- Title
- North Carolina historical review [1941 : January]
-
-
- Date
- January 1941
-
-
- Place
- ["North Carolina, United States"]
-
North Carolina historical review [1941 : January]
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The North Carolina
Historical Review
Volume XVIII January, 1941
Number 1
WILLIE JONES OF HALIFAX
By Blackwell Pierce Robinson
Willie Jones of Halifax was the outstanding radical of
North Carolina in the latter part of the eighteenth century.
A consummate politician and an aristocratic democrat, he
won for himself the title of the Jefferson of North Carolina.
Yet, in spite of the recognition of his importance by his¬
torians both early and recent, little has been written about
this eighteenth-century gentleman whose life has provoked
so much romantic fiction.
Like so many of his contemporaries in North Carolina,
Willie Jones was not born in the colony in which he was
later to become so prominent. His great-great-grandfather,
James Jones, Gentleman, came to America from Wales and
settled in Charles City County, or what is now Prince
George County, Virginia, where he left one son, James
Jones, Jr., who died in 1725. This second James Jones was
the father of Robert (or Robin) Ap Jones, born in 1694,
who was the grandfather of Willie Jones. A man of wealth
and influence, Robin Jones, Senior, lived in eastern Virginia
in Surry County or what is now Sussex County.1 Owning
a seat on the Assamoosack Swamp, he was Burgess from
Surry County in 1750, 1753, and 1754. 2 He died at the age
of eighty-one, leaving three sons, John, Nathaniel, and
1 The above information is to be found in the Albemarle Pari3h Register (pages 44, 46, 162, 166, 169)
of Sussex County, Virginia. This Register was kept during the occupancy of the Reverend William
Willie, The original register, written in long hand, is in the archives of the Virginia Historical Society
in Richmond. These records explode the tradition of the family, as set forth by the North Carolina
historian, Wheeler, and by the Dictionary of American Biography, that Robin Jones came to Norfolk,
Virginia, in the latter part of the seventeenth century as a boatswain on a man-of-war, and that while
there he fell in love, and, failing to get a discharge from service, as the ship sailed out of the Harbor,
he leaped overboard as
"... Leander swam the Hellespont
His true love for to see. "
See J. H. Wheeler. Reminiscences and Memories of North Carolina, and Eminent North Carolinians, p. 196.
2 Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, VIII (1901), 252, 255-256.
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