48 



HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY. 



whose only surviving child married Henry 

 Mercur, of Towanda, Pennsylvania ; Re- 

 becca, who married, January 5, 1840, Alfred 

 T. Duffield, who succeeded the General as 

 storekeeper at Davisville, and died in 

 September, 1871, and his wife in 1884, leav- 

 ing three children : J. Davis Duffield, T. II. 

 Benton Duffield, and Amy, wife of Judge 

 Gustav A. Endlich of Reading; Sarah, who 

 married Ulysses Mercur, of lowanda, later 

 chief justice of the supreme court of Penn- 

 sylvania; Amy, who married Holmes Sells, 

 a practicing physician at Dublin, Ohio, 

 later a prominent physician and druggist 

 at Atlanta, Georgia, where they resided 

 during the Civil war; Elizabeth, who never 

 married, and resides at the old homestead 

 at Davisville; and an only son, William 

 Watts Hart Davis, the subject of this 

 sketch, who was named for his mother's 

 brother, William Watts Hart, a member of 

 the Bucks county bar, who was clerk of 

 the orphans' court of Bucks county in 1814, 

 and resigned to go in defense of his country 

 when Washington was burned, and was 

 adjutant of Colonel Humphrey's Bucks 

 county regiment. At the close of the war 

 he returned to Doylestown and died m 1815 

 of typhus fever. 



William Watts Hart Davis was born at 

 at Davisville, July 27, 1820. He was 

 reared on ttie old homestead and his 

 earliest educational advantages were ob- 

 tained at a private school Kept by Miss 

 Anna Longstreth, at the Longstreth home- 

 stead nearDy; later he attended the cele- 

 brated classical school at Southampton 

 Baptist church, and the day school, a mile 

 from Davisville, on the Bucks and Mont- 

 gomery county line road. In 1832 he came 

 to Doylestown and attended the Academy 

 there, boarding at the public house of his 

 father's old captain and friend, William 

 Purdy; a few years later he attended the 

 select school of Samuel Long, near Harts- 

 viUe, and the Newtown Academy, finishing 

 his elementary education at the boarding 

 school of Samuel Aaron, Burlington, New 

 Jersey. From the age of ten years the time 

 not spent in school was spent behind the 

 counter in his fathers' store, where he 

 learned practical business methods and 

 habits of industry from the best of teachers, 

 by both example and precept. In 1841 he 

 entered Captain Alden Partridge's Univer- 

 sity and Military School at Norwich, Ver- 

 mont, and concluded a three years' course 

 in sixteen months, graduating in 1842 with 

 the degrees of A. M. and M. M. S. In 

 the same year he was appointed an instruc- 

 tor of mathematics and commandant of 

 cadets in the military academy at Ports- 

 mouth, Virginia, where he remained three 

 years. 



He then began the study of law in the 

 office of Judge John Fox, at Doylestown, 

 and in 1846, after his admission to the bar, 

 entered the law department of Harvard 

 University. On December 5, 1846, while a 

 student of Harvard Law School, at Cam- 

 bridge, Massachusetts, he enlisted in the 



First Massachusetts Infantry for the Mex- 

 ican war ; was commissioned first lieutenant, 

 December 31, 1846, of Captain Crowning- 

 shield's company, Colonel Caleb Cushing's 

 regiment; adjutant, January 16, 1847; aide- 

 de-camp June I, 1847; acting assistant ad- 

 jutant general, July 18, 1847; acting com- 

 missary of subsistence, October 9, 1847; act- 

 ing qtiartermaster and inspector, October 

 29, 1847; captain. Company I, First Massa- 

 chusetts Infantry, March 16, 1848, spending 

 the winter of 1847-1848 with Scott's con- 

 quering army in the Valley of Mexico. 

 He was one of the officers who participated 

 in the capture of General Valencia, in a 

 night ride of seventy miles. He was mus- 

 tered out July 24, 1848, at the close of the 

 war. 



He now returned to Doylestown, where 

 he practiced law until 1853, when he was 

 appointed by President Franklin Pierce 

 (with whom he had served in the Mexican 

 war) to the position of United States dis- 

 trict attorney of the territofy of New 

 Mexico, and spent the next four years in 

 that territory, during which time he filled 

 the offices of attorney-general, secretary of 

 the territory, acting governor, superintend- 

 ent of Indian affairs and of public build- 

 ings. While there he also published a 

 newspaper at Santa Fe in Spanish and 

 English, and, with the assistance of an in- 

 terpreter and his clerk he saved the valuable 

 Spanish manuscript in the secretary's office 

 which afterward furnished him the material 

 from which he wrote "The Spanish Con- 

 quest of New Mexico," that was issued 

 from the press of the "Doylestown Dem- 

 ocrat" in 1869. While at Santa Fe he wrote 

 his first work on New Mexico, entitled 

 "El Gringo, or New Mexico and Her 

 People," which Harper & Brothers puD- 

 lished in 1857. While exercising the func- 

 tions of government in our new territory, 

 Mr. Davi^ met with some unique experi- 

 ences. On one occasion, himself and party, 

 while traveling on the plains, were cap- 

 tured by the Arapahoe Indians, but, by the 

 exercise of a little diplomacy, escaped seri- 

 ous molestation. 



Returning to Doylestown in the fall of 

 1857, lie purchased the "Doylestown Dem- 

 ocrat," then as now the organ of the Demo- 

 cratic party in the county, and owned and 

 edited it until 1890, when he sold out to 

 the Doylestown Publishing Company, but 

 continued as its editor until 1900, since 

 which time he has devoted his time to his- 

 torical and literary work. 



General Davis raised and took to the 

 front the first armed force in the county for 

 the defense of the country in the civil war, 

 known as the "Doylestown Guards," of 

 which he had been captain since 1858 as a 

 volunteer militia organization. He served 

 with this company through a campaign in 

 the Shenandoah Valley under General 

 Robert Patterson, an account of which cam- 

 paign he later published, and which is con- 

 sidered an authority on that subject. The 

 company was ordered to Washington in 



