John Randolph Tucker (December 24, 1823 – February 13, 1897) was an American lawyer, author, and politician from Virginia.

John Randolph Tucker attended a private school near his Winchester home, then entered the Richmond Academy.

John Randolph Tucker was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1845, and began a private legal practice in Winchester.

In 1854 he delivered a major speech to the literary societies at College of William and Mary which argued that slavery was consistent with republicanism.

His speeches on other questions include those on the Electoral Commission bill, the constitutional doctrine as to the presidential count, the Hawaiian treaty in 1876, the use of the army at the polls, in 1879, and Chinese emigration, in 1883.

Speaking on the House floor, he asserted that “We did not ordain and establish this Constitution for the Chinaman and for all the other races of the earth.

I hold that this Constitution was ordained and established by our fathers for their posterity of the Caucasian people of America.”[3] Not surprisingly, he was also not supportive of the post-Civil War push to grant rights to African Americans, declaring that “.

there is not a philosophical statesman in this land who to-day does not say either that the citizenship and the voting power of the African race in the South is a failure--either that or that it is an unsolved problem of our future.

We have that one disease in the body-politic, which God grant we may recover from.”[4] Tucker made an unsuccessful but legally influential argument on behalf of August Spies and the other Haymarket Riot defendants during their appeal to the Supreme Court.

[5] Tucker died in 1897 in Lexington, Virginia and is buried in the family plot at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Winchester.