RARE "West Virginia Congressman" John Davis Clipped Signature For Sale

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RARE "West Virginia Congressman" John Davis Clipped Signature:
$699.99

Up for sale a VERY RARE! "West Virginia Congressman" John Davis Clipped Signature. 

ES-4460E

John

James Davis (May 5, 1835 –

March 19, 1916) was an attorney and politician who helped found West Virginia and later served as a United States

Representative in Congress from that state.  John James Davis was born in Clarksburg, Virginia (now West Virginia) in 1835 to master saddler

John Davis (1797-1863) and his New York born wife Eliza Arnold Steen Davis

(1799-1866). He had a younger brother, Rezin Caleb Davis (1847-1910, who

initially apprenticed with their father, but was a Confederate soldier and

later became a lawyer in Kentucky). The family included at least two sisters:

Regina (b. 1837) and Ann (b. 1839). Their grandfather Caleb Davis (1767-1834)

had been born across the Potomac River at Oldtown, Allegheny County, Maryland but

had moved to Woodstock, Shenandoah County, Virginia where

J. J. Davis's father John Davis had been born. After learning his trade, John

Davis moved to Clarksburg shortly before Virginia authorized construction of

the Northwestern Turnpike.

John Davis served as the Harrison County sheriff, ruling elder in his

Presbyterian church and (unlike his son John James Davis) sympathized with the

Confederacy and died in 1863. His wife Eliza (J.J. Davis' mother) was a pioneer

school teacher in Harrison County, who taught Stonewall Jackson as well as her sons and many other

local children.[2] Either the father John Davis or this J.J. Davis

owned 6 slaves in Harrison County in 1860, and his brother Rezin Davis owned

two slaves (a 17 year old woman and a one year old boy). Young

J. J. Davis attended the Northwestern Virginia Academy at Clarksburg (the

Harrison County seat). When he was 17, he moved to Lexington, Virginia to

attend the Lexington Law School (now the law department of Washington and Lee

University). Graduating in 1856, J. J. Davis was admitted to the

Virginia bar that same year and began what would become his life-long legal

practice in Clarksburg. On August 21, 1862, John J. Davis married Anna Kennedy

(1841-1917) in Baltimore, Maryland, her

home city. She was the daughter of a lumber merchant and college-educated. They

later had a son John W. Davis (1873-1955);

who followed his father's career and became a lawyer and Congressman, although

he also left West Virginia and was an unsuccessful Democratic Presidential

candidate in 1924). They also had four daughters: Lillie Davis Preston

(1863-1939) of Lewisburg, West Virginia,

Emma Kennedy Davis (1865-1943) who never married and was secretary of the local

Red Cross in World War I as well as assistant chair of the Harrison County

Democratic committee, Anna Holmes Davis Richardson (1869-1945; whose first

husband was a Uniterian minister in New York), and Catherine Estelle Davis

(1874-1881). Davis became politically active after the Virginia

Secession Convention of 1861 on April 17, 1861 voted to approve

an ordinance of secession over the opposition of many delegates from the

northwestern counties (including fellow lawyer John S. Carlile from Harrison County). Carlile called a

mass meeting in Clarksburg on April 22, 1861 to call Virginia's secession

treasonous and consider responses. Davis attended that On May 13–15, J.J. Davis was among seven Harrison

County men attending the Wheeling Convention which

established the Restored Government of

Virginia. In June 1861, Harrison County voters elected

Davis and John C.

Vance to represent them in the Virginia House of

Delegates which met in Wheeling from July 1–26; he never served

in Richmond, Virginia (the normal meeting place of the Virginia General

Assembly, including during the American Civil War). In October, 1861, Harrison County voters

elected Vance and J.J. Davis as their two delegates to the General Assembly at

Wheeling which met from December 2, 1861 – February 13, 1862, and from May

6–15, 1862, and from December 4, 1862-February 5, 1863 (although Vance resigned

on January 2, 1862). Despite Davis' Unionist advocacy, his father

remained a Confederate sympathizer and his brother Rezin enlisted in the

Confederate army. As the war ended, Davis continued his legal practice in

Clarksburg, and voters elected him to the West Virginia House of

Delegates in 1869. He served one term in that part time

position (1870). Active in his local Democratic Party, Davis was a delegate to

the Democratic National

Conventions in 1868, 1876 and 1892. He also was a Mason,

regent of the University of West

Virginia, a member of the Board of Visitors of the United

States Military Academy at West Point, director of the State Insane

Hospital, and a ruling elder in the Southern Presbyterian Church. 

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