David Lowry Swain served as president of the University of North Carolina for 33 years, from 1835 to 1868. During his tenure, the University grew its enrollment, with numbers second only to Yale in the years before the Civil War.
In “A Consequential Life: David Lowry Swain, Nineteenth-Century North Carolina, and Their University,” Willis P. Whichard explores Swain’s complex and lasting impact on public life in North Carolina.
Born in Buncombe County, North Carolina, Swain served as a member of the General Assembly, a state Superior Court judge, and the governor of North Carolina before being appointed president of the University. Throughout his career, he significantly influenced politics, the judiciary and public education in the state. He was also an enslaver and proponent of slavery. As scholar Harry Watson notes in the book’s introduction, “twenty-first-century readers will probably struggle with the stark contradictions” in Swain’s life and beliefs.
“A Consequential Life” is available for purchase or as an open-access eBook from The University of North Carolina Press.
The publication of “A Consequential Life” is supported by the Albert and Gladys Coates Endowment Fund for the North Carolina Collection at the Wilson Special Collections Library. In partnership with the UNC Press, the Library has published biographies of Albert Coates and of the presidents of UNC-Chapel Hill. Previous books in the series are “The Good Government Man,” a biography of Albert Coates, “Fire and Stone: The Making of the University of North Carolina under Presidents Edward Kidder Graham and Harry Woodburn Chase,” and “Frank Porter Graham: Southern Liberal, Citizen of the World.”
