Representative Edward Junius Black

Edward Junius Black (October 30, 1806 – September 1, 1846) was a slave owner, United States Representative, state legislator, and lawyer from Georgia. He was born in Beaufort District, South Carolina, the son of planter William Black and Sarah Hanson Reid. His father, after suffering a serious financial setback, moved the family from Beaufort District to Barnwell District, South Carolina, where he continued his planting interests. Around the age of eight, Edward was sent to live in Augusta, Georgia, with his maternal uncle, Robert Raymond Reid, a successful attorney who would later become a prominent jurist and territorial governor of Florida. Black’s later family included his son, George Robison Black, who also served as a United States Representative from Georgia.

Black received his early education in Augusta and graduated from the Richmond Academy there. While a student, he served as secretary of the academy’s St. Cecilia Society, a literary and musical organization. He did not attend college, but instead read law under the supervision of his uncle, Robert R. Reid. He was admitted to the Georgia bar at the age of twenty-one and commenced the practice of law in Augusta. In 1826 he entered into a formal law partnership with Reid, maintaining an office on Washington Street in Augusta. About 1827, Black contracted tuberculosis, the disease that had earlier claimed his mother’s life. His expectation that he might share her fate weighed heavily on his mental health, yet contemporaries noted his wit, humor, and fondness for poetry. Between 1826 and 1829, a number of his verses appeared in the Augusta Constitutionalist under the pen name “Quip, Crank & Co.”

Black’s public career began in state politics. At the age of twenty-four, he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives from Richmond County and served from 1829 to 1831. During his tenure, he took a particular interest in educational policy and led an effort to relocate the University of Georgia—then known as Franklin College—from Athens to Milledgeville, which was at that time the state capital. This initiative was driven in part by a running feud he had with the students over what he regarded as the poor quality of scholarship at the institution. In 1831, he served as prosecutor for the Superior Court of Richmond County in the case of “The State vs. Surry, a Slave,” involving the February 6, 1831, stabbing death of an African American victim. The case was tried before Judge William White Holt of the Middle Circuit of Georgia, with General Thomas Glascock, Andrew Jackson Miller, and Augustus Baldwin Longstreet—himself a slave owner and outspoken pro-slavery and pro-secession advocate—appearing for the defense. The trial concluded on February 21, 1831, with a verdict of guilty. Around this time, Black was also considered by the Georgia legislature for election as Attorney General of the state, but he was defeated by a single vote.

In 1832, Black moved from Augusta to Screven County, Georgia. That same year he married Augusta George Anna Kirkland, a member of a prominent local family. In Screven County he combined his legal practice with planting and significantly expanded his slaveholding. According to the later recollections of his son, he increased his ownership from a few enslaved people to “thirty or forty slaves.” The 1840 federal census lists him as the owner of twenty enslaved persons, and the 1850 Census of Slave Inhabitants records his widow as the owner of thirty enslaved individuals, reflecting the continued operation and growth of the family’s plantation interests after his death.

Black entered national politics in the late 1830s. In 1838 he was elected as a Whig to represent Georgia in the Twenty-sixth Congress and served from March 4, 1839, to March 3, 1841. During the 1840 presidential campaign, he, along with fellow Georgia Representatives Walter T. Colquitt and Mark A. Cooper, broke with most of the state’s congressional delegation by refusing to support the Whig presidential nominee, General William Henry Harrison. Black stood for reelection in 1840 but, by then aligned with the Democratic Party, was unsuccessful in his bid for a second consecutive term. Shortly thereafter, however, he was elected as a Democrat to fill a vacancy in the Twenty-seventh Congress created by the resignations of Representatives Julius C. Alford, William Crosby Dawson, and Eugenius Aristides Nisbet. He took his seat on January 3, 1842.

Black won reelection in the general election of 1842 and served through the Twenty-eighth Congress, with his second period of congressional service extending from January 3, 1842, to March 3, 1845. During these years he sat in a House deeply divided over issues of banking, tariffs, and the expansion of slavery, and he was identified with the Democratic opposition to many Whig economic policies. After losing his bid for reelection in 1844, he returned to Georgia and resumed the practice of law, while maintaining his planting and slaveholding interests in Screven County.

Edward Junius Black’s health, long undermined by tuberculosis, continued to decline in the mid-1840s. He died on September 1, 1846, at the residence of Mr. G. Robison, his wife’s grandfather, in Barnwell District, South Carolina. He was interred in a family cemetery near Millettville, in what is now Allendale County, South Carolina. His career left a legacy of service in both state and national legislatures, and his family’s political influence in Georgia continued through his son, George Robison Black, who later followed him into the United States House of Representatives.