Background
Archibald Murphey was born on March 16, 1777, in Caswell County, North Carolina, the son of Archibald E. Murphey and Mary Jane DeBow.
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(An oration delivered in Person Hall, Chapel Hill, on the ...)
An oration delivered in Person Hall, Chapel Hill, on the 27th June, 1827, the day previous to the commencement, under the appointment of the Dialectic Society This book, "An oration delivered in Person Hall", by Archibald D. Murphey, is a replication of a book originally published before 1843. It has been restored by human beings, page by page, so that you may enjoy it in a form as close to the original as possible.
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Archibald Murphey was born on March 16, 1777, in Caswell County, North Carolina, the son of Archibald E. Murphey and Mary Jane DeBow.
After preparatory training at the log college of David Caldwell near Greensboro, Murphey entered the University of North Carolina and graduated in 1799.
Then Murphey served as tutor and professor of ancient languages for two years.
In 1802 he qualified for the bar and began the practice of law in Hillsboro. He soon won distinction as an equity pleader and in the handling of testimony.
From 1818 to 1820 he was superior-court judge and frequently acted as special justice of the supreme court when cases were heard in which one of the three regular justices had been of counsel or on the lower bench during the litigation leading to appeal. He also edited three volumes of reports consisting of the cases heard from 1804 to 1819 by the supreme court and its antecedent, the court of conference. His prime interests were not in the law but in the improvement of economic and social conditions in North Carolina.
From 1812 to 1818, inclusive, Murphey was a member of the state Senate from Orange County and assumed a distinct leadership in many public causes. Believing that the chief factor that retarded prosperity in North Carolina was its lack of adequate transportation facilities, he advocated a system of internal improvements with aid from the state, proposing a comprehensive program that included the improvement of harbors, the dredging of rivers, the construction of canals and turnpikes, and the drainage of swamp lands. A number of navigation companies had been chartered before 1815, and the policy of state aid had been recommended without results, but after proposals in that year by a committee on internal navigation, of which he was chairman, appropriations were made by the state to various enterprises.
In 1819 he set forth a comprehensive survey of the transportation problem in his Memoir on the Internal Improvements. In the same year the state established a fund for internal improvements, its income to be used to finance transportation enterprises. Unfortunately most of the enterprises were too expensive for the financial resources available, and not until the advent of railroads was transportation adequately improved in North Carolina. Along with internal improvements Murphey urged public education. Of this he was by no means the first advocate, but a Report on Education to the General Assembly of North Carolina (1817), written by him, offered the first definite plan for public education submitted in North Carolina. That plan was not unlike one proposed by Thomas Jefferson for Virginia; primary schools and academies should be established and larger support given the university, but free education was to be confined to poor children.
Nothing was accomplished in his lifetime, except the establishment of a literary fund in 1826; not until 1838 was a public-school law enacted. In other reforms, also, Murphey was interested, notably the revision of the state constitution, the colonization of the free negroes, humanizing the criminal law, and the abolition of imprisonment for debt.
He was instrumental in obtaining the passage of a statute in 1820 abolishing the imprisonment of debtors, but the law was repealed the following year; and in 1829 he was compelled to spend some time in jail as part of the procedure by which his property was turned over to his creditors.
Another of his projects was the writing of a history of North Carolina. To this end he collected materials and memorialized the legislature for appropriations with which to copy documents in the British archives. He was granted permission to float a lottery which, however, was not successful. Only the introductory chapter of his history was ever completed. Archibald Murphey died on February 1, 1832, at Twin Chimneys in Hillsborough, North Carolina.
(An oration delivered in Person Hall, Chapel Hill, on the ...)
(This reproduction was printed from a digital file created...)
On November 5, 1801, Archibald Murphey married Jane Armistead Scott. They had four sons and one daughter.