William Blount (/blʌnt/ BLUNT; April 6, 1749 – March 21, 1800)[1] was an American politician, landowner and Founding Father who was one of the signers of the Constitution of the United States.

[2] Blount was born on Easter Sunday at Rosefield, the home of his maternal grandfather, John Gray, in Windsor, Province of North Carolina.

The Blounts had gradually risen to prominence in the first half of the 18th century as William's grandfather and father had steadily built the family fortune.

Jacob Blount raised livestock, cotton, and tobacco, produced turpentine, and operated a mill and horse racing track for the local community.

Jacob Blount, a justice of the peace, furnished Governor William Tryon's army with supplies as it marched to defeat the Regulators at the Battle of Alamance in 1771.

[6]: 38 In early 1780, Blount was appointed official commissary to General Horatio Gates, who had arrived in North Carolina to command Patriot forces in the South.

He also agreed to consider a land cession act to satisfy North Carolina's massive tax debt owed to the Confederation.

[6]: 57–59  Blount left Philadelphia in January 1783 and resigned from Congress three months later to accept an appointment to the North Carolina House of Commons steering committee.

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.

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.

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.

[6]: 126  He was present for the Congress's debate and passage of the Northwest Ordinance and heard Henry Knox's report recommending a North Carolina land cession.

Blount visited Washington at Mount Vernon on September 18 and was sworn in by Supreme Court Justice James Iredell two days later.

[6]: 182–3  In October 1790, he set up a temporary capital at William Cobb's house, Rocky Mount, in what is now Piney Flats, Tennessee, and began organizing a government for the new territory.

Blount managed to gain their trust, however, by recommending John Sevier and James Robertson as brigadier generals of the territorial militia, and appointing Landon Carter, Stockley Donelson and Gilbert Christian as colonels.

Blount ordered a state constitutional convention to be held at Knoxville in January 1796, which he personally attended as part of the Knox County delegation.

Blount's brother, Thomas (a Congressman from North Carolina), along with James Madison, convinced the house to vote for Tennessee's admission to the Union on May 6.

[6]: 292–5 Throughout the 1780s and 1790s, William Blount and his brothers gradually bought up large amounts of western lands, acquiring over 2.5 million acres by the mid-1790s.

[6]: 301  Blount partnered with Philadelphia physician Nicholas Romayne in an attempt to sell land to British investors, but their efforts were unsuccessful.

[6]: 271 Following France's defeat of Spain in the War of the Pyrenees, land speculators, already on the financial brink, worried that the French would eventually gain control of Spanish-controlled Louisiana and shut off American access to the Mississippi River.

[6]: 302  In hopes of preventing this, Blount and his friend, Indian agent John Chisholm, concocted a plan to allow the British to gain control of Spanish-controlled Louisiana and Florida, expecting them in turn to give free access to both New Orleans and the Mississippi River to American merchants.

The plan called for American territorial militias, with the aid of the British Royal Navy, to attack New Madrid, New Orleans, and Pensacola.

[6]: 307 To help carry out the plan, Blount recruited Romayne, who never showed more than lukewarm support for the idea, and Knoxville merchant James Carey.

In April 1797, Carey was at the Tellico Blockhouse near Knoxville when he gave a government agent a letter from Blount outlining the conspiracy.

On July 7, Blount, after consulting with attorneys Alexander Dallas and Jared Ingersoll, testified before the committee and denied writing the letter.

At one session on January 30, a bizarre brawl erupted between two congressmen, Matthew Lyon and Roger Griswold, in connection with the hearings.

[11] The unraveling of the conspiracy destroyed Blount's reputation at the national level and touched off a series of accusations between Federalists and Anti-federalists.

Most of his old Tennessee allies, among them Andrew Jackson, Joseph Anderson, James White, Charles McClung and William C. C. Claiborne, remained loyal, and helped repair his image among locals.

[6]: 339  In October 1798, William Blount was elected to Knox County's state senate seat, following James White's resignation.

A life-size bronze statue of Blount is part of the "Signers' Hall" exhibit at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.