Philip Pendleton Slaughter and his wife, Margaret French Strother (daughter of French Strother), Slaughter was born into the First Families of Virginia, his grandfathers (uncles and cousins) having helped settle Culpeper County and fought in the American Revolutionary War.

Philip Slaughter's Springfield farm), probably by classical scholar John Robertson, because by the time 1818, former Presbyterian church pastor Samuel Davies Hoge succeeded him in 1818, Daniel French Slaughter was attending the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

When Dade moved to Owensboro, Kentucky, Daniel Slaughter won that senate seat in 1832, and with the creation of Rappahannock County from them, it was added in 1834.

The Battle of Cedar Mountain was partially fought on Slaughter's lands (resulting in a Confederate victory on August 9, 1862), as would be skirmishes during the following fortnight.

One nearby pasture at once was called "Raccoon's Ford" on the Rapidan River below Slaughter's Mountain (owned by merchant Philip Pendleton Nalle and later by U.S. Representative Jeremiah Morton was so disrupted by cannon fire that locals called it "cannon ball field".

After the Civil War, Daniel F. Slaughter became one of the directors of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad alongside his longtime ally John Barbour[12] as well as the Culpeper Savings Bank and Insurance Company, licensed in 1867, alongside Barbour, Jacob S. Eggborn, Walter O'Bannon, Charles Crittenden, Charles Wiate and Lewis P. Nelson.