JOHN

See also:

• JOHN SEVIER (1745-1815)

SEVIER (1745-1815)  , American frontiersman, first governor of Tennessee, was born in Rockingham county, Virginia, on the 23rd of September 1745, of Huguenot ancestry, the family name being Xavier . He settled on the Watauga on the western slope of the Alleghanies in r772, and served as a captain in Lord Dunmore's War in 1774 . Early in 1776 the Watauga settlements were annexed to North Carolina, and Sevier, who from the beginning had been a member of the Watauga government, now represented the district in the provincial congress, which met at Halifax in November-December 1776 and adopted the first state constitution, and in 1777 he was a member of the state House of Commons . He took part in the campaign of 178o against the British, especially distinguishing himself in the battle of King's Mountain, where he led the right wing . In December 178o he defeated the Cherokees at Boyd's Creek (in the present Sevier county, Tennessee), laying waste their country during the following spring . Later in the same year (1781), under General Francis Marion, he fought the British in the Carolinas and Georgia .