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Back to article: JOHN SEVIER (1745-1815)

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SEVIER, JOHN (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. In 1784, when North Carolina first ceded its western lands to the Federal government, he took part in the revolt of the western settlements; he was