Biography

William Davie moved from England to the Waxhaws near Charlotte as a child. He had just graduated from the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) when the war broke out. He became a militia soldier, created a cavalry unit, and was badly wounded at the Battle of Stono Ferry (S.C.). He recovered and was training to be a lawyer in Salisbury when the British army made a second, successful attack on Charleston. He created a new Patriot militia cavalry unit as a colonel and began attacking British and Loyalist forces in South Carolina. After taking over the southern Continental Army, Nathanael Greene asked Davie to serve as the commissary (food supply) officer. He moved to Halifax to fulfill those duties, later settling there, where you can still see his home. Post-war he served in the U.S. Constitutional Convention. There he stated that N.C. would not join the union if delegates did not go along with a compromise that counted each slave as three-fifths of a person when setting a state’s number of representatives in Congress (which they did).