WILLIAM RICHARDSON DAVIE AND THE UNIVERSITY OF THE
PEOPLE:
IRONIES AND PARADOXES
Harry L. Watson
2006 Gladys Coates University History Lecture
April 18, 2006
The University of North Carolina has officially recognized the Hon.
William Richardson Davie as its “Founder and principal supporter”
since 1811, when the Trustees awarded him their first honorary degree.
But despite that early and well-deserved tribute, it is not easy today
to recapture the meaning of Davie’s life and work. Artists have
left us his portrait and panegyrists have described his character,
but few of our Founder’s personal papers survive today to document
his thoughts and actions. How do we find the man beneath the powdered
wig, the personality behind glowing description like this one, left
us by Judge Archibald DeBow Murphey only seven years after Davie’s
death?
Davie was a tall, elegant man in his person, graceful and commanding
in his manners. His voice was mellow, and adapted to the expression
of every passion; his mind comprehensive yet slow in its operations,
when compared with [a rival orator]; his style was magnificent and
flowing; he had a greatness of manner in public speaking which suited
his style, and gave to his speeches an imposing effect. He was a
laborious student, arranged his discourses with care, and where
the subject merited his genius, poured forth a torrent of eloquence
that astonished and enraptured his audience.(1)
The challenge is particularly acute in an era marked by a deep gulf
between popular and academic views of Davie and his peers, the Founding
Fathers not only of our university but of our republic itself. On
the one hand, biographies of men like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton
are remarkably attractive to the reading public and figure prominently
on best-seller lists. The popularity of these works testifies to a
deep-seated hunger for the wisdom and disinterested statesmanship
that the Founders represent for many. On the other, many professional
students of early America would like to shift our attention from prominent
leaders to more ordinary Americans—“the people out of
doors” contemporaries called them—whose contributions
to America’s founding took place far from constitutional conventions
and university classrooms, commonly in streets, taverns, parades,
or boisterous demonstrations around a liberty pole. Only two years
ago, UNC Press published a book entitled Beyond the Founders that
served as a kind of manifesto for this more democratized view of early
republican politics, and won widespread academic praise when it appeared.(2)
From that perspective, another look at Davie must seem very out of
place.
Here on our own campus, moreover, we cherish the democratic values
symbolized by label “University of the People.” Even so,
some of us struggle with the knowledge that these values were not
always shared by our leaders from the distant past, some of whom we
honor on the modern campus landscape. In this intellectual environment,
what are we to say about the paradoxical William Richardson Davie:
soldier, statesman, Federalist, slaveholder, convinced elitist, and
founder of the University of the People?
Let me start with the highlights of Davie’s life. William Richardson
Davie was born in northern England on June 22, 1756, so we are observing
the 250th anniversary of this birth this season. The Davie family
had Scottish origins and boasted a coat of arms, but unlike the most
privileged families in Britain, did not live on a landed estate but
engaged in trade and the manufacture of linen. (3)
Davie’s maternal uncle, William Richardson (for whom he was
evidently named) was a central figure in his nephew’s life.
Richardson was a Presbyterian minister who left Britain for America
in the early 1750s and settled in the Old Waxhaws district on the
border of North and South Carolina, not far from the frontier village
of Charlotte. This was a Scots-Irish community, settled by migrants
whose ancestors had originated in southern Scotland, migrated to the
north of Ireland in the seventeenth century, thence Pennsylvania in
the eighteenth, and finally south to the Carolina backcountry. The
Rev. Mr. Richardson took charge of the Presbyterian church in the
Waxhaws and persuaded his sister and her family to join him. Archibald
and Mary Richardson Davie thus came to America in 1764, when our future
founder was eight years old. The elder Davie took up lands adjoining
his brother-in-law’s farm in what is now Lancaster County, South
Carolina and gave up the linen business for life as a frontier farmer.
Here we see our first paradox: though Davie became a leader of North
Carolina’s fledging aristocracy, his roots were elsewhere, in
a family of middling Dissenters who had come to America for economic
opportunity.
The childless Rev. Richardson took quite an interest in his namesake,
seeing to his education at a nearby Charlotte academy and expressing
the hope that Davie might succeed him in the pulpit. Though Richardson
died when Davie was only sixteen, and the youth eventually abandoned
any thought of the ministry, something of that ambition may have governed
the decision—highly unusual for that day and time—to enroll
the young man in the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University)
when he turned eighteen in the fall of 1774. There Davie received
the training in Greek, Latin, and sound theology that would have equipped
him for life as a Presbyterian divine.
