Biographical Note

John Preston "Pres" Sheffey, Southwest Virginia attorney, judge and Confederate cavalry officer, was born in Marion, Virginia on December 12, 1837. The son of James W. and Eleanor F. Preston Sheffey, John Sheffey graduated from Emory and Henry College in 1857, then studied law at the University of Virginia. Admitted to the bar in 1859, Sheffey entered into law practice as a junior partner with his father.

In February 1861, the elder Sheffey was elected delegate to Virginia's secession convention; later, he served as captain of the Smyth County home guards, responsible largely for guarding the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad. John Sheffey, meanwhile, enlisted in the Smyth Dragoons on May 27, 1861. Initially incorporated into the 50th Virginia Infantry as a cavalry company, the dragoons in September were assigned to the 8th Virginia Cavalry as Company A, with Sheffey serving as first lieutenant. Company A served throughout much of the war in southwestern Virginia and the counties that later became West Virginia. The company was encamped near Lewisburg, (West) Virginia during the autumn of 1861 and in Mercer County the following spring.

Sheffey was elected captain of Company A on May 14, 1862. During that summer and autumn, his unit participated in Jenkins' cavalry raid, proceeding through northwestern Virginia to the Ohio River, then southward to the Kanawha Valley. They had returned to the New River Valley by November and established quarters in Montgomery County for the winter of 1862-63. Sheffey was granted leave in the summer of 1863, while the 8th Virginia was in the Shenandoah Valley. Traveling southward to Wytheville, Sheffey married Josephine Spiller on June 19. (The couple would have seven children: Eleanor F., Susan M., Margaret P., Josephine S., James W., Miriam and John P.).

During the winter of 1863-64, Sheffey took a brief medical leave and then served as judge advocate in a Lee County court-martial session, while the 8th Virginia remained in southwestern Virginia. On August 7, 1864, Company A participated in a battle at Moorefield, West Virginia. Sheffey was one of a number of Confederates captured by Union forces. Soon transferred to Camp Chase, Sheffey remained a prisoner until exchanged in February 1865. He apparently rejoined his regiment at Appomattox, just as the war was drawing to a close.

Returning to Marion, Sheffey continued as his father's law partner until the latter's death in June 1876. Sheffey's law practice remained his primary occupation until his election to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1893 and his subsequent appointment as judge of Virginia's sixteenth judicial circuit in 1895. Josephine S. Sheffey died November 19, 1904, and John P. Sheffey died the following year on August 20. He is buried in Round Hill Cemetery, Marion, Virginia.

See also: Sheffey, John Preston, and James I Robertson. Soldier of Southwestern Virginia : The Civil War Letters of Captain John Preston Sheffey. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2004.

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