I have found the solution, and am replying to my own topic here in case someone else is interested. The Tomcat server invokes Axis, so it's the Tomcat environment that must support the JAXP 1.3 environment. In catalina.bat I placed the following endorsed directory information:
set JAVA_ENDORSED_DIRS=%CATALINA_HOME%\webapps\axis\WEB-INF\lib\endorsed
In this directory place all five JAXP 1.3 files: dom.jar jaxp-api.jar sax.jar xalan.jar and xercesImpl.jar
Add these jars to your project's build path and that's all that needs to be done. Since its an "endorsed" diretory path, the jars in this path will override any jdk classes that come with the sdk, like JAXP 1.2, at least that is my understanding. Axis now works properly, both from a web service client call and when
testing within eclipse as a standalone object via main().