Josiah Simpson

Josiah Simpson (September 21, 1817) was a Mississippi Territory judge from 1812 to 1817. Originally from Pennsylvania, he graduated from Princeton College and worked as a private tutor in Virginia and as a lawyer in New Jersey before he was appointed to the bench in Washington, Mississippi Territory. He was heavily involved in the Mississippi constitutional convention of 1817, but died suddenly in autumn of that year and did not live to see statehood.

Biography Simpson was the son of William Simpson and was baptized May 12, 1787, in Newtown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Simpson had a sister named Mary Simpson, and a brother named John Simpson. He worked as a private tutor for the children of John Taliaferro in Fredericksburg, Virginia, circa 1805. He studied law and went into practice near Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he married first a Miss Stuart; after her early death, he married second Ann Stanard, daughter of Fredericksburg lawyer William Stanard. He was appointed a judge of Mississippi Territory to replace Oliver Fitts, and was present in the region by October 1812. Simpson's commission, dated February 9, 1816, was handwritten on sheepskin, and signed by James Madison and James Monroe and was still in the possession of descendants as of 1942.

Simpson "took a very prominent part" in the 1817 Mississippi constitutional convention. He was buried in Natchez "at the burying ground of this place" (possibly Natchez City Cemetery).

According to historian and Jacksonian Democratic partisan J. F. H. Claiborne, "He left an only daughter who became the wife of the Hon. Thos. L. Dobyns, a native of Mason county, Ky., who resided at Rodney, Miss., a leading lawyer and prominent politician, and died there in 1854." Claiborne classed Simpson with a number of other Pennsylvanians who held political sway in Natchez in the early decades of the 19th century, including the Duncans, Postlethwaites, Gustines, Butlers, Andrew Ellicott, David Holmes, Christopher Rankin, Robert J. Walker, James C. Wilkins, the Minors, and the Stockmans. The U.S. Congress appropriated $1,000 survivor benefit for Simpson's daughter.