Representative Burwell Bassett

Burwell Bassett, Jr. (March 18, 1764 – February 26, 1841) was an American planter, militia officer, and politician from New Kent County and, for two decades, from Williamsburg in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Like his father, he served in both chambers of the Virginia General Assembly, and in addition won election (and lost re-election) several times to the United States House of Representatives, where he served for more than a decade in three different districts because of census-required reorganizations. Over the course of ten terms in Congress, he participated in the legislative process during a formative period in the early republic, ultimately aligning with the Democratic-Republican Party, the Crawford Republicans, and later the Jacksonian Democrats, and representing the interests of his Virginia constituents in the national legislature.

Bassett was born at the family plantation, Eltham, in New Kent County, Virginia, to Anna Marie Dandridge and Burwell Bassett Sr. He was the second of four sons and the fifth of the couple’s eight children. Both sides of his family were among the First Families of Virginia and deeply embedded in the political and social elite of the colony and later the state. His father, Burwell Bassett Sr., and his maternal grandfather, Bartholomew Dandridge, were patriots who served many terms in the Virginia General Assembly; Bassett Sr. also sat in the Virginia Ratification Convention for the United States Constitution, while Dandridge served on what is now known as the Supreme Court of Virginia. Through his mother’s family, Bassett was the nephew of Martha Dandridge Custis Washington, wife of General and later President George Washington, and he was a first cousin of future President William Henry Harrison. He received a private education appropriate to his class and then attended the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, preparing for a life of plantation management and public service.

As heir to a prominent landed family, Bassett inherited substantial property and enslaved laborers. The Bassetts had long been among the ruling elite in New Kent County and neighboring Hanover County, which had been formed from New Kent in his father’s lifetime. Upon his father’s death, Bassett inherited about 6,000 acres of land in New Kent County and more than 1,000 acres in Hanover County, and he subsequently purchased about 350 acres in neighboring James City County. He operated these plantations using enslaved labor, largely through overseers, especially after he moved his residence to Williamsburg, where he lived from 1815 until 1837. Federal census records reflect the scale of his slaveholding: in 1810 he owned 98 enslaved people in New Kent County; by 1820 his two New Kent plantations, each under a separate overseer, held 88 enslaved men and women, with an additional 19 enslaved people in James City County. In the 1830 census he owned 109 enslaved men and women in New Kent County and 18 in James City County. After selling his James City County land in 1837, he appears to have reduced his enslaved holdings in New Kent County, possibly through sales or transfers to relatives; in the 1840 census he is recorded as owning 75 enslaved people there. Although he married twice, he had no children, and his estates and enslaved property were ultimately dispersed among extended family.

Bassett married Elizabeth McCarty on January 10, 1788. She was the daughter of Colonel Daniel McCarty, a planter and delegate from Westmoreland County, thereby reinforcing Bassett’s ties to Virginia’s political and planter aristocracy. Following Elizabeth McCarty Bassett’s death, he remarried in 1800 to Philadelphia Ann Claiborne, a member of another prominent Virginia family. Despite these alliances and his position as principal heir to his father’s estates, Bassett and his two wives had no surviving children, a fact noted by later family chroniclers.

Bassett began his political career in the Virginia House of Delegates, seeking to represent New Kent County while his father simultaneously served in the Virginia Senate for New Kent, James City, and Charles City Counties. Voters elected and re-elected him as one of New Kent County’s two part-time delegates from 1787 to 1789, placing him in public office before the federal Constitution had fully taken effect. After his father’s death in January 1793, Bassett successfully ran for his father’s former seat in the Virginia Senate. He served there from October 1793 to 1805, representing New Kent and adjacent counties in what was then a part-time but influential legislative body. During these years he consolidated his standing as a regional political figure and maintained the family’s long tradition of legislative service.

Bassett’s early efforts to enter the national legislature were unsuccessful. He lost his first three contests for the United States House of Representatives, twice to incumbent John Clopton in 1794 and 1796, and again to Thomas Griffin in 1802. He was finally elected as a Democratic-Republican in 1804 and served in the U.S. House from 1805 to 1813, during the Ninth through Twelfth Congresses. Over these terms he represented three different Virginia districts as congressional reapportionment and redistricting followed the federal censuses. In Congress he became chairman of the Committee on Claims in the Twelfth Congress and chaired the Committee on Revisal and Unfinished Business from 1811 to 1813, positions that placed him at the center of administrative and procedural work in the House. He failed to win re-election in 1812 but returned to Congress in 1814, again as a Democratic-Republican, and served from 1815 to 1819. During this second period of service he continued to represent Virginia agrarian interests in the midst of the War of 1812 and its aftermath.

Although he announced his retirement from Congress after 1819, Bassett remained active in state politics. He won election to the Virginia House of Delegates from James City County and served two one-year terms from 1819 until he again took a federal seat in 1821. Voters returned him to the United States House of Representatives for a third extended period beginning with the congressional term that commenced in 1821, and he was re-elected several times, serving until 1829. During these final congressional terms he moved through the shifting party alignments of the era, beginning as a Democratic-Republican, then associating with the Crawford Republican faction, and ultimately aligning with the Jacksonian Democrats. He announced his retirement early in 1828 but was persuaded to run again; however, he lost that race to Richard Coke, who had already secured the support of other leading politicians in the district. His last bid for elective office, a race for a seat in the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829–1830, ended in defeat when he finished last in a field of eight candidates. In his later congressional years he spoke only occasionally on the House floor, notably criticizing President John Quincy Adams and supporting efforts to reduce the size and expense of the United States Navy.

In addition to his legislative career, Bassett held a commission in the Virginia militia. His only combat experience occurred during the War of 1812, particularly in 1814 when British forces invaded the Chesapeake Bay region. At that time he served as lieutenant colonel of the 68th Regiment of the Virginia Militia, a local defense force organized to protect the Tidewater area. His military role, though limited in active engagement, reflected the expectation that leading planters and officeholders would also assume militia responsibilities in times of national emergency.

Bassett also devoted attention to religious and educational causes, especially within the Episcopal Church. He was an advocate of public schooling and hosted British educational reformer Joseph Lancaster during Lancaster’s tour of Virginia in 1819, demonstrating his interest in new instructional methods. While residing in Williamsburg, Bassett served on the vestry of historic Bruton Parish Church and was a delegate to several Virginia Episcopal conventions. In 1811, during his service in the U.S. House, he sponsored a bill to incorporate an Episcopal congregation in Alexandria, Virginia. President James Madison vetoed the measure on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment’s prohibition on federal establishment of religion, making Bassett’s bill part of an early and significant constitutional debate over church and state. In 1827 he became a trustee of the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, further cementing his role in the institutional life of the Episcopal Church in Virginia.

In 1837, after more than two decades of residence in Williamsburg, Bassett sold his James City County land and returned to New Kent County to spend his final years on his ancestral ground. He died there on February 26, 1841. He was probably interred at Eltham Plantation in Eltham, Virginia, although the plantation house itself burned to the ground in 1875, obscuring some details of the family burial site. A grand-niece later recalled that Burwell Bassett, Jr. had been “perhaps the last man in Virginia who wore small clothes and powdered hair in a queue,” a description that underscored both his longevity and his embodiment of the manners and style of the eighteenth-century Virginia gentry.