It was not to be. The young man’s preparation must have been
excellent, for he received his degree in 1776 after two short years
of study. As we shall see, however, Davie’s mature religious
views tended to rationalism, and events that summer did not encourage
a contemplative career. As the War for Independence intensified, the
young man alternated between periods of legal study and military service
until 1779, when he received a law license and a cavalry commission
almost simultaneously. Soon afterwards, Lord Charles Cornwallis invaded
the South and the center of fighting shifted to the Carolina backcountry.
Davie rose steadily through the Continental officer corps, finishing
the war as a colonel and commissary general for the army of General
Nathanael Greene.
The Revolutionary War in North Carolina was a desperate guerilla conflict
with intense partisan fighting and widespread charges of atrocities
between rival bands of Whig and Loyalist militias. Struggling to keep
his army fed and supplied without resorting to strong-arm tactics
that would surely have backfired, Davie mastered business techniques
and clearly learned the importance of a centralized authority that
could impose order and stable conditions for trade. Military service
also brought Davie personal rewards. In 1780 he married Sarah Jones,
daughter of his commanding officer, General Allen Jones of Northampton
County, North Carolina. Military distinction, college education, personal
talents, and alliance with one of the leading planter families of
eastern North Carolina were clearly crucial personal developments
that vaulted William Davie out of the ranks of middling frontiersmen
and into the forefront of early republican leadership. And here we
have a second paradox: though reared on the South Carolina frontier,
Davie joined the gentry of eastern North Carolina and became one of
its foremost representatives.
As fighting gradually tapered off after Yorktown, William and Sarah
Davie settled near the bride’s home, in the village of Halifax,
county seat of Halifax County, and Davie began to practice law in
a community that was dramatically different from his childhood home
in South Carolina’s remote Piedmont. Halifax County is in northeastern
North Carolina near the Virginia border, and enjoyed fertile soil,
moderately good transportation via the Roanoke River, and a flourishing
plantation economy. Supported by a large population of African American
slaves, the gentry of town and county built handsome homes, and fostered
commodious taverns, a Masonic lodge, frequent horse races and cockfights,
and eventually a school and a newspaper. Before the establishment
of Raleigh, North Carolina’s peripatetic General Assembly occasionally
held its annual meetings there. With connections established by his
fortunate marriage, Davie quickly built up a flourishing legal practice
and began to accumulate the lands and slaves to create his own plantation.
Political and economic conditions would not allow the young lawyer
to concentrate exclusively on his private business, however. In North
Carolina, the American Revolution had been launched and led by a colonial
elite who had recruited reluctant citizens with a series of democratizing
reforms.(4) To their chagrin, the reforms had succeeded
too well, leaving the post-Revolutionary General Assembly in the hands
of self-made leaders who did not share the financial interests, educated
culture, or conservative values of Davie and his father-in-law. Under
their leadership, stay laws impeded the collection of debts, an inflated
currency left creditors fuming, and the confiscation of Loyalist property
in defiance of the peace treaty destabilized titles to property. In
modern language, some might say that too much democracy had become
bad for business. In the words of men like contemporary Hillsborough
merchant James Hogg, “a sett of unprincipled men, who sacrifice
everything to their popularity and private views, seem to have acquired
too much influence in all our Assemblies.”(5)
William R. Davie began to combat these conditions in 1784, when he
won his first term in the lower house of the General Assembly. He
continued to do so as a leader of the legislature’s Conservative
minority for the remainder of the 1780s. To use the terms introduced
by historian Jackson Turner Main, Davie and his colleagues were North
Carolina’s “Cosmopolitans,” influenced by college
education, Continental army service, and family connections to see
the value of a centralized government, an independent judiciary, and
stable, long-distance trade. Their opponents were the “Localists,”
who usually came from more circumscribed backgrounds and whose policies
favored local government and the interests of small farmers and artisans
over planters, merchants, and lawyers.(6)
In North Carolina as elsewhere in the new nation, Cosmopolitans were
outnumbered in post-Revolutionary state governments, and sought relief
through the creation of a stronger federal government that could overrule
the power of supposedly irresponsible, Localist-dominated state legislatures.
