Richard Henry Field (18 June 1793–1 September 1865), judge of the Special Court of Appeals, was born in Madison County and was the son of Daniel Field and Judith Yancey Field. He attended Washington College (later Washington and Lee University), in Lexington, in 1810–1811, and Dickinson College, in Pennsylvania, in 1812, but graduated from neither. Field returned to Virginia to read law and on 22 April 1813 he qualified to practice in the Madison County Court. The previous month he had been commissioned a militia captain during the War of 1812. He may have served briefly as commonwealth's attorney, and he qualified to practice before the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals on 12 December 1825 but does not appear to have argued any cases before the court.
Richard H. Field, or R. H. Field, as he often identified himself, married Matilda Slaughter, of Culpeper County, by November 1825. So far as is known, they had no living children at the time of her death on 24 January 1827. In Fauquier County on 22 January 1829, Field married Alice Logan Gibson. They had one son before she died on 22 March 1839. In Orange County on 10 December 1840, Field married Philippa Barbour, daughter of Philip Pendleton Barbour, an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. They had one son and one daughter. Following Barbour's death in 1841, Field assisted his widow in the settlement and management of his estate.
General Court Judge
In the 1820s Field emerged as a strong political supporter of Andrew Jackson. Highly critical of President John Quincy Adams's "alarming new-fangled doctrines of constitutional power and expediency," he bemoaned the fact that the presidential electors and representatives in Congress had failed to honor what he believed was the will of the people in the election of 1824. Jackson had received more popular votes than Adams, but no candidate received a majority of the electoral votes, and the House of Representatives elected Adams president. Field's political preferences may have played a part when on 3 March 1827 the General Assembly elected him a judge of the General Court of Virginia, assigned to the Ninth Circuit that initially included the counties of Albemarle, Amherst, Culpeper, Fauquier, Madison, Nelson, Orange, and Spotsylvania. About that time, Field moved to a plantation named Walnut on land that his grandparents had formerly owned near Rixeyville in Culpeper County. He became one of the largest land- and slaveholders in the county.
Field took his judicial responsibilities seriously and served on the bench until his death thirty-eight years later. One contemporary later remarked that he was "quick of apprehension and rapid in reaching conclusions; not elaborate in writing opinions, but like lightning in forming and delivering them." After the Constitution of 1851 abolished the old General Court and transferred election of judges from the General Assembly to the voters, Field won election in March 1852 as judge of the new Tenth Circuit Court encompassing the counties of Albemarle, Culpeper, Fluvanna, Goochland, Greene, Louisa, Madison, and Orange.
Special Court of Appeals Judge
Field was second in seniority among the General Court judges when in 1848 the General Assembly established a new Special Court of Appeals consisting of the five most-senior judges in the state to handle the ever-increasing backlog of appellate cases in the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. After the death of Judge Daniel Smith, Field became presiding justice in December 1850. Between its first meeting on 14 December 1848 and its dissolution on 11 February 1852 under terms of the Constitution of 1851, the court decided 180 cases, some of which the official court reporter included in the published reports of the Supreme Court of Appeals. Unlike decisions of the Supreme Court of Appeals, though, the rulings of the Special Court of Appeals did not provide guiding precedent for other courts. Field also presided over a second Special Court of Appeals that the assembly created in 1854. Its decisions had the same authority as those of the Supreme Court of Appeals and therefore were good precedent that other, inferior courts, had to follow. Two volumes of the decisions of that court were published in 1856 and 1857. It met for the last time on 31 August 1863.
Field assisted his nephew, James Gaven Field, early in his legal and political careers that began in Culpeper County in the 1850s and culminated in his being attorney general of the state from 1877 through 1881 and the People's (Populist) Party candidate for vice president of the United States in 1892. Late in October 1860, Richard H. Field published a letter in the Culpeper Observer critical of secessionists and urging peaceful acceptance of Abraham Lincoln as president so long as he governed constitutionally. Advocates of disunion sharply criticized Field publicly, but after the Civil War began, he became a staunch Confederate. Still, he remained devoted to the principles of states' rights, both politically and from a legal standpoint, even when that conflicted with the needs of the Confederate government.
Field's third wife died on 3 December 1860, and both of his sons were killed during the war. Contemporaries believed that the war ruined Field's finances and that the deaths of his sons left him a broken man. He was a refugee at Columbia, in Fluvanna County, early in 1865, from which place he wrote to an old Culpeper County friend, "I fear we are to be overrun & made to yield to Yankee rule, In preference to which I would rather be exterminated as a government and as a people." Richard Henry Field died at Columbia on 1 September 1865. He was buried probably at Walnut, in Culpeper County.
Sources Consulted:
Field Family Bible Records (1793–1940), Virginia Historical Society (VHS), Richmond, Va. (with birth and death dates and variant third marriage date of 20 Dec. 1840); biography in S. Bassett French MS Biographical Sketches, Accession 21332, Library of Virginia (with incorrect date of birth); brief biography in Frederick Clifton Pierce, Field Genealogy (1901), 2:1119–1120; second marriage reported in Fredericksburg Virginia Herald, 31 Jan. 1829; third marriage reported in Richmond Enquirer, 22 Dec. 1840; 1852–1854 account book and family letters in Barbour Family Papers, VHS, and individual letters in other collections at VHS and Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va.; Richmond Enquirer, 6 Apr. 1827 (first quotation); John Randolph Tucker, Reminiscences of Virginia's Judges and Jurists (1895), 41 (second quotation); Richard H. Field to George Hamilton, 28 Jan. 1865, Downman Family Papers, VHS (third quotation); election to court in Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1826–1827 sess., 194, with certificate of election, 3 Mar. 1827, in Governor John Tyler Executive Papers, Accession 42267, Library of Virginia; Special Court of Appeals Order Books 1 (14 Dec. 1848–11 Feb. 1852) and 2 (2 Jan. 1855–31 Aug 1863), Accession 31211, Library of Virginia; David K. Sutelan and Wayne R. Spencer, "The Virginia Special Court of Appeals: Constitutional Relief for an Overburdened Court," William and Mary Law Review 8 (1967): 244–276; 16 Oct. 1860 letter to Culpeper Observer and criticism in Daily Richmond Enquirer, 1 Nov. 1860; Richmond Daily Dispatch, 7 Nov. 1860; inventory and sale of estate in Culpeper Co. Will Book V, 451–455, 520–524; Culpeper Co. Death Records, 1864–1896, 38; memorial in Richmond Whig and Public Advertiser, 10 Oct. 1865.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by E. Lee Shepard.
How to cite this page:
E. Lee Shepard,"Richard Henry Field (1793–1865)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2015 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Field_Richard_Henry, accessed [today's date]).
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