Samuel Davies

1723-1761. Founder of Southern Presbyterianism. After theological training in Samuel Blair's school at Foggs Manor, Pennsylvania, he was ordained as an evangelist in 1747 and sent to Hanover County in Virginia to preach to Presbyterian converts of the Great Awakening.* He preached in licensed meeting houses in Hanover, and evangelized in other counties of Virginia and North Carolina. He went to England with Gilbert Tennent in 1753, and raised £3,000, mostly in Scotland, for the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), preached with great acceptance, and won by personal argument before the king in council legal status for dissenters in Virginia. He became president of the College of New Jersey in 1759 and improved its standards. He led in organizing Hanover Presbytery (the first in the South) in 1775. His always feeble health gave way in 1761 after he contracted pneumonia and blood poisoning from being bled.