Shortly before David Lowry Swain’s thirty-second birthday, the North Carolina General Assembly elected him the state’s twenty-sixth governor. He remains its youngest. A Consequential Life details the life and work of the man who was arguably the state’s most significant nineteenth-century leader.
Willis P. Whichard of Chapel Hill is a lawyer who, like his subject David Swain, has spent most of his career in public office and the academy. He is the only person in North Carolina history who has served in both the North Carolina House of Representatives and the North Carolina Senate and on both the North Carolina Court of Appeals and the North Carolina Supreme Court. Dean and Professor of Law at Campbell University from 1999-2006, he holds the A.B. and J.D. degrees from the University of North Carolina and the LL.M and S.J.D. degrees from the University of Virginia.