He was admitted to the practice of medicine at New London, Connecticut. He left his native city of Poughkeepsie, New York on a trip south for his health. After marrying in 1807 in New Berne, North Carolina95, he served as a surgeon with the New York forces96 in the War of 1812.95 They had four daughters and two sons.95 They lived probably first at New Bern, North Carolina96, beginning in 1808291, at times in Newton, Hillsborough, Salisbury, Fayetteville and in 182396 to Raleigh, North Carolina. He was one of the commissioners for building the capitol in Raleigh which was completed in 1840. On the 1840 US Census he and his family lived in Raleigh. They finally settled during January, 1845 in Petersburg, Virginia.95 In 1846, John Beckwith, M.D. and his son T. Stanly Beckwith, M.D., engaged in a suicidal dispute with the Petersburg Medical Faculty, a group of regular physicians who, like physicians elsewhere, had recently organized to define and combat quackery. High on the Medical Faculty's new list of unethical practices was the promotion of "secret nostrums". The Beckwiths meantime had made a considerable investment in the production and sale of Beckwith's Antidyspeptic Pills, and they saw the Medical Faculty's code of ethics as a mere pretext for driving out competitors. The Beckwiths stood their ground and took the dreary consequences. Consultations were refused, and patients grew fainthearted. Creditors closed in, and the Beckwith's furniture, evidently a gift from Edmund Ruffin, was sacrificed to pay them.299 Dr. Beckwith soon tired of fighting, and he retired from the practice of medicine, leaving his large family with very little income. Into the breach stepped the Beckwith women. Kate's mother tried taking in boarders, but had to give it up "as her old fashion-open-house-entertaining was not money-making." Kate, for her part, tried to get some cash out of her accomplishments. She opened a school for young ladies in which she taught piano, voice, guitar, and drawing, and she was apparently a popular teacher. But she, too, failed to make enough to solve the family's continual financial problems. 299 On the 1 June 1850 census of Petersburg John Beckwith, MD, 64 and born in Connecticut, lived with his wife Margaret, 62 and born in Connecticut, and children all born in North Carolina, Cornelia, 27, Catherine, 24, Nancy, 20, John 19, and Edwin Gary, 6. 1245 On the 22 Jun 1860 census John is 75, and living in Petersburg, Virginia with Margaret, age 73, daughter Cornelia, age 29, Nancy K, age 2?, Ann G. Nash?, age 11, and _____ V. Nash?, age 9. 301 Mrs. Beckwith died in Petersburg in 1864, and in 1865 Dr. Beckwith and his daughters Cornelia and Nancy went to live with his daughter Katherine Spalding, at Riverdale , NY.95 299 “I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me. Write blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth.”520 He died at age 85.1216

Check The Bronx for probate, etc.

My grandfather, Thomas [sic] Beckwith married the oldest daughter of the then Earl of Derby, Margaret Stanly, in written memoirs of Mary Izabell Beckwith Moody.

She was named for and reared by her aunt Margaret Cogdell Greene.95 She left a letter of family genealogy in the Edmund Beckwith Papers 103 Petersburg went under siege in June, 1864, and by July, Margaret S. Beckwith and her family were driven out by the shelling. The Beckwith's cook had been killed, but the other slaves stayed on, scrounged for food, and helped make do in the hardscrabble conditions of the failing Confederacy. When peace came, the Beckwith slaves set off to claim their freedom, and for the first time, the white Beckwith women were confronted with cooking and the laundry. 299 She died 7 January 1864 at age 76.1216