Dixon's father, Thomas J. F. Dixon Sr., son of an English–Scottish father and a German mother, was a well-known Baptist minister, as well as a landowner and slave-owner. His maternal grandfather, Frederick Hambright (possible namesake for the fictional North Carolina town of Hambright in which "The Leopard's Spots" takes place), was a German Palatine immigrant who fought in both the local militia and in the North Carolina Line of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Dixon Sr. had inherited slaves and property through his first wife's father, which were valued at $100,000 in 1862.