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William P. Foster (swindler)

American jurist from Virginia

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMar 27, 2025
Entity authorityQ8016459 ↗
Source-derived summary

William P. Foster (fl. 1810s) was an American swindler from Virginia who obtained an appointment to the Illinois Supreme Court, but never served.

Foster was appointed to the Illinois Supreme Court on October 9, 1818, by the Illinois State Legislature, having charmed the legislators with his charisma, and having no previous experience as a lawyer. Foster never met with the Supreme Court, and never presided over his assigned circuit court. He resigned on July 7, 1819, before the Supreme Court's first December session.

After leaving Illinois, Foster made a living "moving from city to city and living by swindling strangers and prostituting his daughters, who were very beautiful".

References

Bibliography

Scott, John M (1896). Supreme Court of Illinois, 1818. Bloomington, IL. pp.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “William P. Foster (swindler)” as american jurist from Virginia. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1818, 1819, 1896—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where William, Foster and swindler can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as american jurist from Virginia. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 27, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q8016459. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1818, 1819 and 1896.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “William P. Foster (swindler)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.