Their opportunity came in 1787, when the Confederation Congress summoned
a convention to Philadelphia, ostensibly to consider changes in the
Articles of Confederation, but actually to draft an entirely new frame
of governance. Davie won a place as one of North Carolina’s
five delegates.
Perhaps overawed by even more distinguished delegations from Virginia
and South Carolina, North Carolina’s delegates took a very minor
role in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Davie’s most
significant contribution was deeply revealing, however, and concerned
the place of slavery in the new government. As we all remember, the
delegates argued bitterly over how to treat slaves when they apportioned
power and obligations among the nation’s free inhabitants. States
with large numbers of slaves wanted to count them for purposes of
representation in Congress and the Electoral College but not for purposes
of taxation. States with few slaves naturally wanted the exact opposite
policy.
On July 12, when the exhausted delegates had apparently reached an
impasse, William R. Davie rose briefly and denounced those who would,
as he put it, “deprive the Southern States of any share of Representation
for their blacks.” According to James Madison’s careful
notes, Davie “was sure North Carolina would never confederate
on any terms that did not rate them at least as 3/5. If the Eastern
States meant therefore to exclude them altogether the business was
at an end.”(7) In other words, Davie spoke
resolutely for slaveholding interests, but unlike more obdurate delegates
from South Carolina, he signaled his flexibility and willingness to
compromise. Soon afterwards, the delegates resolved their impasse
by applying the three-fifths ratio to both taxation and representation.
We will never know if Davie was bluffing when he threatened a southern
walkout from the convention, but his intervention left an ambiguous
legacy. The famous three-fifths compromise may have preserved the
Union for its first seven decades, but it did so by giving slaveholders
the political tools to keep federal policy steadfastly proslavery
until 1860.
Davie’s participation in the remainder of the Convention remained
minor, so much so that he decided to leave Philadelphia early, without
signing the final draft, in order to get back home for more pressing
(and better paid) work in North Carolina’s Superior Courts.
But if Davie cut short his work as a Framer, he undoubtedly rejoiced
that the new instrument of government settled all major public controversies
in postwar North Carolina in favor of his Conservative or Cosmopolitan
faction. The Constitution’s fine print prevents state legislatures
from issuing paper money or interfering with private contracts. It
makes federal treaties the supreme law of the land, putting a stop
to North Carolina’s confiscations of Tory property. Withal it
created an enormously powerful and distant central government which
isolated farmers reasonably feared they could never control. As one
North Carolina Antifederalist would later complain, “It appears
to me to be a scheme to reduce this government to an aristocracy.”
More pointedly, one Federalist reported, “the common people
have unhappily taken up the notion that the system is formed for commerce
and not for them.” (8)
Though he mostly stayed on the sidelines at Philadelphia, Davie threw
himself into the ratification struggle in North Carolina. He represented
Halifax at the state ratifying convention which met at Hillsborough
in 1788 and argued strenuously for the Constitution before a hostile
and mostly shut-mouthed Antifederalist majority. There the subject
of slavery came up again. This time, Davie not only defended the three-fifths
compromise but tellingly betrayed his impatience with those he viewed
as his intellectual and political inferiors. In Philadelphia, slaveholders
like Davie had demanded at least three-fifths representation for slaves
in order to increase their own power in congress, and were willing
to increase their taxes to do so. Speaking for heavily Quaker Guilford
County, however, delegate William Goudy would have none of this, mixing
racial resentment with a sharp accusation that slaveholders would
gain all the benefits of increased representation while shifting the
extra tax burden to the plain folk. “I wish not to be represented
with negroes,” he objected, “especially if it increases
my [tax] burthens.”
Davie’s reply was scathing. “I wonder to see gentlemen
so precipitate and hasty on a subject of such awful importance,”
he began, in words dripping with sarcasm. “It ought to be considered,
that some of us are slow of apprehension, or not having those quick
conceptions, and luminous understandings, of which other gentlemen
may be possessed.” Laboriously, Davie then explained that he
and the rest of North Carolina’s delegates had been anxious
to increase the South’s power by any means possible, and that
counting and taxing slaves was the only way to do it. In passing,
Davie referred to slaves as “rational beings,” and expressed
a brief sympathy for their condition that was conventional in the
Revolutionary era though taboo a generation later. “This, sir,
is an unhappy species of population,” he admitted, “but
we cannot at present alter their situation.” The polished debater
then returned to the tongue-tied scruples of poor Goudy, and could
not resist another sneer. “It may wound the delicacy of the
gentleman from Guilford,” Davie concluded, “but I hope
he will endeavor to accommodate his feelings to the interest and circumstances
of his country.”(9) Characteristically, Davie
had won the argument but certainly not a supporter.
