James Byeram Owens

James Byeram Owens (c. 1816 – August 1, 1889) was a slaveowner and American politician who served as a Deputy from Florida to the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States from 1861 to 1862. He mounted legal arguments in defense of secession based on an originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and Southern arguments in favor of states' rights, with the intention of protecting the practice and institution of slavery.

Biography Owens was born in Fairfield County, South Carolina, moving to Mississippi and later to Marion County, Florida, in 1857, with two of his brothers. His name appears on the 1860 Slave Census Schedules for Marion County which attribute to him the ownership of 89 enslaved persons. Owens used the forced labor of enslaved Black people to work the land on his plantation, where cotton was grown. Shortly thereafter, Florida joined the Confederacy and Owens became a Deputy in the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States as well as a signatory to the Constitution of the Confederate States, representing Florida.

After the war, Owens, along with all other former Confederates, was granted a full and unconditional pardon by President Andrew Johnson in 1868.

Notable relatives Owens was the brother-in-law of Ethelbert Barksdale and the maternal grandfather of John W. Martin, the 24th Governor of Florida, by way of his daughter, Willie Owens, and her husband, John M. Martin Jr., himself the son of John Marshall Martin.