[1] He attended the county schools and Edenton Academy in Georgia, and moved to Alabama in 1844, graduating from Randolph-Macon College in 1840 and being admitted to the bar in 1841.

[2] He practiced law in Milledgeville, Ga. beginning in that year,[3] and developed an association with Robert S. Lanier, whose son Clifford later married Clopton's daughter.

[6] During his term he was a strong supporter of states' rights; in a speech delivered during the struggle for the Speakership of the 36th Congress, he said the following: "We do not desire war.

[7] Clopton withdrew from the United States House of Representatives in 1861 and enlisted as a private in the Confederate Army in the Twelfth Alabama Infantry for one year.

He was among a group who wrote to the Alabama governor petitioning for the pardon of Robert Wynn, doorkeeper of the provisional Congress, who had been convicted of assault with intent to murder but later reconciled with his victim.