Representative Richard Thomas Walker Duke

Richard Thomas Walker Duke Sr. (June 6, 1822 – July 2, 1898) was a nineteenth-century congressman, Confederate officer, lawyer, planter, and local official from Virginia. A member of the Democratic Party and later aligned with the Conservative movement in postwar Virginia, he represented his state in the United States House of Representatives for two terms during the Reconstruction era, contributing to the legislative process at a significant moment in American political history and representing the interests of his Albemarle County and central Virginia constituents.

Duke was born near Charlottesville, Albemarle County, Virginia, on June 6, 1822, the son of Francis Edward Duke, a Virginia planter born November 29, 1783, in Berkeley, Virginia, and Elizabeth Morris Kendrick, born August 23, 1802, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. His father died on November 8, 1836, in Harpers Ferry, then in Virginia (now West Virginia), when Richard was a teenager. Duke received a private education appropriate to his social class and, after his father’s death, was sent to Lexington, Virginia, for advanced studies. He attended the Virginia Military Institute and graduated in 1844. He then returned to Charlottesville to study law and enrolled in the law department of the University of Virginia, from which he received a law degree in 1850.

Following his admission to the Virginia bar in 1850, Duke began the private practice of law in Charlottesville and Albemarle County. He simultaneously managed and helped operate his family’s plantation, which relied on enslaved labor, reflecting the economic and social structure of antebellum central Virginia. In March 1851 the Virginia General Assembly amended Charlottesville’s town charter, and in 1854 Duke was elected one of the town’s four aldermen, serving alongside Andrew J. Brown, John B. Dodd, and William Kebinger, while Drury Wood served as mayor. Duke’s first major public office came in 1858, when he was elected Commonwealth’s Attorney for Albemarle County, a position he would hold through repeated reelections, including during the Civil War, and in which he served until 1869.

On the eve of the Civil War, Duke became active in local militia organization. In November 1859, in the aftermath of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry and Brown’s subsequent trial and execution, he organized a volunteer company known as the Albemarle Rifles at Charlottesville. After Virginia voted to secede from the Union in April 1861, Duke enlisted on May 8, 1861, and his company was mustered into Confederate service as Company B of the 19th Virginia Infantry. The regiment fought at the First Battle of Manassas (First Bull Run), where Duke and his company, ordered to hold a ford, saw limited casualties but received favorable mention in the battle report. Duke was ill in Charlottesville for much of August and September 1861, and in April 1862, while his Company B and Captain Peyton’s Company E were on picket duty in a swamp during the Peninsula Campaign, they were driven back and later replaced by a Mississippi regiment. When the 19th Virginia was reorganized later that month, Duke failed to win reelection as captain.

In May 1862, Duke’s military career took a new turn when the 46th Virginia Infantry reorganized after its defeat at the Battle of Roanoke Island in January 1862 and heavy losses from expiring enlistments and disease, including measles and typhoid fever. The regiment, which included three companies from Albemarle County and two companies of the Richmond Light Infantry Blues among its nine companies, refused to reelect its lieutenant colonel, Richardson, who then transferred to the 39th Virginia Infantry as a major. The men instead elected Duke as colonel of the 46th Virginia Infantry, an outcome he had not anticipated, as he had expected to return to Albemarle and his law practice. The 46th Virginia served in Wise’s Brigade under former Virginia governor and then Confederate General Henry A. Wise. While the brigade participated to some extent in the Seven Days Battles that helped save Richmond in the summer of 1862, it was largely assigned to the Virginia Peninsula, responding to alarms about Union movements on the James River and serving for roughly sixteen months as a counterforce to the Union presence at Norfolk and Fortress Monroe. Duke remained colonel of the regiment until March 1864, when he resigned his commission following quarrels with General Wise.

Duke reentered Confederate service shortly thereafter. In May 1864 he accepted a commission as lieutenant colonel and assumed command of the 1st Virginia Reserves Battalion. This unit, composed of reserve companies from Albemarle, Fluvanna, Greene, Louisa, Orange, and Madison Counties, was charged with the defense of Richmond during the final year of the war, including during the Appomattox Campaign. As the summer of 1864 ended, Duke marched the Albemarle County Reserves to Richmond, where they were organized into the 1st Virginia Reserves Battalion and assigned to guard prisoners at Belle Isle and to undergo further training. In late September 1864, the battalion was ordered to man the trenches at Fort Harrison, then retreated to new defensive lines at Chaffin’s Bluff before returning to Richmond to guard Libby Prison. During the Confederate evacuation of Richmond on April 3, 1865, Duke and his men, acting under orders, helped set public warehouses afire. He was captured with many of his troops at the Battle of Sailor’s Creek on April 6, 1865; the officers, including Duke, were sent to the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C., while enlisted men were eventually transferred to Point Lookout, Maryland.

Released from prison in July 1865, Duke returned to Charlottesville and resumed both farming and the practice of law in Albemarle County and surrounding areas. In the turbulent early years of Reconstruction, he participated in organizing a local white citizens’ group aimed at preventing what its members termed “black domination,” reflecting the racial and political tensions of the period. He continued to practice law while Virginia underwent political readjustment, including the drafting and adoption of a new state constitution in 1869. That constitution, which was accepted by the electorate, omitted a proposed provision that would have barred many former Confederates from holding public office, clearing the way for men such as Duke to reenter political life. After Virginia’s readmission to representation in Congress, Conservative candidate Robert Ridgway was elected to the United States House of Representatives from a central Virginia district but died soon thereafter.

Duke entered national politics as a Conservative aligned with the Democratic Party. In 1870 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives unopposed in a special election to fill Ridgway’s vacant seat and was concurrently elected unopposed in the general election for the succeeding full term. Running as a Conservative, he defeated fellow Albemarle County planter and lawyer Alexander Rives, a Republican, in the contested regular election. Rives, who had courteously and without fee secured a presidential pardon for Duke to remove any taint of civil disability arising from his Confederate service, was soon afterward appointed and confirmed as United States District Judge for the Western District of Virginia. Duke served two terms in Congress, participating in the legislative process during a critical phase of Reconstruction and representing his Virginia constituents’ interests as federal authority and state governance were being renegotiated. His tenure in the House extended through the early 1870s, when issues of readjustment, amnesty, and the political status of former Confederates and freedpeople dominated national and state politics.

In 1873 Duke was succeeded in Congress by another former Confederate, Alexander Davis, who ran as a Democrat. Duke then returned to state and local affairs. Albemarle County voters elected him to the Virginia House of Delegates in 1879 and again in 1880, where he continued to represent local interests during the post-Reconstruction era. Alongside his legislative service, he maintained his legal practice and agricultural pursuits in Albemarle County. In his later years he devoted increasing attention to documenting the history and society of his native region. Around 1899, in retirement, he began writing extensive reminiscences of Charlottesville and Albemarle County for his five children and, eventually, his grandchildren. Over the next two decades, ending only months before his death, these writings grew into five bound volumes, which, along with other family papers, are preserved in the University of Virginia Library and constitute a valuable source for the study of nineteenth-century central Virginia.

Richard Thomas Walker Duke Sr. died at his estate, “Sunny Side,” near Charlottesville, Virginia, on July 2, 1898. He was interred in Maplewood Cemetery in Charlottesville. His family papers, including his multi-volume reminiscences, are held by the University of Virginia Library, providing detailed insight into his life as a lawyer, planter, soldier, and public official, as well as into the broader history of Charlottesville and Albemarle County in the nineteenth century.