John Curtiss Underwood

John Curtiss Underwood (March 14, 1809 – December 7, 1873) was a lawyer, Abolitionist politician, and federal judge.

Underwood was born in Litchfield, New York. He graduated from Hamilton College in 1832, and was a founding member of Alpha Delta Phi. Underwood traveled to what was then western Virginia after graduation and taught children of the Jackson family in Clarksburg for two years. He then returned to New York to read law and began a private legal practice, which he continued in New York and Virginia from 1839-1856.

On October 21, 1839, in Fauquier County, Virginia, he married Maria Gloria Jackson, one of his former pupils. She was a granddaughter of Edward B. Jackson (whose brother John G. Jackson and great-nephew John Jay Jackson, Jr. were also federal judges); her cousin (on both sides) Stonewall Jackson became a distinguished Confederate general. The Underwoods farmed in Herkimer County, New York for about a decade (where they had two daughters, one of whom died, and a son, Edward J. Underwood (1842-1907), then moved to Clarke County, Virginia.

Underwood had been a Whig, but as that party was disintegrating, joined the Liberty Party in the 1840s because of his anti-slavery views. He unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Representative and then District Attorney in 1847. Underwood joined the Free Soil Party in 1848, and the following year moved back to Virginia, hoping that successful operation of a dairy farm and cheese making factory in adjoining Clarke and Fauquier Counties would show the superiority of using free rather than slave labor.

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