William Blount ( ; April 6, 1749March 21, 1800) was an American politician, landowner and Founding Father who was one of the signers of the Constitution of the United States. He was a member of the North Carolina delegation at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and led the efforts for North Carolina to ratify the Constitution in 1789 at the Fayetteville Convention. He then served as the only governor of the Southwest Territory and played a leading role in helping the territory gain admission to the union as the state of Tennessee. He was selected as one of Tennessee's initial United States Senators in 1796, serving until he was expelled for treason in 1797.Terry Weeks, "William Blount," Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, 2010. Accessed 10 September 2012.
Born to a prominent North Carolina family, Blount served as a paymaster during the American Revolutionary War. He was elected to the North Carolina legislature in 1781, where he remained in one role or another for most of the decade, except for two terms in the Continental Congress in 1782 and 1786. Blount pushed efforts in the legislature to open the lands west of the Appalachians to settlement. As governor of the Southwest Territory, he negotiated the Treaty of Holston in 1791, bringing thousands of acres of Indian lands under U.S. control.
An aggressive land speculator, Blount gradually acquired millions of acres in Tennessee and the Trans-Appalachian West. His risky land investments left him in debt, and in the 1790s, he conspired of his own accord to have Great Britain take over Spanish-controlled Louisiana and Florida in the hope of boosting local land prices. When the conspiracy was uncovered in 1797, he was expelled from the Senate and became the first federal official to face impeachment."To Arrest an Impeached Senator." United States Senate website. Accessed 10 September 2012. However, Blount remained popular in Tennessee and served in the state senate during the last years of his life.
Early life Blount was born on Easter Sunday at Rosefield, the home of his maternal grandfather, John Gray, in Windsor, Province of North Carolina. He was the eldest child of Jacob Blount (1726–1789) and Barbara Gray Blount. The Blounts had gradually risen to prominence in the first half of the 18th century as William's grandfather and father had steadily built the family fortune. In the years following William's birth, Jacob Blount built a plantation, Blount Hall, in Pitt County, North Carolina.
Outside of tutors, William and his brothers had little formal education but were involved in their father's business ventures at a young age. Jacob Blount raised livestock, cotton, and tobacco, produced turpentine, and operated a mill and horse racing track for the local community. His land acquisitions, consisting of several thousand acres by the end of the 1760s, taught his sons the profit potential of aggressive land speculation.
During the Regulator Movement of the late 1760s and early 1770s, the Blounts remained loyal to the North Carolina government. Jacob Blount, a justice of the peace, furnished Governor William Tryon's army with supplies as it marched to defeat the Regulators at the Battle of Alamance in 1771. William Blount, along with his brothers Jacob and John Gray Blount, were among Tryon's soldiers, though they saw little action.
American Revolution
As tensions heightened between Great Britain and the Thirteen Colonies in the 1770's, the Blount family gradually aligned themselves with the Patriot cause. In April 1776, Jacob Blount was appointed paymaster of the 2nd North Carolina Regiment, and William Blount was appointed paymaster for the New Bern District Brigade of the North Carolina militia the following month. William's brothers, Reading and Thomas Blount, accepted commissions in the Continental Army. The Blounts provided provisions for the Continental Army and militias, and they profited both financially and politically from the war. They also began looking westward, with John Gray Blount acquiring a portion of Richard Henderson's Transylvania Purchase in mid-1776.
In December 1776, William Blount was appointed paymaster of the 3rd North Carolina Regiment and spent the first few months of 1777 with the unit as it marched north to join George Washington's forces in the defense of Philadelphia. In November 1777, political rivals in the North Carolina legislature removed Blount as paymaster, though he was restored to the office in April 1778. He helped organize regiments for the defense of Charleston, South Carolina, which fell to the British in 1780 during the siege of Charleston. William's brother, Thomas, was captured during the siege.
In early 1780, Blount was appointed official commissary to General Horatio Gates, who had arrived in North Carolina to command Patriot forces in the South. Blount was present at Gates's defeat at the Battle of Camden in August 1780 and in the confusion of battle lost $300,000 intended to be used to pay Patriot soldiers.
North Carolina politics and the Continental Congress
In late 1779, Blount ran for the vacant New Bern state House of Commons seat against Richard Dobbs Spaight in a campaign described by Blount's biographer, William Masterson, as "violent in an age of fierce elections." Spaight won by a narrow margin, but Blount successfully convinced election officials that voter fraud had occurred, and the election was voided. In the weeks following the Battle of Camden, Blount again ran for the seat and this time was successful. He took his seat in the House of Commons in January 1781.
In May 1782, Blount was elected one of North Carolina's four delegates to the Continental Congress. At the Congress's 1782 session, Blount helped defeat a poll tax and a liquor tax and opposed a reduction of the army. He also agreed to consider a land cession act to satisfy North Carolina's massive tax debt owed to the Confederation. Blount left Philadelphia in January 1783 and resigned from Congress three months later to accept an appointment to the North Carolina House of Commons steering committee.
During the House's 1783 and 1784 sessions, Blount introduced several bills that would prove critical in the early history of what is now Tennessee. One bill, known as the "Land Grab Act," opened the state's lands west of the Appalachians (i.e., the parts of Tennessee not under Indian domain) to settlement. One individual who took advantage of this act was militia captain James White, who acquired a tract of land that would later become Knoxville, Tennessee. Another bill rendered soldiers with at least two years of military service eligible for land grants. Some soldiers used their grants to acquire land in the Tennessee Valley, while others sold their grants to the Blounts and other land speculators. In 1784, Blount sponsored a bill establishing the city of Nashville in what was then the Cumberland settlements.
In June 1784, Blount sponsored another bill critical to early Tennessee history—a bill calling for North Carolina lands west of the Appalachians (i.e., modern Tennessee) to be ceded to the Continental Congress to satisfy the state's share of the nation's tax burden. The bill was hotly contested but passed by a 52-43 margin. Opponents of the cession gained control of the House and repealed the act in October, but not before a movement by the Tennessee Valley residents to establish a separate state, known as the State of Franklin, had gained momentum. A friend of both North Carolina Governor Richard Caswell and Franklinite leader John Sevier, Blount waffled on the Franklin issue for the next four years.
Despite the cession debacle, Blount was elected to the Continental Congress for the 1785 session. As he prepared to depart, however, word came that the Congress had appointed a commission to negotiate a new treaty, eventually known as the Treaty of Hopewell, with the southern tribes. Fearing the new treaty would be unfavorable to North Carolina, Blount, with Governor Caswell's blessing, headed south in hopes of negotiating a separate treaty for the state. He arrived too late, however, and the Hopewell Treaty negotiated by the commissioners returned a sizeable portion of western lands claimed by North Carolina speculators to the Indians. Fearing a backlash back home, Blount merely signed the treaty as a witness.
In March 1786, Blount hurried to New York to take his seat in the Continental Congress, hoping to prevent ratification of the Hopewell Treaty, but once again he arrived too late, and the treaty was ratified. Disappointed, he went home, but with anger rising over his handling of the Hopewell Treaty, he returned to the Continental Congress in November 1786. In March 1787, Blount was chosen as one of five delegates to represent North Carolina at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Blount arrived at the convention on June 20, after debates had already begun.James Madison, Gaillard Hund and James Brown Scott (eds.), Notes on the Debates in the Federal Convention (Oxford University Press, 1920). Accessed at the Yale University Avalon Project website, 11 September 2012. He sent a copy of the Virginia Plan (in violation of Convention rules), and, expressing pessimism in the Convention's outcome, he stayed for just a few days before heading to New York to rejoin the Continental Congress in early July. He was present for the Congress's debate and passage of the Northwest Ordinance and heard Henry Knox's report recommending a North Carolina land cession. By August 7, however, he had returned to the Convention in Philadelphia for final debates. Still reeling from the fallout from the Hopewell Treaty, he was wary of signing the final document but was finally convinced by Gouverneur Morris to do so.
Confident that North Carolina would gain more than it would lose with the new Constitution, Blount returned home to campaign for its ratification. Elected to the North Carolina Senate from Pitt County in 1788 and 1789, Blount and his allies successfully countered attempts by anti-federalists Willie Jones and William Lenoir to thwart adoption of the new Constitution, and North Carolina voted for its ratification in November 1789. On December 1, the state legislature voted to cede its trans-Appalachian lands to the new federal government. Blount sought one of North Carolina's inaugural U.S. Senate seats in November 1789 but was defeated by Benjamin Hawkins.
Southwest Territory
Congress accepted North Carolina's western cession, which consisted of what is now Tennessee, on April 2, 1790. In May, the Southwest Territory was created from the new cession and was to be governed under the Northwest Ordinance. On June 8, President George Washington appointed Blount governor of the new territory. Blount visited Washington at Mount Vernon on September 18 and was sworn in by Supreme Court Justice James Iredell two days later. In October 1790, he set up a temporary capital at William Cobb's house, Rocky Mount, in what is now Piney Flats, Tennessee, and began organizing a government for the new territory.Walter Durham, "The Southwest Territory: Progression to Statehood," Journal of East Tennessee History, Vol. 62 (1990), p. 7.