Despite these efforts (or perhaps because of them), Davie and his
Federalist supporters could not budge the Antifederalist majority
at Hillsborough. The convention refused to ratify the US Constitution
by a vote of 184 to 93, and North Carolinians stood by as the new
federal government took shape without them.
Eventually, of course, North Carolina softened its opposition. When
it became clear that the new Constitution would go into effect, that
North Carolina would be treated as a foreign country unless it ratified,
and that a Bill of Rights would limit the power of the government
over individuals, North Carolina summoned a second convention in 1789
and approved the new document by an overwhelming margin. William R.
Davie once more took a leading role. But for our purposes, the most
important events of 1789 took place in the General Assembly, which
met at the same time and place as the second state ratifying convention,
and where Davie once more served. Just as the convention agreed to
ratify, Davie introduced his bill in the General Assembly to charter
the University of North Carolina.
What were Davie’s motives? The state constitution of 1776 authorized
both common schools and a university, but no one else seemed to feel
much urgency about either one. Indeed, it would be another five decades
before a state system of common schools even got off the ground. Davie
briefly explained himself in the charter’s often-quoted preamble:
“In all well regulated governments it is the indispensable duty
of every legislature to consult the happiness of a rising generation,
and endeavor to fit them for an honorable discharge of the social
duties of life by paying the strictest attention to their education,
and that, a University, supported by permanent funds and well endowed,
would have the most direct tendency to answer the above purpose.”(10)
What did Davie mean by “the happiness of a rising generation?”
How did he understand “the social duties of life?” The
founder did not explain himself immediately, but I think we can sample
contemporary views from the address which the Rev. Samuel E. McCorkle
delivered when Davie laid the cornerstone of Old East four years later.
McCorkle and Davie would eventually clash, but the preacher’s
words on October 12, 1793 were not controversial and surely represented
Davie’s sentiments as well as his own. “Happiness is the
centre to which all the duties of man and people tend,” McCorkle
explained.
To diffuse the greatest possible degree of happiness in a given
territory is the aim of good government and religion. Now the happiness
of a nation depends on national wealth and national glory and cannot
be gained without them. They in like manner depend on liberty and
good laws. Liberty and laws call for general knowledge in the people
and extensive knowledge in matters of the State, and these in turn
demand public places of education. . . .
McCorkle made clear that happiness consisted of more than liberty
and virtue, that moderate prosperity was also essential for a good
society, and that wealth and virtue were deeply intertwined.
How can any nation be happy without national wealth…? How
can glory or wealth be procured without liberty and laws? They must
check luxury, encourage industry and protect wealth. They must secure
me the glory of my actions and save me from a bow-string or a bastille.
And how are these objects to be gained without general knowledge?(11)
In other words, insofar as McCorkle spoke for Davie and the other
founders of the University, national happiness demanded wealth and
glory, promoted and protected by liberty and good laws. All four depended
on an education that would teach men to obey virtue instead of mobs
or despots. These were the conventional sentiments of contemporary
republicanism. National happiness was the highest social good and
it depended on “liberty and good laws.” Without these
things, wealth and glory were impossible. But liberty did not imply
an uncontrolled freedom. It required self control in place of anarchy
or despotism. And the instinct for self-control did not come naturally;
it had to be instilled by education. By starting with a university
instead of a common school system, moreover, Davie and McCorkle made
clear that the first need they saw was for educated leaders rather
than voters. Train the former properly and the latter will sure follow.
So once again we see a paradox: a truly free and happy society would
not depend on pure freedom but on severe and self-imposed restraint,
taught from the highest levels of society to the lowest. For Davie
and his fellow founders, promoting this kind national happiness was
foremost among “the social duties of life.”
