David Seth Doggett (23 January 1810–27 October 1880), Methodist bishop, was born in Lancaster County and was the son of John Doggett, a Methodist minister and justice of the peace, and Mary Smith Doggett. He attended nearby schools and a Northumberland County academy in preparation for studying law, as his father wished, but following a conversion experience at age sixteen Doggett felt called to the ministry. After a year of teaching school and reading theology in Orange County, he joined the Virginia Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1829 and became a junior preacher on the Roanoke Circuit in North Carolina. The following year he was assigned to the Mattamuskeet Circuit in coastal North Carolina.

Doggett returned to Virginia in 1831 as pastor of the Methodist church in Petersburg, where he became a noted preacher. His congregation grew considerably. His success continued at the Methodist church in Lynchburg from 1832 to 1833 and at Trinity Methodist Church in Richmond in 1834. Doggett served in Petersburg in 1835, in Norfolk in 1836 and 1837, and again in Lynchburg in 1838. He married Martha Ann Gwathmey, of Lynchburg, in Charlestown on 19 June 1834. They had five daughters and three sons.

Doggett was chaplain at the University of Virginia during the 1838–1839 academic year. He enrolled as a student there for the following term and also served as pastor of the Methodist church in Charlottesville. In 1840 Doggett began two years' service as chaplain of Randolph-Macon College, then located in Boydton, and from 1842 to 1846 taught mental and moral philosophy at the school. He continued to study additional academic subjects and received from Randolph-Macon College an honorary M.A. in 1842 and a D.D. in 1847. He served as a trustee of the college from 1841 until his death.

As the Methodist Episcopal Church divided over the issue of slavery, Doggett served as one of eight Virginia Conference delegates to the 1845 Louisville convention that laid the groundwork for the organization of the Methodist Episcopal Church South. He returned as minister of the church in Lynchburg in 1847 and 1848 and served the Washington Street Methodist Church in Petersburg from 1849 to 1850. Doggett was a delegate to every quadrennial General Conference of the church from 1850 through 1866 and more than once chaired the General Conference Committee on Education. In 1851 he became a director of the New York–based American Tract Society. A member of the Colonization Society of Virginia, he attended board meetings of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United States (popularly known as the American Colonization Society) during the mid-1850s.

For about eight years beginning in 1850, Doggett edited the Quarterly Review of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. During those years he also served pastorates at Centenary Methodist Church in Richmond (1851–1852), Granby Street Methodist Church in Norfolk (1853–1854), and the Southern Methodist church in Washington, D.C. (1856–1857). From 1858 to 1861 he was presiding elder of the church's Richmond district.

During the Civil War, Doggett remained in Richmond as pastor of the Broad Street Methodist Church (1861–1863) and Centenary Methodist Church (1864–1866). Two of his published sermons on the war, A Nation's Ebenezer (1862) and The War and Its Close (1864), show that he staunchly supported the Confederacy and slavery. In July 1865 Doggett helped found the Episcopal Methodist, a weekly published in Richmond and at that time the only Southern Methodist newspaper. He edited the paper until his church's General Conference elected him one of four new bishops on 26 April 1866. While continuing to live in Richmond, Doggett presided over conferences throughout the denomination's territory from Virginia to California. In August 1870 he issued a call for African American Methodist ministers to meet the following month and organize a Virginia conference of Black Methodists. He also served as president of the Bible Society of Virginia in 1879 and 1880. Throughout Doggett's career, the scholarship and elegant style of his sermons and addresses did much to dispel the then-common image of Methodist preachers as overly emotional and uneducated. Several of his addresses appeared in print during his lifetime, and a former colleague published a volume of his sermons in 1882.

Having remained active in church work until a few months before his death, David Seth Doggett died of stomach cancer at his Richmond home on 27 October 1880. The city's principal Baptist, Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian clergymen all spoke at his funeral at Centenary Methodist Church before he was buried in Hollywood Cemetery.

Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Thomas O. Summers, ed., Sermons by the Late Rev. David Seth Doggett, D.D.… (1882), 1:ix–xli (with birth date of 23 Jan. 1810 from family source and frontispiece portrait), Samuel Bradlee Doggett, A History of the Doggett-Daggett Family (1894), 611, 615–618 (with birth date of 23 Jan. 1810), Edward Leigh Pell, A Hundred Years of Richmond Methodism (1899), 128–132, and Arthur L. Stevenson, "The Methodist Ministry," Northern Neck of Virginia Historical Magazine 31 (1981): 3551–3552; Charlestown Virginia Free Press, 3 July 1834; Richmond Daily Dispatch, 3 May 1866; other publications include Doggett, Memorial Discourse, on Occasion of the Death of Bishop John Early, D.D.… (1875); Death Register, Richmond City (with variant age at death of seventy years, nine months, and one day), Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia; obituaries and accounts of funeral in New York Times, 28 Oct. 1880, Richmond Daily Dispatch, 28 Oct. 1880 (with variant birth date of 26 Jan. 1810), 30 Oct. 1880, Richmond Daily Whig, 28, 30 Oct. 1880, and Richmond State, 28, 29 Oct. 1880.

Image courtesy Library of Virginia.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by William B. Bynum.

How to cite this page:
William B. Bynum, "David Seth Doggett (1810–1880)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2023 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Doggett_David_Seth, accessed [today's date]).

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