James Sevier Conway was born on December 4, 1796, in Greene County, Tennessee, the son of Thomas Conway and Anne Rector Conway. James Conway and his brothers and three sisters were raised on a prosperous frontier plantation and received their education from private tutors. In 1818 the family moved to St. Louis, probably to be near Anne Conway's uncle, the Surveyor General of the vast Missouri Territory. In the first two decades of the 19th century, the United States was rapidly settling east of the Mississippi River and fortunes were to be made speculating in frontier land. No one was better positioned to take advantage of this opportunity than the surveyors who first encountered these new territories and opened them up for settlement. In 1820 James Conway and his older brother Henry were appointed surveyors for the newly formed Arkansas Territory.
Almost all of the early surveyors of Arkansas were, in fact, related in some fashion. Combined with their advance knowledge of the best lands, this gave them a tremendous advantage during the early settlement of Arkansas. As a result four interrelated families of former surveyors would dominate Arkansas politics for most of the antebellum period. The families were the Conways, the Rectors, the Seviers, and the Johnsons. Collectively they were referred to as the "Dynasty," or more often as "the Family."
Next: "The Family"
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