John Tipton was an American frontiersman and statesman.
Background
John was born on August 15, 1730 in Baltimore County, Md. He was the son of Jonathan and Elizabeth Tipton and the uncle of John Tipton. When he was about twenty years of age he removed to Frederick County, Va. , with his father, and settled on Cedar Creek.
Career
Tipton's services in Virginia extended over a period of more than thirty years. He was instrumental in founding Woodstock, in Dunmore (later Shenandoah) County, was a vestryman and justice of the peace in Beckford Parish, cooperated with John Peter Muhlenberg in organizing the Revolutionary meeting at Woodstock, June 16, 1774, and signed the resolutions drawn up on that day.
He served under Andrew Lewis in Dunmore's War and participated in the battle at Point Pleasant in October 1774, became a member of the committee of safety and correspondence and a recruiting officer for his county, and served as a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses from 1774 to 1781.
He represented Dunmore County at the Virginia Convention at Williamsburg on May 6, 1776, supported four or five sons as Revolutionary soldiers, and acted as lieutenant-colonel of militia, commissioner, and high sheriff of Shenandoah County during the war.
Late in 1783 he removed to the Watauga settlement in North Carolina (later part of Tennessee), where, after some vacillation, he soon crystallized his political views in opposition to John Sevier, and the "State of Franklin. " His election from Washington County to the North Carolina Assembly in 1785 precipitated the first conflict with Sevier, then governor of the State of Franklin, and Tipton, as colonel of the Washington County militia, and justice of the court, followed it up by strenuous punitive measures. The two men became bitter and implacable enemies. Innumerable opportunities for clashes rose out of a chaotic situation in which two sets of courts, two sets of local officials, and two "officially" authorized bodies of militia tried to function. Armed raiding parties, first from one side and then the other, carried off the court records and official papers of the opposition, and for three years the community was in a state of civil war. Tipton's side was clearly in the minority; when the petition of William Cocke, representing Franklin's case for separate recognition, was refused in the North Carolina Assembly, Franklinites hanged Tipton in effigy.
Upon one occasion the two leaders met, and, after long and spirited argument, Tipton finally set upon Sevier, and, as an early historian so quaintly put it, "began to annoy him with his hands clinched . " A compromise arranged by Evan Shelby on behalf of the conciliatory North Carolina government failed, and strife subsided, with Tiptonites victorious, only after a pitched battle in 1788 at Tipton's fortress-like home near Jonesboro.
The adoption of the federal Constitution brought about the final collapse of the State of Franklin; but Tipton's enthusiasm for a central government was bounded by state lines, and he voted against adoption in the Assembly.
Sevierites were ultimately elected to all offices in the Washington district, but Tipton's great native ability and his experience were once more made use of when Tennessee became a territory; he represented his county in the first assembly in 1793, and in 1794 and 1795.
He and Sevier were among the first trustees of Washington College at Salem in 1795. He died at his home on Sinking Creek at the age of eighty-three.
Achievements
Politics
His tactics, those of a strong, self-reliant, ambitious, hot-headed, unrelenting dispenser of justice, were nowhere popular, although his long record testifies to the fact that his neighbors respected him highly.
He helped to draft the constitution, when Tennessee became a state in 1796, and was a senator in the first and second state legislatures. This was his last public service.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Sevier's early biographer, James B. Gilmore, was particularly hostile toward Tipton, and historian James Phelan, in his 1888 History of Tennessee, described Tipton as a temperamental and jealous individual who "lacked intellectual force. "
Connections
Sometime before 1753 he was married to Mary Butler, who bore him nine sons. After her death in 1776, he was married on July 22, 1779, to Martha (Denton) Moore, the widow of Dr. James Moore. They had about six children. From John Tipton's numerous progeny stem many of the Tiptons whose names appeared in almost every frontier community of the Shenandoah Valley, the transmontane districts of North Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio, and Indiana.
Tipton's eldest son, Samuel (1752–1833), is considered the founder of Elizabethton, Tennessee. He deeded the land on which the city was founded in the 1790s.
Tipton's son, Jacob (1765–1791), was killed at St. Clair's Defeat in 1791. He was the second son to die in war. Tipton County, Tennessee, is named in Jacob's honor.
In the early 19th century, Tipton's son, William (1761–1849), known as "Fighting Billy, " acquired much of the land in Cades Cove, in the Great Smoky Mountains. Tipton's in-law, Joshua Jobe, convinced John Oliver to become the Cove's first white settler in 1818. The Tipton Place, built by Tipton's descendants in the 1880s, still stands along the Cades Cove Loop Road.
Tipton's great-nephew, John Tipton (1786–1839), fought at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. He was elected by the Indiana state legislature as a U. S. senator in the 1830s. He was a great-grandson of Tipton's uncle, William (1696–1726). Tipton County, Indiana; Tipton, Indiana, and Tipton, Iowa, are all named for him.