Andrew Dousa Hepburn (1830-1921) was the son of Rebecca Williamson and Samuel Hepburn, a lawyer and judge. Andrew grew up in Pennsylvania, attended Jefferson College and the University of Virginia before graduating in 1857 from Princeton Theological Seminary. In the same year he married Henriette McGuffey; the couple had one son, Charles McGuffey. Hepburn was ordained in the Presbyterian church in 1858. Assuming a professorship at the University in Fall 1860, Hepburn sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War and remained in Chapel Hill until 1864, when he took a leave of absence to serve as a supply pastor for the First Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, NC. In the summer of 1865 he studied at the University of Berlin. After the war financial necessity prompted him to accept a professorship at Miami University in Ohio; he served as the institution's president from 1871 until it closed temporarily in 1873. Hepburn then took a position on the faculty at Davidson College, publishing in 1875 a Manual of English Rhetoric and becoming president of Davidson in 1877. When Miami University reopened in 1885, he was reappointed as professor of English literature, a post he held until his retirement in 1908. He received a DD degree from Hampden-Sydney in 1876 and an LLD degree from the University of North Carolina in 1881 (Dictionary of North Carolina Biography 3:117-18).