Davie confirmed this interpretation of his objectives in the model
curriculum he submitted to the Trustees in 1795. By this time, he
and McCorkle had parted ways over the place of religion and classical
literature in the new University. For his part, Davie insisted on
a secular, scientific approach to republican education. “In
every free government,” his preamble began, “the law emanates
from the people…. “ As a result, “the people should
receive an education to enable them to direct the laws, and the political
part of this education should be consonant to the constitutions under
which they live.” A republican people, in other words, must
have an education to match. Davie intended his curriculum “to
form useful and respectable members of society—citizens capable
of comprehending, improving, and defending the principles of government,
citizens, who from the highest possible impulse, a just sense of their
own and the general happiness, would be induced to practice the duties
of social morality.” Fleshing out these ideals, Davie’s
curriculum took the radical step of deemphasizing the classical languages
in favor of what he called “moral and political Philosophy and
History,” especially as embodied by the leading authors of the
European Enlightenment: Montesquieu, Vatell, Burlamaqui, and Hume.
Second place would go to modern science, especially physics, followed
by mathematics, chemistry, English, Latin, and Greek. (12)
In another irony, this Enlightenment curriculum did not sit well with
other University leaders, and the institution did not begin to seem
stable until President Joseph Caldwell reinstated an emphasis on the
classics.
As a capsule description of William Davie’s political objectives
in the 1780s, wealth, glory, liberty, and good laws aptly sum up his
own view of what was at stake in the fight for court reform and against
paper money, stay laws, confiscations, and locally-minded legislation.
Given his long history of conflict with untaught or self-taught men
like William Goudy, whom he obviously regarded as a numbskull unfit
to preserve public happiness or liberty in any shape, Davie clearly
believed that popular self-government could never succeed unless the
people’s representatives learned to think as he did. Teaching
them to do so was the intended mission of the University of North
Carolina.
Winning a charter was obviously not enough. There would be many long,
hard-fought battles ahead: for funding, to select a site, to employ
a faculty, to choose a curriculum, to settle an unruly student body.
Davie remained in the thick of all these battles and struggled mightily
over the next decade and a half to see the University survive and
flourish. His reward was unstinting criticism from those he intended
to uplift. Just as the charter was adopted, one irate assemblyman
fumed that spending on a university—even from non-tax sources—“must
augment the Tax on the Citizens who can by no means be in any measure
benefited thereby.” Later on, another critic of the University
complained that the “country will be imbued with aristocratic
principles because an aristocrat is at the head of it,” and
a newspaper described South Building as “the palace-like erection,
which is much too large for usefulness and might aptly be termed the
‘Temple of Folly,’ planned by the Demi-God Davie.”(13)
Enduring these complaints as best he could, Davie persevered as leading
Trustee and the University slowly found its footing. In the same fifteen
year period that followed the granting of the charter, Davie continued
to build up his law practice and his plantations while also finding
time to serve as a Major General in the United States Army, Governor
of North Carolina, and Minister Plenipotentiary to France.
In all these activities, Davie aligned himself with those who styled
themselves the “friends of government,” whom we know as
the Federalist Party of George Washington and John Adams. These loyalties
pitted him against those who called themselves Democratic Republicans
and followed such men as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The most
fervent Democrats, Jefferson among them, suspected their Federalist
adversaries of covert monarchism, but Davie never harbored such sympathies.
The fact that he named one of his sons “Hyder Ali” after
a contemporary Muslim warrior who fought the British in India is convincing
evidence that he cherished no nostalgia for the land of his birth
or its institutions. Instead, Davie believed that the people should
rule by electing men like himself: wealthy, conservative, well-educated,
and deserving of popular deference.
Sadly for Davie, the United States and North Carolina were leaning
in other directions. In its best moments, the new nation would be
led by men like his adversary Thomas Jefferson—also well-educated,
also the founder of a university, also a wealthy slaveholder, but
a small-d democrat who honored popular wisdom and led by inspiration
rather than command. Davie himself never learned the secret. When
he tried to take his principles past Halifax County in an 1803
campaign for Congress, he lost disastrously to those he called “the
Demos.”
Afterwards, he bitterly accused his Democratic enemies of “raising
the spirit of party into a flame, and alarming the ignorant and
credulous with frightful stories about Kings and aristocrats….
