John Winn Davis (1798–1862), merchant and farmer, was born in Hanover County. His father, Hardin Davis, was postmaster at Charlottesville in 1801, and he had a mercantile partnership with John Winn. In 1829 the younger Davis ended his own partnership with Winn, Charlottesville’s longtime postmaster. Davis moved permanently in about 1837 to Pike County, Missouri. In 1840 he was chosen as a Whig candidate for the state legislature, but he declined to run. Davis owned twenty-two slaves that year and thirty in 1860, with his real estate and personal property then valued at a combined $98,700 (Mary Rawlings, ed., Early Charlottesville: Recollections of James Alexander, 1828–1874 [1942], 31; Charlottesville Virginia Advocate, 2 Oct. 1829; Woods, Albemarle description begins Edgar Woods, Albemarle County in Virginia, 1901, repr. 1991 description ends , 208, 253; Dennis Naglich, “The Slave System and the Civil War in Rural Prairieville,” Missouri Historical Review 87 [1993]: 254, 260, 263; Bowling Green, Mo., Salt River Journal, 25 Apr., 9 May 1840; DNA: RG 29, CS, Mo., Pike Co., 1840–60, 1860 slave schedules; gravestone inscription in Saint John’s Episcopal Church Cemetery, Eolia, Pike Co.).

apm: “assistant postmaster.”

TJ used the verso of an undated printed dinner invitation to transcribe the schedule above in a different format, undated, lacking Davis’s name, and not necessarily derived from this text (MS in ViU: TJP).