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To Baltimore attorney W.P. Maulsby. Writing to his Maryland co-counsel for the plaintiffs in a case to be tried in a Virginia Court, Southall believed that one of the defendants had committed " a deliberate fraud - a gross act of swindling", but worried that their key witness, "a stranger from another state" would be contradicted by a Virginia defense witness, "connected with a respectable family, in the midst of his friends and neighbors, and before a jury to whom he will, no doubt, be known, and whose sympathies and possibly whose confidence, would be more likely to be extended to him than to a total stranger." Valentine Wood Southall (1789-1861) was a veteran Virginia politician and respected attorney – a descendant of Patrick Henry, and cousin of future Confederate General Joseph Johnston – who had been Speaker of the Virginia House of Representatives in the 1840s. On the eve of Civil War, Southall, while bitterly opposed to “federal coercion”, was elected as a Union advocate to the Virginia Convention which met in February 1861 to decide whether the state should secede from the Union. Though not president of the Convention, he chaired the momentous session of April 17, days after the surrender of Fort Sumter, when the Virginia Ordinance of Secession was passed. Southall died four months later.