John James Beckley (4 August 1757–8 April 1807), first clerk of the House of Representatives and first librarian of Congress, one of at least two sons and one daughter of John Beckley and Elizabeth Withers Beckley, of London, may have been born in Exeter, Devonshire, England. When he was eleven years old his family sent Beckley to Virginia, where he was apprenticed to John Clayton (1695–1773), a noted botanist and clerk of Gloucester County. Beckley completed his education in Clayton's household and worked for him in the county clerk's office.
Following Clayton's death at the end of 1773, Beckley moved to Richmond and went to work for the clerk of Henrico County, Thomas Adams. On 17 November 1774 Beckley was appointed clerk of the Henrico County Committee formed to enforce the nonimportation association that the First Continental Congress had adopted, and late in 1775 or early in 1776 he moved to Williamsburg to work for John Pendleton, another former Adams assistant, who was the clerk of the Virginia Committee of Safety. On 7 February 1776 Beckley was appointed assistant clerk of the committee, and on 4 July 1776 he was charged with arranging and preserving its records. His careful work and the patronage of such prominent men as John Pendleton, Edmund Pendleton, and Edmund Randolph led to a quick succession of clerical appointments of increasing responsibility. In 1776 and 1777 Beckley worked as an assistant to the clerk of the Council of State and served as clerk to a number of legislative committees. He succeeded John Pendleton as clerk of the Senate of Virginia in October 1777 and two years later was elected to the more prestigious post of clerk of the House of Delegates, which he held for ten years.
Beckley also studied law in Williamsburg and took over Edmund Randolph's law practice in 1779, just as Randolph had taken over that of Thomas Jefferson in 1774. On 10 April 1779 Beckley was elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He became the first clerk of the Virginia Court of Appeals on 30 August 1779 and served until 29 October 1785. At the time the capital was moved to Richmond in the spring of 1780, Beckley was also acting as clerk of the High Court of Chancery. He was elected one of the first aldermen of the city of Richmond in July 1782 and became the second mayor of the city, serving from 1 July 1783 to 6 July 1784. He won another term as mayor on 21 February 1788 and this time held the office until 9 March 1789. In 1782 Beckley obtained a grant of almost fifty thousand acres of land in Greenbrier County, but he did not succeed in using this property or his law practice either to achieve financial security or to launch a political career of his own. In the spring of 1787 he went to Philadelphia in a fruitless attempt to obtain appointment as secretary to the Constitutional Convention. A year later he unsuccessfully ran for one of Greenbrier County's two seats in the Virginia ratification convention, but after his defeat he became the convention's secretary.
In the spring of 1789 Beckley accompanied several Virginia members of the new Congress to New York, where with their support he was elected the first clerk of the House of Representatives on 1 April 1789. By then he had ceased to use his middle name, and he never again resided in Virginia. On 16 October 1790 he married Maria Prince, the daughter of New York merchant James Prince. They had three sons and a daughter, of whom the only one to live to maturity was Alfred Beckley, an army officer and the founder of the town of Beckley. Following the death of his father-in-law, Beckley also took care of his wife's family.
Beckley's life from 1789 until his death was intertwined with the history of the House of Representatives and with the fortunes of the Jeffersonian Republicans. At first secretly and later openly, Beckley assisted in organizing opposition to the policies of Alexander Hamilton. Beckley's close relationship with the printers enabled him to learn the identities of the authors of anonymous political publications, and he was able to assist his friends in the preparation of effective opposition propaganda. Beckley also wrote articles and pamphlets under the pseudonyms Americanus, Calm Observer, and Senex. In 1796 he operated as the nation's first political party manager, organizing the Pennsylvania campaign effort to elect Thomas Jefferson president of the United States. As a result, Beckley lost his job as clerk of the House of Representatives following the Federalist victories in the elections of 1796.
From 1797 to 1801 Beckley continued to organize the Jeffersonian Republicans, but he had to rely on the generosity of his friends, sell some of his Virginia property, and take jobs as clerks to two Philadelphia courts in order to pay his bills. After the Jeffersonians won the national elections of 1800, Beckley was reelected clerk of the House of Representatives, and in January 1802 Jefferson named him to the new position of librarian of Congress. From then until his death Beckley held both positions and continued his work on behalf of the Republicans. As clerk of the House, Beckley followed the procedures he had learned in Virginia. He read impressively from the floor and put the final texts of the journals and statutes in good order, but his passion for orderliness outweighed his sense of history, and he routinely eliminated office clutter by destroying draft documents and working papers that he believed were no longer useful. Consequently, many of the original documents detailing how the House worked during its formative years are lost to history. Beckley's partisanship during his two terms as clerk firmly established the position as a distinctly political one.
John Beckley died in Washington on 8 April 1807 and was buried in a public cemetery in Georgetown.
Sources Consulted:
Birth date in unpublished autobiography of son Alfred Beckley in John Paxton Davis Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Smith Berkeley, John Beckley: Zealous Partisan in a Nation Divided (1973), includes full bibliography of primary sources; Noble E. Cunningham Jr., "John Beckley: An Early American Party Manager," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 13 (1956): 40–52, The Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of Party Organization, 1789–1801 (1957), and The Jeffersonian Republicans in Power: Party Operations, 1801–1809 (1963); Linda Grant De Pauw et al., eds., Documentary History of the First Federal Congress, 1789–1791 (1977– ), 3:x–xiv; obituary in Washington National Intelligencer, 10 Apr. 1807.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Charlene Bangs Bickford.
How to cite this page:
>Charlene Bangs Bickford, "John James Beckley (1757–1807)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 1998 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Beckley_John_James, accessed [today's date]).
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