page_title: William Blount
section_title: North Carolina politics and the Continental Congress
hierarchical_section_title: William Blount / North Carolina politics and the Continental Congress
caption_attribution_description: English: A key identifying the subjects of Howard Chandler Christy's 1940 painting Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, a well-known work which hangs in the United States Capitol building (purchased from the painter in 1819)
context_page_description: William Blount was an American statesman and land speculator who signed the United States Constitution. 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 Fayetteville. 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.
  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.
context_section_description: 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 the 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.
  In spite of 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 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 1787, he was a candidate for president of the Congress, but Arthur St. Clair was chosen instead.
  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.   He sent Caswell a copy of the Virginia Plan (in violation of Convention rules), and, expressing pessimism in t
caption: Key, William Blounty, No 18
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