Representative Josiah Parker

Josiah Parker (May 11, 1751 – March 11, 1810) was an American politician, Revolutionary War officer, and Virginia planter who served in the United States House of Representatives from Virginia in the First through Sixth United States Congresses. Before his federal service he represented Isle of Wight County in three of the five Virginia Revolutionary Conventions and served several terms in the Virginia House of Delegates. A member of the Federalist Party in Congress, he participated in the formative legislative debates of the early republic and became the first national legislator in American history to formally introduce an antislavery motion in Congress.

Parker was born at the Macclesfield estate in Isle of Wight County in the Colony of Virginia, on land his family held under a grant from King Charles I dating to 1638. He grew up in the Tidewater planter society that combined agricultural enterprise with local political influence, and he later operated Macclesfield as a plantation in his own right. In 1773 he married Mary Pierce Bridger, a widow from another established local family. They had one child, Anne Pierce Parker, born around 1775 in Isle of Wight County. Anne later obtained a legislative divorce from an abusive husband after her father’s death, and her son, Leopold Copeland Parker Cowper, would go on to follow his maternal grandfather into public life.

Parker’s political career began on the eve of the American Revolution. In 1775, a year after the Fairfax Resolves and Virginia’s first revolutionary convention, he was elected as one of Isle of Wight County’s two part‑time representatives, alongside John Scarsbrook Wills, to the Second Virginia Convention, which met at St. John’s Church in Richmond in March 1775. He and Wills also represented the county in the Third Virginia Convention, which met in July and August 1775 in Richmond and created the Virginia Committee of Safety to act as an executive body between sessions, and in the Fourth Virginia Convention, which met from December 1775 to January 1776. At the Fifth Virginia Convention, Isle of Wight County was represented by Isaac Fulgham and John Scarsbrook Wills, but Parker’s early legislative service had already established him as a committed supporter of the revolutionary cause.

With the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in April 1775, Parker entered military service. He enlisted in the Continental Army and was commissioned a major in the 5th Virginia Regiment on February 13, 1776. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel on July 28, 1777, and became colonel of the regiment on April 1, 1778. Initially serving in Virginia under General Charles Lee, the 5th Virginia Regiment was transferred in the autumn of 1776 to General George Washington’s main army. Under Parker’s rising command the regiment saw action in several major engagements, including the Battles of Trenton and Princeton in the winter campaign of 1776–1777, and later at the Battles of Brandywine and Germantown in 1777, the Battle of Monmouth in 1778, and the Siege of Charleston. At the Battle of Trenton on December 26, 1776, Parker received the sword of surrender from Hessian Colonel Johann Rall, an episode memorialized in John Trumbull’s painting “The Capture of the Hessians at Trenton, December 26, 1776,” in which Parker is depicted as the only figure holding a sword.

Parker resigned his Continental Army commission on July 12, 1778, and promptly resumed civil service. That year Isle of Wight County voters elected him, again alongside John Scarsbrook Wills, as one of their two part‑time representatives in the Virginia House of Delegates. Because he was still colonel of the 5th Virginia Regiment on the election days, however, fellow legislators refused to seat him in the first session on the ground that his military command made him ineligible to serve. Samuel Hardy was elected on October 3, 1778, to replace him in the December 1778 session. Voters returned Parker to the Assembly of 1779, where he again served with Wills, but he was once more replaced by Samuel Hardy for the Assembly of 1780–1781. During Lord Cornwallis’s Virginia campaign in 1781, the British cavalry commander Banastre Tarleton ransacked Parker’s home at Macclesfield. In August 1781, the Marquis de Lafayette sent Parker on a reconnaissance mission to Portsmouth, Virginia; there Parker discovered that British forces had embarked for Yorktown and succeeded in recovering twenty‑five cannons that the British had thrown into the sea to prevent their capture. Isle of Wight voters again elected Parker and Wills as their delegates to the General Assembly session of 1782 and re‑elected both men to the 1783 session, confirming his continued standing in local politics.

In 1786, Parker accepted an officer’s commission in the United States Navy at Portsmouth, Virginia, reflecting his ongoing engagement with national defense in the postwar period. He also sought election as a delegate to the 1788 Virginia Convention called to consider ratification of the proposed United States Constitution. Opposed to what he regarded as a surrender of Virginia’s hard‑won independence, he campaigned against ratification, aligning himself with the Anti‑Federalist sentiment prevalent in parts of the state. Nevertheless, after Virginia ratified the new federal Constitution, Parker accepted the changed political order and stood for federal office.

Parker was elected to the First United States Congress as a representative from Virginia and was subsequently re‑elected to the Second and Third Congresses. Running as a member of the Federalist Party, he then won election to the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Congresses, thus serving six consecutive terms in the national legislature from the inauguration of the federal government in 1789 through the early years of the nineteenth century. As a Federalist representing Virginia, he contributed to the legislative process during a critical formative period in American history, participating in the democratic process and representing the interests of his constituents. Deeply troubled by the institution of slavery, Parker declared that it was time to “wipe off the stigma” that slavery placed upon the United States. Acting on this conviction, he became the first member of Congress to introduce a formal antislavery motion, seeking to restrict and ultimately end aspects of the slave trade, and he was one of only seven representatives to vote against the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. After concluding his service in the Sixth Congress, he returned to Isle of Wight County and resumed management of his plantation at Macclesfield.

Josiah Parker died on March 11, 1810, and was buried in the family cemetery on his Macclesfield plantation in Isle of Wight County, Virginia. His only child, Anne Pierce Parker, survived him by several decades, dying on March 21, 1849. His grandson, Leopold Copeland Parker Cowper, born to Anne the year after Colonel Parker’s death, carried forward the family’s political legacy by serving two terms representing Isle of Wight County in the Virginia House of Delegates and later becoming lieutenant governor in the Restored Government of Virginia after the American Civil War. In recognition of Parker’s historical significance, the Col. Josiah Parker Family Cemetery at Macclesfield was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, and a World War II Liberty ship, the SS Josiah Parker, was named in his honor.