McKnight represented Currituck at the New Bern Convention of 1775, and there refusing to sign the document approving the Continental Congress at Philadelphia, and withdrawing from the Convention, he was accused of being a Tory by the House and denounced as a traitor to his country.
Though in an open letter to Joseph Jones, of Pasquotank, McKnight indignantly denied the charges against his loyalty to America, the Halifax Convention of 1770 ordered his estate to be confiscated and rented out for benefit of the State, by Isaac Gregory, William Ferebee, and Abram Harrison. An amusing story is told of how McKnight acquired one of his plantations in Currituck. John Durant, the Chief of the Yeopims, had very astutely made it known to his own braves, as well as to his white neighbors, that the visions that visited him in his somnolent hours must somehow, somewhere, if within the range of possibility, materialize into visible, tangible realities, and that those who could, and did not help in their materialization, would incur the anger of the great chief. Now it was the habit of the wily red man, whenever he greatly desired to acquire a new possession, to dream that the owner of the coveted article had presented it to him. Having dwelt near the paleface for a number of years, the old chief adopted the white man's mode of dress to a certain extent. Needing, or coveting, a new coat, he very conveniently dreamed that McKnight, who had kept a trading store on Indian Ridge, gave him a bolt of bright cloth which appealed strongly to his innate love of bright colors. Presenting himself at the trader's store, he related his dream to the owner of the cloth; and McKnight not daring to incur the enmity of the Indian by refusing to let him have the coveted article, presented it to him forthwith; but McKnight, equally as shrewd as the chief, soon did some dreaming on his own account, and in his vision he saw himself the owner of some four hundred acres of land in Indian Ridge, the property of John Durant. So with due ceremony he approached the chief and solemnly related his dream; and the old Indian, realizing that in the Anglo-Saxon he had met his match--nay, his superior in cunning--made over to McKnight the land.