Dinwiddie County's Representative to the Secession Convention and one of my (white) ancestors

As promised, Chris, I am posting a little blurb about one of my (white) ancestors; James Boisseau, Jr. Boisseau was born June 10th 1822. He was a son of James Boisseau, a merchant of Petersburg, and Jane Turner. His father died when James, Jr. was two and Boisseau’s mother, Jane died when her son was five. Despite being born in Petersburg he spent most of his life in Dinwiddie County. He attended the College of William and Mary beginning in 1839 and from which he graduated in 1842.

He bought a farm, “Cedar Level” (and now the location of the new Dinwiddie County High School, which preserved the Boisseau family cemetery located on the property) which is south of Five Forks. He studied law at the University of Virginia and graduated in 1851.

The antebellum period found James Boisseau also busy in politics. He served as the county’s Commissioner of the Revenue, 1848-49 and 1850; the Commonwealth attorney 1852-53-54-55 and '56; Justice of the Peace, and Presiding Justice in 1860; and a Member of the State legislature in 1857-58.
By 1860, he owned a farm and was an attorney. His real property valued at $2000 and his personal property at $12,000. He owned nine male slaves and six female slaves. He also hired one male slave in 1860 from a Petersburg resident. Nine of the enslaved people on Boisseau’s farm in 1860 were between the ages of 2 months old and 9 years old. Seven of his slaves were listed as mulattos. Boisseau married Martha Elizabeth Cousins, daughter of Capt. William Henry Cousins (veteran of the War of 1812) of Dinwiddie on February 29, 1860. She was 24 at the time of the census.

Perhaps Boisseau’s greatest political service was as Dinwiddie County’s representative to the 1861 Secession Convention. Boisseau voted for secession on April 4th 1861; however this vote for secession was defeated 80-45. Boisseau voted for secession again on April 17, 1861, which this time passed 88 for secession and 55 against. Boisseau’s son, Sterling later noted that his father was a corporal in the Confederate army in Capt. B.J. Epes, Company. He was captured a short time before the surrender of Lee.

In the post-war years he served as the first judge of Dinwiddie County. The 1870 census lists him as 47 and the Judge of the County whose real estate was worth $2200 and his personal property decreased to just $100 (hey, that’s what happens when much of the antebellum personal property was evaluated in terms of the humans who took control of their lives in the aftermath of the war). His wife, familiarly called Betty on the census, was 34 and by then the mother of three children: Sterling (age 7 on the census), Ada Cousins (age 6 on the census), and Emma Robinson (age 1 on the census). The couple had a final son, Preston (who by the 1880 census was 7, remembering that the census listed children according to age on June 1, 1880, Preston must have been conceived in the final months of his father’s life), before James Boisseau Jr. died on Nov. 29th 1872.

FYI: I continue to work on the Boisseau side of my family so I have not pinpointed exactly when this race mixing occurred though I think it began long before James Boisseau, Jr. This of course, was not something that prominent slaveholders wrote down in their family bible so it will be daunting but I'll keep working.