Minor, John

John Minor III was born in 1761 in Caroline County, Virginia, to John Minor Jr. and his wife Elizabeth Cosby. As a teenager, he fought in the Revolutionary War, and was present at the surrender of Yorktown in October 1781 along with his father. After the war, he studied law with George Wythe at the College of William & Mary and then established a practice in Fredericksburg. William Wirt, a colleague and protege of John Minor III, described him as “a most excellent lawyer with a most persuasive flow of eloquence, simple, natural, graceful and most affecting.” His first marriage was in 1786 to Mary Berkeley, who died the next year, presumably in childbirth, and was buried along with their newborn daughter. In 1793, he remarried his first wife’s cousin, Lucy Landon Carter, a member of Virginia’s large and prominent Carter family. They had seven surviving children.

Evidently a prominent and respected citizen in Fredericksburg, John Minor combined his legal career with political, military, and charitable service. In 1803, his acquaintance and occasional correspondent President Thomas Jefferson offered him a federal appointment, but Minor declined, citing that “prudence” and family demands made him unable to “relinquish my present practice, which is lucrative, and accept the appointment you are so good as to offer me.” He did serve two terms in the Virginia House of Delegates from 1805 to 1807, representing Spotsylvania County as a Federalist. Minor also served as a presidential elector during the 1808 election. He served as a director of the Fredericksburg branch of the Bank of Virginia from 1807 through 1810. He was also a member of the board of managers of Fredericksburg’s Female Charity School starting in 1804, advertising tickets in local newspapers for a lottery benefitting the school and other charitable projects. By 1814, Minor had become the school’s president, and he published an open letter in the Alexandria Gazette defending the school from unspecified “foul and malicious slander” allegedly concocted by a “worthless servant, removed from the institution for misconduct.” During the War of 1812, Minor was commissioned as a brigadier general in the Virginia militia and stationed in Norfolk. After the war, he continued to practice law.

Politically, Minor was best known for unsuccessfully advocating for the gradual emancipation of enslaved Virginians and their transportation to Africa. Most colonization advocacy did not directly contest or threaten the existence of slavery—the movement was more focused on removing free people of African descent from America, which contributed to its popularity even among some slaveholders. After the planned Richmond slave revolt known as Gabriel’s Rebellion was uncovered in 1800, laws in Virginia and other slave states cracked down on the movements of enslaved and free African and African-descended people, and the colonization movement began to grow as the white population feared further uprisings.

John Minor wrote of his reaction to Gabriel’s Rebellion and the proposed execution of its participants: “my heart bleeds for them and yet this degree of severity [of punishment] is necessary.” In 1816, shortly before his death, he acted as the defense attorney for George Boxley, a white man accused of attempting to instigate a slave rebellion in a “novel and alarming” case that caused great anxiety among slaveholding Virginians. Facing execution if convicted, Boxley escaped from prison and fled the state, settling in Indiana where he continued to oppose slavery.

While Minor died before the peak of the organized colonization movement in Virginia, his widow and several of his children continued to be involved in it. Lucy Carter Minor and sons John IV and Charles each emancipated enslaved people they owned and paid for their passage to Liberia. Most notably, John Minor’s only daughter ,Mary Minor Blackford, was dubbed by one historian “the best-known and most active woman in the work of African colonization in Virginia,” and his son Launcelot, an Episcopal priest, moved to Liberia, where he spent several years as a missionary among the resettled freed people.

In June 1816, General John Minor died at the age of fifty-five while on business in Richmond. He was buried in the Masonic cemetery in Fredericksburg.

By Julia Preston