SEVIER, JOHN (1745-1815), American frontiersman, and first governor of Tennessee, was born in Rockingham county, Va., Sept. 23, 1745. He settled on the Watauga river west of the Alleghanies. When this territory was annexed to Tennessee in 1776, Sevier was elected as its representative to the provincial congress which drew up the first state constitution. He served as captain in Lord Dunmore's War in 1774. He took an active part in the battle of King's Mountains in 1780, and in the following year he served under General Francis Marion against the British in the Carolinas and Georgia. In 1780 he defeated the Cherokees at Boyd's Creek. When North Carolina ceded her western lands to the Federal government in 1784, Sevier took part in the revolt against the parent state which resulted in the formation of the separate state of Franklin and was elected its first governor. By 1786 the Conservative party had regained control, and Sevier was tried for high treason and convicted, but was subsequently par doned. In 1789 he was a member of the North Carolina Senate,
and in 1790-91 of the National Hotise of Representatives. After the final cession of its western territory by North Carolina to the United States in 1790 he was appointed brigadier-general of militia for the eastern district of the "Territory South of the Ohio"; and when Tennessee was admitted into the Union as a state, Sevier became its first governor (1796-1801) and was governor again in 1803-09. He was a member of the National House of Representatives in 1811-15, and then was commissioner to determine the boundary of Creek lands in Georgia. He died near Fort Decatur (Ga.), Sept. 24, 1815.
See J. R. Gilmore, The Rear-Guard of the Revolution (New York, 1896), and John Sevier as a Commonwealth Builder (New York, 1887) ; errors in Gilmore's books are pointed out in Theodore Roose velt's The Winning of the West (New York, 1894-96).