James Finley (February 4, 1725 – January 6, 1795) was an American Presbyterian minister and politician who was a pioneer resident of Western Pennsylvania.
He immigrated to America at the age of nine, and studied under Samuel Blair at Faggs Manor Academy,[1] in what is now Londonderry Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania.
Through his brother Samuel, James was likely acquainted with another signer of the Declaration of Independence, Richard Stockton, as well as Oliver Ellsworth, who became the third Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and Ebenezer Hazard, who became Postmaster General.
[1] Finley family history holds that during the American Revolution, he was connected to the house where the Declaration of Independence was initially drafted.
[4] Other sources state that the home where Jefferson wrote the Declaration was owned and occupied by Jacob Graff, a local bricklayer.
A remarkable case of premonition or telepathy, or call it as one may, must here be recorded: During young Finley's running fight and narrow escapes, just mentioned, his father, Rev.
James Finley, three hundred miles away, had a strange and undefinable impression that his son was in great danger, but could form no distinct conception of its nature or cause.
He fell to his knees and spent a long time in earnest prayer for his son, arising with the comfortable feeling that the danger was past.
Finley was a man of absolute truth—the reader must settle for himself what was the cause of this wireless intercourse between father and son and separated by three hundred miles of space.