Named as a college trustee in the 1794 charter establishing Blount College, James White purchased four thousand acres in what is now Knox County and, with James Cowan and others, established a fort (White’s Station) in 1786. Five years later, he laid out a town that eventually became downtown Knoxville. A member of Samuel Carrick’s congregation at Lebanon in the Forks Presbyterian Church, he gave the land for Knoxville’s First Presbyterian Church and also donated the land for county buildings of Knox County. He sold the land for the first Blount College building to the trustees for $30.
He was a member of the legislatures of the State of Franklin and the State of North Carolina. He represented North Carolina at the convention to ratify the US Constitution and was also a representative to the Tennessee Constitutional Convention in 1796. Elected senator in the First General Assembly of Tennessee, he became Speaker of the Senate in 1797. He resigned from the Tennessee Senate in 1800 to allow William Blount to occupy the seat, and he returned to the state Senate after Blount’s death in 1800. He was the commander of the “Immortal 38” in the defense of Knoxville in 1793 against an estimated one thousand Cherokee and Creek warriors, and he served as a general with Andrew Jackson during the Creek War of 1813.