Born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a great-grandson of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf und Pottendorf, founder and patron of the Moravian Church, in 1787 Schweinitz was placed in the institution of the Moravian community at Nazareth, Pennsylvania, where he remained for eleven years and was a successful and industrious student.

This path allowed him to meet with some of the academics at Kiel University in Holstein, where he received an honorary Ph.D. "in absentia, for his work as an administrator, his cultivation of natural science, and the Conspectus".

[4] The Synopsis was published without Schweinitz's knowledge: in 1818, he had simply given a list of North Carolina fungi to a friend in Leipzig.

While a resident of Salem he was elected president of the University of North Carolina, which honor he declined because it involved relinquishing work in the Moravian church.

His herbarium, which comprised at the time of his death the largest private collection of plants in the United States, he bequeathed to the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia.

[11] His birthplace, the Gemeinhaus-Lewis David de Schweinitz Residence, is a National Historic Landmark in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.