Representative Francis Everod Rives

Francis Everod Rives (January 14, 1792 – December 26, 1861) was an American Democratic politician, businessman, and planter who served two terms in the United States House of Representatives. Born in Prince George County, near Petersburg, Virginia, he received a private education appropriate to his class. As a young man he served as an ensign in the Virginia state militia during the War of 1812, stationed in Norfolk, reflecting both his social standing and early engagement in public service.

Rives’s personal life was closely tied to the prominent families and social networks of his region. In October 1833 he married Eliza Jane Pegram Rives (1802–1874), who survived him and bore several children. Among them was a daughter, Mary Chieves Rives Frazer (1821–1851). His family connections and growing wealth helped position him within the planter elite of southside Virginia, particularly in and around Petersburg, Prince George County, and neighboring localities.

Rives’s early business career was rooted in the domestic slave trade. In 1818 he and his neighbors Peyton Mason Sr. and Peyton Mason Jr. formed a slave-trading partnership known as “Peyton Mason and Company.” The firm purchased enslaved people in Virginia and transported them on foot in coffles to markets farther south. Rives twice personally drove coffles of enslaved people through Fayetteville, North Carolina, and westward to Tennessee, and in some cases all the way down the Natchez Trace to Natchez, Mississippi. He is also believed to have worked in the 1830s as an agent for the major slave-trading firm Franklin and Armfield. Having made a substantial fortune through this trade, he became a planter himself, acquiring land and enslaved laborers in several Virginia counties.

With his economic base established, Rives entered politics. Prince George County voters elected and re-elected him as one of their part-time representatives in the Virginia House of Delegates from 1821 to 1831. He subsequently joined the Democratic Party and won election to the Virginia State Senate, where he represented Prince George and neighboring Isle of Wight, Southampton, Surry, and Sussex Counties from 1831 to 1836, and again from 1848 to 1851. During these years he was repeatedly returned to office, reflecting his influence in the region and the support he enjoyed among white voters in the Tidewater and southside areas.

Rives advanced to national office as a Democrat representing Virginia’s 2nd congressional district. He was elected to the Twenty-fifth Congress with 80.61 percent of the vote in 1837, defeating fellow Democrat William B. Goodwyn, and was re-elected to the Twenty-sixth Congress in 1839 with 57.6 percent of the vote, defeating Whig candidate James W. Pegram. His service in Congress extended from March 4, 1837, to March 3, 1841, a period marked by intense partisan conflict and economic turmoil in the wake of the Panic of 1837. While in the House of Representatives he served as chairman of the Committee on Elections during the Twenty-sixth Congress, contributing to the legislative process and the adjudication of contested seats. He chose not to seek re-election in 1840 and returned to state and local affairs after his two terms.

Alongside his political career, Rives expanded his activities as a planter and businessman. By the 1840 census he considered himself a resident of Sussex County, where 27 of the 37 people in his household were enslaved. In the 1840s and 1850s he made Petersburg his official residence and became increasingly involved in urban and transportation development. He was a principal figure in the establishment and management of the state-chartered Petersburg Railroad, which linked Petersburg with North Carolina markets. His efforts to promote Petersburg’s commercial interests, sometimes at the expense of rival railroads and the competing port city of Portsmouth, led to accusations of chicanery from opponents. Nonetheless, his prominence in local affairs grew, and Petersburg voters elected him mayor; he served as the city’s chief executive from May 6, 1847, to May 5, 1848.

Rives’s wealth and status were underpinned by extensive slaveholding across multiple jurisdictions. In 1840 he listed his occupation as “Law,” and census records show that in 1850 he owned 13 enslaved people in the city of Petersburg, while N. F. Rives owned an additional 8 there, 6 of them under 12 years old. By 1860, F. E. Rives owned 33 enslaved people in Petersburg. Other members of the extended Rives family also held large numbers of enslaved people: in 1850 John E. Rives owned 34 enslaved people in Sussex County; in 1860 G. E. Rives owned 6 enslaved people in Prince George County, and John E. Rives owned 35 in Sussex County. In the 1860 census Francis E. Rives described himself as a “Gentleman” and resided in central Petersburg with his wife and three other white adults, including a young doctor, an elderly non-relative, and a young girl, possibly all servants or dependents.

Francis Everod Rives died in late 1861, with some sources indicating November 30 at Littleton in Sussex County and others giving December 26, 1861, in Petersburg as the date and place of his death. He is interred in Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia. His life and career spanned the early national, antebellum, and Civil War eras, and combined legislative service at the state and national levels, municipal leadership, and significant—though deeply exploitative—commercial and agricultural enterprises in the slave-based economy of the Old South.