David Settle Reid (April 19, 1813 – June 19, 1891) was the 32nd governor of the U.S. state of North Carolina from 1851 to 1854 and a

U.S. Senator The United States Senate is the upper chamber of the United States Congress, with the House of Representatives being the lower chamber. Together they compose the national bicameral legislature of the United States. The composition and powe ...

from December 1854 to March 1859. His uncle was Congressman Thomas Settle. He was born in what would later be

Reidsville, North Carolina Reidsville is a city in Rockingham County in the U.S. state of North Carolina. At the 2020 census, the city had a total population of 14,580. Reidsville is included in the Greensboro–High Point Metropolitan Statistical Area of the Piedmont T ...

, an unincorporated town named for his father, Reuben Reid. He had a brother, Hugh Kearns Reid. At age 16, David Reid became the first postmaster for the town. He studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1833. From 1835 to 1842, Reid served in the North Carolina Senate. He was a U.S. Representative from 1843 to 1847. Reid ran for governor in 1848 as a long-shot candidate. In his campaign, Reid promoted the now-obscure cause of "free suffrage," i.e. that there should not be different standards for who could vote for members of the North Carolina House of Commons and of the North Carolina Senate. It was assumed that more voters would only increase the Whig domination of the state, but the Whigs denounced suffrage reform as "a system of communism unjust and Jacobinical." To everyone's surprise, Reid lost to Charles Manly by only 854 votes. In 1850, Reid defeated Manly by 2,853 votes, becoming the first elected Democratic governor of North Carolina. In the Senate, Reid was chairman of the Committee on Patents and the Patent Office. He sought but was denied a full term in the Senate when he lost a three-way internal party fight with Thomas Bragg and

William W. Holden William Woods Holden (November 24, 1818 – March 1, 1892) was an American politician who served as the 38th and 40th governor of North Carolina. He was appointed by President Andrew Johnson in 1865 for a brief term and then elected in 1868. He ...

in 1858. He returned to the practice of law and was a delegate to the ill-fated 1861

Washington Peace Conference The Peace Conference of 1861 was a meeting of 131 leading American politicians in February 1861, at the Willard's Hotel in Washington, D.C., on the eve of the American Civil War. The purpose of the conference was to avoid, if possible, the sece ...

to try to prevent the American Civil War. Reid was a member of a state constitutional convention in 1875. In 1881 Reid suffered a stroke at Wentworth and died at his elder son's home in Reidsville in 1891 and is buried in Greenview Cemetery also in Reidsville. His widow died in 1913.

References

External links

History of Reidsville
* NC State Capitol 1861

{{DEFAULTSORT:Reid, David 1813 births 1891 deaths Democratic Party governors of North Carolina Democratic Party North Carolina state senators People from Reidsville, North Carolina North Carolina postmasters Democratic Party United States senators from North Carolina Democratic Party members of the United States House of Representatives from North Carolina Settle family 19th-century American politicians