David Camden De Leon, called “the fighting doctor,” was born in Camden, South Carolina, the oldest of three sons and four daughters of physician Mordecai Hendricks De Leon and his wife, Rebecca Lopez. His father was one of seven Charleston Jews drawn to Columbia when it was made the state capitol in 1786. There his medical practice prospered, and he established and ran a small hospital.

David Camden followed his father into the medical profession, graduating with a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1836. But two years later he enlisted in the United States Army to fight in the Seminole War. He fought again in the Mexican War, where he earned his nickname, and remained stationed on the Southwestern frontier for a number of years. Like his two brothers, he was an ardent Southern patriot: when South Carolina later seceded from the Union in 1861, he resigned his commission to join the Confederate cause. He served the C.S.A. briefly as Surgeon General, then as head of medical operations for the Army of Northern Virginia, but soon lost these posts, possibly because he was a drunkard.

His brothers also had troubled careers in the C.S.A., and Edwin actually lost a Confederate diplomatic post for criticizing Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin. T.C., the youngest, emerged after the war as a prominent author and one of the great literary champions of the Confederacy. His most significant work was Four Years in Rebel Capitals: An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death. T.C. later authored the first American play to run more than a hundred performances on Broadway.

Distraught after the Southern defeat, David Camden left the United States for Mexico and then for New Mexico territory, where he still owned property. He never returned to South Carolina, and died, unmarried, at Santa Fe on September 2, 1872.