David Hervey Maxwell was an American physician and legislator.
Background
David Hervey Maxwell was born on September 17, 1786 in Garrard County, Kentucky. He was the son of Bazaleel and Margaret (Anderson) Maxwell, came of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian stock which figured conspicuously in the making of early Indiana.
Education
Reared in a pioneer environment, he had meager opportunities for early schooling, but at the age of eighteen he went to Danville, Ky. , an educational center, where he became proficient in mathematics and well read in English. He then studied medicine at Danville under Ephraim McDowell, a noted surgeon of the day.
Career
He settled down to the practice of his chosen profession. Emigrating a year later to Indiana, then a new and promising country, he settled in Jefferson County about the time the town of Madison was founded. There he practised medicine for nine years, serving for part of the time as military surgeon during the War of 1812. In 1816 Indiana became a state, and at this time Maxwell first appeared in a public capacity, as a delegate to the convention which framed the state constitution. In 1818 the little backwoods town of Bloomington, Monroe County, was in its first struggle for existence, and thither he moved to lay his plans for a school campaign. The legislative assembly of 1819-20 found him on hand as a lobbyist for a bill to establish a state seminary at Bloomington, and so effective was his influence that the law was passed January 20, 1820, with Maxwell as one of six members of a board of trustees. He proved to be the leading member and for many years was the president of that board. To further his influence in promoting the welfare of the university and of education generally he several times sought election to the state legislature, serving in the House during the sixth, eighth, and ninth sessions (1821, 1823 - 25), and in the Senate during the years 1826-29. In the eighth session he was speaker of the House. Maxwell died in Bloomington, in his sixty-eighth year.
Achievements
Views
A dynamic member of that convention, he introduced the clause prohibiting slavery in the state, and though not a member of the "committee relative to education, " was probably a supporter of the clause which provided for "a general system of education, ascending in a regular gradation, from township schools to a state university, wherein tuition shall be gratis and equally open to all". This theoretical system was so far in advance of what was possible at that time and place that more than thirty-five years elapsed before it actually existed. From the time of his activity in the constitutional convention, Maxwell was concerned in educational affairs, his chief interest being in the establishment of a state university. In the federal enabling act which paved the way for statehood, a township of land had been donated for the benefit of a "seminary of learning, " the exact tract to be designated by the president of the United States. The land chosen chanced to be in Monroe County, on what was then the state's frontier, and to Maxwell's mind this was the logical place for the state university provided for by the constitution.