Navigate

Father Knows Best: Davie in Halifax

The large doors that open into the hallway of the Davie house are matched in the rear of the house. A local historian suggests the Davies might have dined between them in hot months. (NC Dept. of Natural and Cultural Resources)

Some months from now, visitors will pass through the big double doors on either end of the hall that runs through the middle of the house William Richardson Davie built in 1783 and take in a restoration that also will be part museum and, as 21st-century preservation would have it, part event space.

Some are partial to seeing the big house in the middle of history-minded Halifax as it was on a radiant day in October — empty 14-foot tall rooms, worn plank floors, the insides of original plaster walls, a hook on the back of a door where Carolina’s father might well have hung his coat.

Besides a university and the bones of the Constitution’s impeachment clause, Davie didn’t leave much — all of his personal records were destroyed or lost. A house tells no tales, and we are left to speculate on which was his study, which his bedroom.

But this is where he lived when he mulled over the idea of a state university, 50 years before the state would even sanction public schools.

Davie’s parents brought him to America from England when he was 8, and they settled in Lancaster County, S.C., just across the border from the little town of Waxhaw, south of Charlotte. He eschewed his namesake uncle’s dream for him to be a minister, got an education at the forerunner of Princeton, distinguished himself in the Revolution and married the daughter of his commanding officer. Sarah Davie was of the prosperous planting class of eastern North Carolina, and thus Davie — born outside the aristocracy — was welcomed into it.

The exterior of Davie’s house in Halifax has been redone; the interior awaits that. (NC Dept. of Natural and Cultural Resources)

After the war, he came to this village in the fertile Roanoke River valley 80 miles east of Raleigh to practice law and oversee a sprawling plantation tilled by a large enslaved workforce.

Davie was elected a delegate from his adopted state to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. He would depart before the signing, anxious to get back to his work. But while he was there, he had a hand in a couple of notable decisions.

On the subject of the “essential security for the good behavior of the Executive,” he remarked that “if the president be not impeachable whilst in office he will spare no efforts or means whatever to get himself elected.” The convention approved a motion by delegates Davie and Hugh Williamson, also of North Carolina, that the executive “be removable on impeachment and conviction of malpractice or neglect of duty.”

Davie also had a hand in the three-fifths compromise for counting slaves in the population, to the chagrin of Northern states that didn’t want to count them at all.

This, UNC history Professor Harry Watson told a gathering of the Friends of Historic Halifax one autumn evening, swelled the Southern population and “allowed the slaveholding states to control most parts of the government in most of the years between George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.”

Back home, Davie went as a delegate to Fayetteville in 1789 for the convention to ratify the Constitution. The General Assembly, on which he also served, was meeting there at the same time. It was there that he introduced a charter for a university, and its approval set him on another arduous journey — finding a site, gathering a faculty, wrangling over curriculum direction and, not least, funding the thing.

The takeaway for the 45 or so in Watson’s audience was that Davie’s ideal, while understandable for its time, was not something they would recognize today.


A house tells no tales, and we are left to speculate on which was Davie’s study, which his bedroom. But this is where he lived when he mulled over the idea of a state university, 50 years before the state would even sanction public schools.


“The University of North 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,” he said. “Instead, he wanted Carolina’s grads to rise above the people and take them, if necessary, where they did not want to go.

“The truth is Mr. Davie didn’t believe in many of the things that the University stands for today — like democracy [big laugh], inclusiveness and the like.”

The years immediately after independence saw what Watson called a tug-of-war in North Carolina between those called radicals who wanted more democratic reforms and conservatives like Davie who, to say the least, didn’t want that movement to go overboard.

Where UNC was concerned, Davie and his crowd made it clear: Educated leaders, good; educated voters, not necessarily.

“Train the leaders properly and the voters will surely follow,” Watson said. “That was the logic that they were embracing. So once again we see a paradox — a truly happy society did not depend on pure freedom but on severe and self-imposed restraint taught in the highest levels of society to the lowest.”

“You can see where we’re going here. Davie felt that the chaos of the post-Revolution period, the radicalism, the assaults on private property, the democratic but distressing measures of these hotheads and radicals in the General Assembly … he thought they needed to be restrained.

“Therefore a university which would train the legislators of the future was the best way to internalize the kind of self-control that he thought the republic absolutely had to have or it would fly to pieces. He wanted the people to rule, but he wanted them to rule by electing men like himself — wealthy, conservative, well educated and deserving of popular deference.

“Sadly for Davie, the United States was leaning in the other direction in the age of Thomas Jefferson. In its best moments, the new nation would be led by men like Jefferson, also well educated, also the founder of a university.”

Davie stuck with the birthing of Carolina for some 15 years. But its pledge of service to the state was a century away, and to his detractors he was an aristocrat building something that wouldn’t benefit a lot of the taxpayers. “His reward was unstinting criticism from those he had intended to uplift,” Watson said.

Exasperated, in playground parlance he took his ball and went back to South Carolina and returned to the life of a planter, close to where he had grown up.

Like many grand homes of its era, the Davie house in Halifax suffered neglect, abided some additions and waited patiently for rescue. The state acquired it in about 2000. More than $1 million has been spent on the exterior, and a recent $200,000 gift will kick off the interior remake. The 236-year-old core is intact, a poignant reminder that the man the trustees voted Father of the University in 1811 hung his coat here in his most productive years.

— David E. Brown ’75


 

Share via: