Bushrod Washington (June 5, 1762 – November 26, 1829) was an American attorney and politician who served as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1798 to 1829.

[citation needed] Bushrod Washington received his initial classical schooling from a private tutor who also taught the children of Richard Henry Lee, who lived nearby in Westmoreland County.

[5] He then traveled to Williamsburg for further studies and despite some school closures related to the American Revolutionary War and British raids nearby, graduated from the College of William & Mary in 1778, although only 16 years old.

Washington joined the Continental Army in 1781,[9] serving as a private of dragoons in Colonel John Francis Mercer’s cavalry, the 3rd Virginia Regiment.

[10] Although he remained a private until the war ended and the troop disbanded in 1782, he and his cousin Ludwell Lee fought in the Battle of Green Spring, and he witnessed General Cornwallis’s surrender to George Washington at Yorktown.

[citation needed] After concluding his studies with Wilson in April 1784, Washington returned to Westmoreland County and opened a law office.

[11] In 1789, he and his new bride moved into a newly constructed house at 521 Duke Street in Alexandria, Virginia, which may have been built as a wedding present, which he kept as one of his residences for decades.

[15] Westmoreland County voters elected Washington as one of their two representatives in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1787, where he served along with veteran Richard Henry Lee.

[16][2] The following year, he won another election and attended the Virginia Ratifying Convention (this time alongside Henry Lee),[17] where he voted for ratification of the U.S.

[19] On September 29, 1798, President John Adams gave Washington a recess appointment as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court,[20] to a seat vacated by James Wilson.

[24] He also enslaved nine adults and four children in Berkeley County (that became West Virginia after the American Civil War) and his brother Corbin (the other primary beneficiary of J.

Thus, while handling cases and taking the notes that would make him the reporter for Virginia's appellate court, Washington primarily lived in Richmond.

Still, according to tradition, Lawrence and Nellie Lewis did not invite him to the post-funeral dinner, so he asked an enslaved person to prepare and bring food to him in a cabin.

[39][40] However, other visitors to the American South also noticed many examples of property deterioration there, especially compared to the Northern States, including Philip Fithian (who tutored the children of Councilor Robert Carter in Westmoreland County in 1773–1774, but whose letters were not published until the 20th century), Alexis de Tocqueville (who toured the county in 1831 and wrote about the subject in 1835 and again in 1855) and Frederick Law Olmsted (who toured the South from 1852 until 1857, publishing dispatches in the New York Daily Times which were collected and republished in 1856, 1857 and 1860).

His decades-long friend, Chief Justice John Marshall, joined the organization as a life member shortly after its founding and became president of its Richmond branch.

[38] In particular, Hezekiah Niles in his nationally distributed Weekly Register questioned Washington's sale of 54 enslaved people from Mount Vernon in 1821 and reprinted a letter Washington had sent to the editor of a Baltimore federalist paper on the subject, as well as an August article in a Leesburg, Virginia paper that noted that a "drove of 100 negroes" were walked westward through the town the previous Saturday.

Washington responded in print several times, advising that he had sold 54 enslaved people the previous March for $10,000 for use on plantations in Louisiana's Red River area, and the contract promised that families would not be broken up.

Niles questioned the justice of the action, insisted that he was not disrespecting Washington, and did not discuss the economics of shipping from the port of Alexandria compared to the lengthy foot journey the coffle was undertaking.

Washington insisted the sale was justified by the economics of plantation management, insubordination of the enslaved people, and the likelihood that more would escape northward.