Samuel Ashe was the ninth Governor of the U. S. state of North Carolina from 1795 to 1798.
Background
Samuel Ashe was born on March 24, 1725 in Bath, North Carolina, United States.
His father, John Baptista Ashe, speaker of the colonial Assembly at the time of Samuel's birth, removed soon after that event to the environs of the Cape Fear River. The boy's mother having already died, the death of his father in 1734 gave his rearing into the hands of his uncle, Sam Swan. This uncle, a vigorous advocate of popular sovereignty, was speaker of the colonial Assembly for twenty-five years.
Education
Hostility to British rule was insistent in the North Carolina of Samuel's youth, but he found himself not unwilling upon completing his education in the North.
Career
Returning home to the Wilmington district, to become assistant attorney for the Crown. He was esteemed by the royal governor, who, as a fugitive some years later, singled him out with one Samuel Johnson as the only two men of integrity in the entire North Carolina Council of Safety. For all his imperial attachments, he was among the earliest Republicans, and beginning in 1774 he furthered his theories by his activities as a propagandist, and as a member of many Revolutionary organizations.
A supporter of independence, he served as Lieutenant and paymaster of the First North Carolina Continental Regiment and served in the Provincial Congress (1775-1778).
In 1776 he became president of the state Council of Safety, and in 1779 he was captain of a troop of light horse. He was perhaps the most substantial lawyer in the state who unreservedly identified himself with the more aggressive implications of the Revolution. He was one of a committee of twenty-four appointed in 1776 to prepare a state constitution, and he held the first court ever conducted under that instrument. Speaker of the Senate in the first state legislature, he was elected presiding judge of the first state supreme court, an office which he retained till 1795.
Made governor in 1795, he served in that office for three one-year terms.
He was also president of the board of trustees of the University of North Carolina.
Achievements
Ashe championed the legislature against a group of lawyers who were defending the property claims of persons who had sympathized with England in the late war, and he also, in the case of Bayard vs. Singleton, took part in the decision which asserted the right of judicial review of legislative enactments on the ground of alleged conflict with the constitution.
The United States liberty ship SS Samuel Ashe was named in his honor.
Politics
He was Jeffersonian in policies, an extremist for state rights, but in times of what he considered national crisis he would subordinate his own views to the views of his opponents in control at Washington.
Personality
He was "independent, " he wrote to some lawyers, "in principle, in person, and in purse, and should neither court their love, nor fear their enmity".
Connections
He was married twice, first to his cousin, Mary Porter, and next, to another cousin, a widow, Elizabeth Merrick. His two sons who had reached maturity at the time of the Revolution were both soldiers, and later took part in local public affairs.
The younger of these sons, Samuel, an ardent Federalist, is notable for having actively arrayed himself in the first decade of the nineteenth century as the leader of Federalist forces pitted against the contrary forces led by his father.
