9 Apr. 1828–3 Mar. 1883
In 1864 and 1865 Dixon served as a judge of the Greene County court, although he had not been trained in law. Elected from Greene County, he served two terms (1868–69, 1869–70) in the North Carolina House of Representatives. In 1870, upon the death of the incumbent, David Heaton, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican, defeating his Democratic opponent, Dr. C. J. O'Hagan, by a vote of 14,076 to 12,333. He served in the closing days of the forty-second Congress, from 5 Dec. 1870 to 3 Mar. 1871, at the end of the first term of President Ulysses S. Grant. He did not seek election to a full term thereafter. Later that year he was appointed U.S. commissioner of claims, a post he held for two years (1871–73); he then returned to his farming interests in Greene County where he remained until his death. His only additional public activity was service as a delegate from Greene County to the North Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1875. He died eight years later, a month before his fifty-first birthday.
On 24 Dec. 1850 at Holly Grove, near Greenville, Pitt County, Dixon married Sallie A. E. Brown, daughter of Captain John S. Brown of the county. If they had children, their names are unknown, although one may have been Joseph Dixon from Fountain Hill who was a student at The University of North Carolina during 1882–84. The elder Dixon died in Pitt County near Fountain Hill, but it is not known whether he had been living there. He was buried in the Edwards Chapel Cemetery in Lenoir County.