| William Blount 1749-1800 |
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Although treaties with the Indian people were usually negotiated in good faith, the Congress found itself politically unwilling and actually unable to halt illegal settlement of Indian lands by a growing number of American settlers. These treaties are attempts by Congress to establish friendship between Congress and the Shawnee and Cherokee nations; the Southern states, as typified by North Carolinian delegate William Blount, objected so violently to the treatise's moderate land claims that the agreed-upon boundaries became impossible to enforce. |
William Blount was the great-grandson of
Thomas Blount, who came from England to Virginia soon after 1660 and settled on a North
Carolina plantation. William, the eldest in a large family, was born in 1749 while his
mother was visiting his grandfather's Rosefield estate, on the site of present Windsor
near Pamlico Sound. The youth apparently received a good education. Shortly after the War for Independence began, in 1776, Blount enlisted as a paymaster in the North Carolina forces. Two years later, he wed Mary Grainier (Granger); of their six children who reached adulthood, one son also became prominent in Tennessee politics. Blount spent most of the remainder of his life in public office. He sat in the lower house of the North Carolina legislature (1780-84), including service as speaker, as well as in the upper (1788-90). In addition, he took part in national politics, serving in the Continental Congress in 1782-83 and 1786-87. Appointed as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention at the age
of 38, Blount was absent for more than a month because he chose to attend the Continental
Congress on behalf of his state. He said almost nothing in the debates and signed the
Constitution reluctantly--only, he said, to make it "the unanimous act of the States
in Convention." Nonetheless, he favored his state's ratification of the completed
document. |
