longest-serving members of the House in Tennessee history.