Background
ASHE, William Sheppard was born on August 12, 1813 in Rocky Point, North Carolina, United States, United States. Son of Colonel Samuel and Elizabeth (Shepherd) Ashe.
lawyer military planter Bureaucrat
ASHE, William Sheppard was born on August 12, 1813 in Rocky Point, North Carolina, United States, United States. Son of Colonel Samuel and Elizabeth (Shepherd) Ashe.
Private school.
His parents came from distinguished North Carolina families. He attended school in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a deeply religious Episcopalian.
He and his wife, the former Sarah Ann Green, had four sons. Ashe became a rice planter and also studied law, being admitted to the North Carolina bar in 1836. Unlike most people who lived in the Cape Fear area, he was an ardent supporter of Andrew Jackson, and in 1844 he was a presidential elector on the Polk ticket.
He represented New Hanover in 1846-1848 in the North Carolina Senate, and from 1849 to 1855, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he was known as an ultra-Southern Democrat and a supporter of internal improvements. But Ashe was perhaps best known as the “father of the North Carolina railroad,” who from 1854 to 1862 was president of the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad Company. He returned to the state Senate in 1859-1861 and was a delegate to the Democratic national convention in 1860 and to the North Carolina constitutional convention in 1861.
Ashe was a committed secessionist. He entered the government in 1861 as a major in the Confederate Army. He was put in charge of all government transportation from South Carolina to Virginia, and President Davis nominated him to supervise all government transportation from the Mississippi River to Virginia.
He was also assistant quartermaster general of the Confederate Army in 1861-1862 and started the salt works at Wrightsville, North Carolina. Ashe was killed in a railroad accident in Wilmington, North Carolina, on September 14,1862. His death was also a deathblow to the Confederate transportation system.
Ashe, Cyclopedia of Eminent and Representative Men of the Carolinas.
"Peculiar institution" of slavery was not only expedient but also ordained by God and upheld in Holy Scripture.
Stands for preserving slavery, states' rights, and political liberty for whites. Every individual state is sovereign, even to the point of secession.