RARE "19th Century Virginia Senator" Charles J Faulkner Cut Signature For Sale

Up for sale a RARE! "Virginia Senator" Charles J Faulkner Clipped Signature. 

ES-8581

Charles James Faulkner (July

6, 1806 – November 1, 1884) was a nineteenth-century politician, planter and

lawyer from Virginia

and West Virginia

who served in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly and as a U.S.

Congressman.  Faulkner was born in Martinsburg, Berkeley County, Virginia

(now West Virginia) in 1806. His father, James Faulkner, had emigrated from

Ireland, and served as an artillery commander defending Norfolk during the War

of 1812, alongside Elisha Boyd, whose daughter would marry this

Faulkner. Although both his parents died when he was still a child, C. J.

Faulkner graduated from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

in 1822, studied law and was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1829. He married

Mary Wagner Boyd, the daughter of Elisha Boyd,

and received "Boydville" as part of his dowry. They had three

daughters and a son of the same name, Charles James Faulkner (1847-1929), who

like his elder brother E. Boyd Faulkner (1841-1917) became Confederate officers

and later politicians, diplomats and judges.  Berkeley County voters first elected

Faulkner one of their representatives in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1829 and he

would win election (and also lose several elections) in the ensuing decades. In

his initial speech, he advocated gradual emancipation. Faulkner was also soon

appointed a commissioner concerning the boundary dispute between Virginia and

Maryland. In 1838, voters in Berkeley, Morgan

and Hampshire Counties elected Faulkner to the Virginia

State Senate and he won re-election in 1841. In 1848 Faulkner again

won election to the House of Delegates. There, he introduced a law which became

a model for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. In 1850, Faulkner was elected to the

Virginia Constitutional Convention of

1850, as one of four delegates elected from the northern Valley

delegate district made up of Berkeley County and neighboring Jefferson and

Clarke Counties. He served with William Lucas, Dennis Murphy and Andrew Hunter, and was especially vocal in

extending suffrage and advocating more equitable tax adjustment, since taxing

slaveowners less than their slaves' worth (and adding nonvoting slaves when

proportioning the legislative seats) naturally meant more of the tax burden was

placed on non-slaveowners and people in the western counties. Faulkner was also elected to the United States House of

Representatives in 1850, and he won re-election several times,

serving from 1851 to 1859. He entered Congress as a Whig, but with the demise of that party,

he was re-elected as a Democrat, which he

remained for the rest of his Congressional career. There, Faulkner served as

chairman of the Committee on Military

Affairs from 1857 to 1859.

 President James

Buchanan appointed Faulkner Minister to France in

1860. He served until the onset of the American Civil War, newly elected President Abraham

Lincoln having replaced him with William L.

Dayton. When Faulkner returned across the Atlantic Ocean to settle

matters in Washington D.C., he was arrested in August 1861 on charges of

negotiating sales of arms for the Confederacy while in Paris, France. Initially

imprisoned in Washington, a prisoner exchange was contemplated of Faulkner for Henry S. McGraw, formerly

Pennsylvania's state treasurer and imprisoned in Richmond while seeking to

recover the corpse of Col. Cameron, but McGraw was released and Faulkner

instead transferred to Fort Warren in Boston Harbor. An exchange

was then contemplated for Alfred Ely, a New York congressman who captured

at the First Battle of Bull Run, but Confederate

President Jefferson Davis wanted to make Faulkner's

arrest an example before the civilized world. Union forces allowed Faulkner a

30-day parole to plead his case in Richmond, whereby Davis reluctantly

consented and Faulkner was formally released in December and allowed to return to

Martinsburg. Days after his release, Faulkner

enlisted in the Confederate Army and was appointed lieutenant colonel and

assistant adjutant general on the staff of General Thomas J.

"Stonewall" Jackson. Some of the troops in the Stonewall

Brigade were from Berkeley County; Martinsburg changed control ten times during

the conflict (30 months under Union governance and 16 months under Confederate

governance). His two sons had already become Confederate States Army officers,

leaving his wife and daughters to run Boydville. In July 1864, his wife stood

up to a Union officer charged with burning Boydville as Faulkner's property, as

Union troops had with fellow rebel Andrew Hunter's home in Charles Town and

A.R. Butler home's in Shepherdstown. She protested that it was her property, and

constructed by her father, a hero of the War of 1812, and her Union-allied

nephews Edmund B. Pendleton and E. Boyd Pendleton backed

her up. Thus, the house was spared.