John Wayles Eppes (April 19, 1773 - September 13, 1823) was the son of Francis Eppes and Elizabeth Wayles Eppes and the nephew of Thomas Jefferson. He was born near Petersburg, Virginia, and educated at home, at the College of William and Mary, and in Philadelphia. Under Jefferson's direction, Eppes studied the sciences and law. He became a successful attorney and planter, represented Virginia in the United States House of Representatives (1803-1811 and 1813-1815), and also served in the U.S. Senate (1817-1819).
Jefferson was delighted when John Wayles Eppes proposed marriage to his daughter Maria, and he wrote glowingly of his future son-in-law: "A long acquaintance with him has made his virtues familiar to me and convinced me that he possesses every quality necessary to make you happy and to make us all happy."[1] John and Maria were married at Monticello on October 13, 1797, after a lifelong courtship. Maria first met her cousin John at Eppington in Chesterfield County, Virginia, where she had gone to live after the death of her mother, Martha, before joining her father in France in 1786. The two renewed their friendship after Maria's return from France, and both lived with Jefferson in Philadelphia when he was secretary of state.
The couple had three children. Their only surviving child, Francis Wayles Eppes, was born at Monticello in 1801.
Jefferson greatly influenced John's education by recommending that he attend his alma mater, the College of William and Mary, and later directed his study of law in Philadelphia. Eppes was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1794 and began his political career in 1800, when he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates. He served his first term in Congress in the fall of 1803 with his brother-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph, and returned to Monticello the next spring, just before his wife died at the age of twenty-five after the birth of their third child.
John Wayles Eppes was a staunch political supporter of Thomas Jefferson and the two men maintained a regular correspondence, which continued after Maria's death in 1804 and Eppes's marriage to Martha Burke Jones in 1809.[2] With Martha, Eppes had four more children. After retiring from office in 1819 due to poor health, Eppes returned to Millbrook, his prosperous Buckingham County tobacco plantation, and remained there until his death in 1823.
-Text expanded adapted from Stein, Worlds, 207
