Richard was born on March 25, 1758 in New Bern, North Carolina, United States. His father, Richard Spaight, a native of Ireland, married Margaret, the sister of Governor Arthur Dobbs, and was a member of the colonial council under him, secretary of the colony, and paymaster of troops during the French and Indian War.
After his parents died he was eight years old, and was sent to Ireland to be educated. It is said that his advanced studies were completed at the University of Glasgow.
In 1778 Spaight succeeded in returning to North Carolina, where in 1779 he was a member of the House of Commons from the borough of New Bern. Afterward, as aide to General Richard Caswell commanding the state militia, he was present at the battle of Camden. There his military career ended, for he was reelected to the Commons, where he represented either New Bern or Craven County from 1781 to 1787, except 1784, and again in 1792.
Young as he was in these early sessions, he won reputation, but rather in committee service and in council than in debate. In 1785 he was chosen speaker, and on January 1, 1787, when the House entered upon a sweeping investigation of the state judges and of alleged official corruption, he was selected as chairman of the whole. He was defeated for the Continental Congress, but he was appointed to fill a vacancy in 1783, was elected the next year, and served until 1785, during which time he was a member of the committee to frame a temporary government for the western territory and of the committee of the states.
In 1787 as an advocate of a stronger federal government, he was chosen a delegate to the federal constitutional convention, where he favored the election of senators by the state legislatures, a term of seven years for senators and president, the election of the president by Congress, and the filling of congressional vacancies by the president. He voted for the Constitution and signed it.
In 1792 he was elected governor and served three terms. In 1793 he was a presidential elector. As governor in 1793 he issued a proclamation enjoining neutrality in the European war, and he had several French privateers, which were being fitted out in Wilmington, seized and held.
After his retirement from Congress he was elected state senator in 1801 and 1802. In 1802 he was mortally wounded in a duel with John Stanly, a prominent Federalist leader, who has ever since been depicted as the aggressor, while Spaight has been regarded as a martyr.
Richard Dobbs Spaight served at the U. S. House of Representatives as a Democratic-Republican. During this time, he advocated repeal of the Alien and Sedition Acts and voted for Jefferson in the contested election of 1800. As Governor of the U. S. state of North Carolina he orchestrated the establishment of the state capitol at Raleigh and the beginning of the state's university system. Spaight Street in central Madison, Wisconsin, is named in honor of Richard Spaight.
In political faith a democrat and a strict constructionist, he was opposed to what he regarded as the usurpation by the North Carolina courts of the power to declare an act of the legislature null and void, asking, perhaps with some point, who would control the judges.
In 1787 he was active in explanation and defense of the Constitution, and, in spite of his well-known democratic views, voted with the Federalists. When North Carolina finally ratified in 1789, he was the Anti-Federalist candidate for federal senator but was defeated.
A stanch Republican in his late years, he favored the repeal of the Alien and Sedition Acts and in the election of president by the House voted for Jefferson. He was, however, never a narrow partisan, and, always independent, he frequently voted differently from his party.
He was normally genial, affable, and good-tempered, and had few personal quarrels and fewer enemies.
In 1795 he married Mary Leach of Holmesburg, Pennsylvania, who with three children survived him. Spaight was the father of North Carolina governor Richard Dobbs Spaight Jr. and the grandfather of U. S. Representative Richard Spaight Donnell.
