A member of the Democratic-Republican Party, he played a leading role in Tennessee's pre-statehood period, both militarily and politically, and he was elected the state's first governor in 1796.

His father, who was of Spanish ancestry (the surname Sevier was an anglicization of the Portuguese Xavier[3]), had immigrated from England to Baltimore in 1740 and gradually made his way to the back country and Shenandoah Valley.

Some sources suggest Sevier served as a captain in the Virginia colonial militia, under George Washington, in Lord Dunmore's War in 1773 and 1774.

A band of Cherokee led by Dragging Canoe disagreed with the tribe's sale of communal lands, and began making threats against the settlers.

[8]: 64 With the outbreak of the American Revolution, in April 1775, the Wataugans, most of whom were sympathetic to the Patriot cause, organized the Washington District and formed a 13-member Committee of Safety.

After receiving word of an impending Cherokee invasion from Nancy Ward, the Nolichucky settlers fled to Fort Caswell, and Sevier soon followed.

On July 21, Old Abraham's forces reached Fort Caswell, which was garrisoned by 75 militia commanded by John Carter, with Sevier and James Robertson as subordinates.

Following the British victory, at the Battle of Camden, in August 1780, a detachment of Loyalists, under Major Patrick Ferguson, was dispatched to suppress Patriot activity in the mountains.

"[8]: 86  Sevier and Sullivan County militia colonel Isaac Shelby agreed to raise armies and march across the mountains to engage Ferguson.

On October 7, the Overmountain Men caught up with and surrounded Ferguson, who had entrenched his Loyalist forces atop Kings Mountain, near the present-day North Carolina-South Carolina border.

At the height of the battle, Sevier and Campbell charged the high point of the Loyalist position, giving the Overmountain men a foothold atop the mountain.

A few days later, he was joined by a contingent of Virginia militia led by Arthur Campbell, and the combined forces continued south, occupying the Cherokee town of Chota on December 25.

[9]: 193  Shortly afterward, he embarked on an expedition against the Cherokee Middle Towns, which lay on the other side of the mountains in the vicinity of modern Bryson City, North Carolina.

[9]: 193 In September 1782, Sevier set out on an expedition against Dragging Canoe and his band of Cherokee, who had become concentrated in a string of villages in northern Georgia and Alabama.

[9]: 208  Chief Oconostota helped negotiate peace between the newly founded America and the Cherokee people, bringing an end to the battles between the two nations.

[10] In June 1784, North Carolina, bowing to pressure, from the Continental Congress and eager to be rid of an expensive and unprofitable district, ceded its lands west of the Appalachian Mountains to the federal government.

[8]: 112  Though Sevier had popular support, a number of men from Washington County, led by John Tipton, remained loyal to North Carolina.

[12] As North Carolina and Franklin competed for the loyalties of the residents of the area, Sevier became involved in intrigues with Georgia to gain control of Cherokee lands in what is now northern Alabama.

[13]: 133–6 In the summer of 1788, several Kirke family settlers were killed by renegade Cherokee warriors, in Blount County, in what became known by European Americans as the "Nine Mile Creek Massacre".

But John Kirke, a member of the murdered family, attacked the delegation and killed several chiefs, including Old Tassel and Old Abraham of Chilhowee.

[13]: 139  In October, after Sevier attacked David Deaderick, a Jonesborough store owner, for refusing to sell him liquor, Tipton and his men captured the leader.

When the senate convened the Fayetteville Convention in November 1789, Sevier was a delegate from Greene County and worked to gain the North Carolina's ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

[8]: 144  The following year, President George Washington appointed Sevier to the Southwest Territory council, a body that operated similar to that of a state senate.

He consistently urged Congress and the Secretary of War (then responsible for relations with Native American tribes) to negotiate new treaties to that end, to extinguish Indian land claims and promote European-American settlement.

[14] In his book, The Lost State of Franklin, Kevin Barksdale says that Sevier was driven, at least in part, by a desire to acquire his own land claims in the trans-Appalachian region.

"[13]: 16  For nearly a century after his death, historians such as Ramsey and Oliver Perry Temple heaped unconditional praise upon Sevier and romanticized various events in his life.

[18][19] Later authors, such as Theodore Roosevelt (Winning of the West) and Samuel Cole Williams (History of the Lost State of Franklin), added a more objective perspective to accounts of this period.

[9]: 18n Several historians argue that the rivalry between John Sevier and Andrew Jackson was the root of the factionalism that divided East Tennessee and the rest of the state in subsequent decades.

Middle Tennessee had numerous planters and slaveowners, who cultivated commodity crops such as tobacco and hemp based on the labor of enslaved African Americans.

They had ten children: Joseph, James, John, Elizabeth, Sarah, Mary Ann, Valentine (namesake of the paternal grandfather), Rebecca, Richard, and Nancy.