by Larry Chowning –
Essex and Middlesex counties had the distinction of having Joseph Allen Bristow of Stormont, Va., represent the counties as a delegate to Virginia’s Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902.
The purpose of the convention was to establish Jim Crow laws to take the right to vote away from Blacks and poor whites without technically violating the 14th and 15th Amendments of the United States Constitution. Since the Civil War, whites in power in the state had attempted to circumvent federal Reconstruction laws, which gave civil and political rights to Blacks.
The convention established laws requiring that all voter-eligible Virginians must be able to read and write enough to pass a literacy test and pay a poll tax before being eligible to vote.
Bristow was born in Middlesex County on Sept. 17, 1838. His elementary education was in a one-room school at Oakenham near Saluda. He attended Centreville Male Academy in King and Queen County for his secondary studies.
He enlisted in the Confederate Army on July 18, 1861 in Urbanna under Captain W.C. Fleet and later transferred to the 23rd Virginia Calvary, where he rose to the rank of sergeant.
After the war, he operated and owned a store at Stormont and gained national attention at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair when he and a Mathews County blacksmith, William M. Dixon, won a blue ribbon for their development of patent oyster tongs.
Politically, he was very popular as a Republican in a generally controlled Democratic electorate in Essex and Middlesex. While running for the constitutional convention, he gave his views in a front-page article in the May 3, 1901 issue of the Southside Sentinel. “I have taken the oath of allegiance to support the constitution of the United States and do not propose to evade its requirements. Therefore I cannot vote to disenfranchise a Black man because he is Black.”
“If elected I shall do my whole duty as sacredly to represent the humblest citizen of the commonwealth as that of her most honored official servants,” he wrote. “As we are to have a new constitution may all good people hope and pray that it may be born in the light of the gospel of Christ and we and our children will never be ashamed of it.”
Virginia’s 1902 Jim Crow laws were approved at that constitutional convention on a 67 to 28 vote. Joseph Allen Bristow was one of 28 who voted against. His portrait hangs today on the wall in the Middlesex County Historic Courthouse in Saluda.
It happened here in Rivah country!
