Life
He was the son of Bryan Fairfax and Elizabeth Cary, sister of Sally Fairfax. George Washington and Martha Washington who traveled to Towlston Grange after his birth to stand as his godparents. Ferdinando was also the heir to George William Fairfax.
He was a justice of the peace for Jefferson County, Virginia and was, at the same time, the largest slave owner in the County.
From the 1770s to 1780s, several people developed plans as possible ways of abolishing slavery. Fairfax offered his "practicable scheme" for resolving this enduring dilemma when he developed his “Plan for Liberating the Negroes within the United States” in 1790. All of these plans were similar in that they wanted the abolition of slaves to be gradual, they wanted the government to compensate the slave owners for the lost property, and they wanted to colonize the freed slaves in a separate place from the white society.
He later squandered his inheritance on visionary schemes and squatters lawsuits.
Ferdinando married his first cousin Elizabeth Blair Cary, daughter of Wilson Miles Cary and Sarah Blair. The couple had children: George William Fairfax (born November 5, 1797), who married Isabella McNeil; Wilson Miles Cary Fairfax, who married Lucy Griffeth; Farinda Fairfax, who married Perrin Washington; Mary Fairfax; Sally Fairfax; Ferdinando Fairfax II, who married Mary Jett; Christiana Fairfax, who married Thomas Ragland; William Henry Fairfax; Thomas Fairfax; Archibald Blair Fairfax.
Donald McNeill Fairfax was his grandson.
Read more about this topic: Ferdinando Fairfax
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—Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865)
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—Anthony Pélissier. Explaining her philosophy of life to her son (1949)
“So that the life of a writer, whatever he might fancy to the contrary, was not so much a state of composition, as a state of warfare; and his probation in it, precisely that of any other man militant upon earth,—both depending alike, not half so much upon the degrees of his WIT—as his RESISTANCE.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)