Thousands of these poor wretches sincerely believe they have saved
their country from these monsters by preventing my going to Congress.” (14)
Two years later, after a serious student rebellion and a battle over
funding in the General Assembly, the Founder of the University had
had enough.
The situation at the University is a distressing one, and the more
so, as it is not likely to be soon capable of any Remedy, being
the necessary consequence of Legislative hostility to the Institution….
The friends of science in other states regard the people of North
Carolina as a sort of Semi-Barbarians, among whom neither learning,
virtue, nor men of Science possess any Estimation. The conduct of
the Legislature for several years past has stamped this character
on the State and it will take a long course of Time, and contrary
conduct and policy to efface the impression…. Poor North Carolina!(15)
Surrendering to this bitterness, Davie disengaged himself from University
and other public affairs, sold his North Carolina properties and retired
to “Tivoli,” a South Carolina plantation near his childhood
home in the Waxhaws. Mourning the death of his wife and already feeling
elderly at the age of 49, Davie spent his last fifteen years as a
cotton planter. His opulent estate included 116 slaves by the time
of his death in 1820.(16)
In a final irony or paradox, the University founded by William Richardson
Davie is now vastly larger and more complicated than anything he ever
dreamed of. Even in his own day, the University of North Carolina
outgrew its founder’s principles and survived by accommodating
itself to forces he despised. Today, that process has gone much farther.
Carolina now styles itself “the University of the People,”
but its founder was not a man of the people and did not desire that
status for the University’s graduates. Instead, he wanted Carolina’s
graduates to leave the people and lead them, if necessary, in directions
they did not want to go. Today, Carolina is open to students, faculty,
and ideas that Davie would certainly have barred, and upholds democratic
principles that—it is safe to say—exceed his worst nightmares.
But for all its democratic principles, Carolina still seeks to create
an enlightened, responsible elite (it is more polite to say “leadership”)
for a self-governing society. That much of Davie’s vision remains
intact.
What finally shall we say of that vision? In a very different society,
two hundred fifty years after his birth, uncritical adulation is impossible.
But this eighteenth-century antidemocratic elitist left us an institution
that can—if it will—serve a democratic society still needing
educated leaders. For that we have to be grateful.
© Harry L. Watson, 2006.
Notes
(1) Quoted in Kemp P. Battle, History of the
University of North Carolina (2 vols.; Raleigh: Edwards &
Broughton, 1907), I, 5.
(2) Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David
Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the
Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Chris Beneke, “The
New, New Political History,” Reviews in American History 33
(2005) 314–324.
(3) The details of Davie’s life are available
in a comprehensive biography by Blackwell P. Robinson, William
R. Davie (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957).
(4) Charles G. Sellers, Jr., “Making a Revolution:
The North Carolina Whigs, 1765-1775,” in J. Carlyle Sitterson,
ed., Studies in Southern History in Memory of Albert Ray Newsome…
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957), 23-46.
(5) James Hogg to James Iredell, May 17, 1783 in
Griffith J. McKree, ed., Life and Corredspondence of James Iredell
(2 vols.; New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1858), II, 46.
(6) Jackson Turner Main, Political Parties before
the Constitution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1973), 32-33, 311-17.
(7) Quoted in John Kaminski, ed., A Necessary
Evil? Slavery and the Debate over the Constitution (Madison,
Wis.: Madison House, 1995), 52.
(8) William Lenoir, July 30, 1788, in Jonathan Elliot,
ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption
of the Federal Constitution, (5 vols. Washington, 1836) IV, 202,
available at the Library of Congress American Memory site, <http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/hlaw:@field(DOCID+@lit(ed0044))>.
(9) William Goudy and William R. Davie, July 24, 1788,
in Elliot’s Debates, IV, 30-31.
(10) Quoted in Battle, History of the University
of North Carolina, I, 6.
(11) Quoted in Battle, History, I, 39.
(12) Quoted in Robinson, Davie, 248, 407-409.
(13) Robinson, Davie, 228, 257.
(14) William R. Davie to Richard Bennehan, August
28, 1803, quoted in Robinson, Davie, 273.
(15) William R. Davie to John Haywood, June 9,
1805, in J.D. de Roulhac Hamilton, ed., William Richardson Davie:
A Memoir, Followed by His Letters with Notes by Kemp P. Battle
(Chapel Hill: The University, 1907), 57.
(16) Robinson, Davie, 396.
