Waller Redd Staples (February 24, 1826 – August 21, 1897) was an American lawyer, law professor, judge, slave-owner and politician who was briefly a member of the Virginia General Assembly before the American Civil War, became a Congressman serving the Confederate States of America during the war, and after receiving a pardon at the war's end became a judge of the Virginia Court of Appeals, and law professor at Washington and Lee University, as well as revisor of Virginia's laws (1884-1887).
Early and family life
Staples was born in Patrick County, Virginia to Col. Abram Penn Staples and his wife, the former Mary Stovall Penn. His paternal grandfather Samuel G. Staples and his maternal grandfather Abram Penn had served as soldiers in the American Revolutionary War, the former leading militia from Buckingham County, Virginia including at the Battle of Yorktown, and the latter leading militia from Henry County. His father was the clerk for Patrick county, as had been his grandfather, Keziah Staples. His elder brother Samuel Granville Staples (1821-1895) would remain in Patrick County and run a plantation before the war, and like his father become a delegate and like his younger brother a judge. The Staples sons received a private education, then Waller Staples attended the University of North Carolina for two years, before moving to Williamsburg to study at the College of William and Mary and graduated in 1845, then began reading law under the guidance of judge Norbonne Taliaferro in Franklin County.
Staples was active in the Presbyterian Church, but either never married, or if he did marry, his wife died between censuses.
Career
After graduation and admission to the Virginia bar, Staples moved to the mountains of Montgomery County, Virginia to begin his private legal practice in its county seat, Christiansburg, as well as adjacent counties. He lived with and worked under the guidance of William Ballard Preston, who had served as Secretary of the Navy during the administration of President Zachary Taylor and was a cousin of his mother. Staples later noted that he never received a fee greater than $2000 until after 1883, when he began representing greater interests in private practice (after being removed from the Virginia Court of Appeals along with all his colleagues in a massive legislative reorganization0.
Meanwhile, in 1854–1855, Staples represented Montgomery County in the Virginia House of Delegates as a Whig. He then ran for the United States House of Representatives in the 12th district as a Know Nothing, but lost to the Democratic incumbent, Henry A. Edmundson. By 1860, Staples lived in a Christiansburg hotel owned by Thomas Wilson, as did several other lawyers and male professionals with less wealth than he. In that census, Staples owned 41 enslaved persons in Montgomery County, of whom three lived at his Christiansburg residence and the remainder lived and worked further out in the county.
However, he opposed secession until Virginia voters accepted the recommendation of the Virginia Secession Convention of 1861. Then he paid to outfit the "New River Grays", a militia unit led by Dr. James Preston Hammett (a VMI graduate who later studied medicine in Philadelphia), which was mustered into the Confederate Army as Company H of the 24th Virginia Infantry.
Confederate legislator
After Virginia's secession from the Union and acceptance into the Confederate States, Staples was named one of Virginia's four delegates to the Provisional Confederate States Congress on February 22, 1862, alongside William C. Rives, R. M. T. Hunter and John W. Brockenbrough. The next year, he was elected to the First and Second Confederate Congresses, serving in the Confederate House of Representatives from 1862 to the end of the war. His brother Samuel G. Staples volunteered for the Confederate States Army and served as an aide to General J.E.B. Stuart; his relatives James S. Redd and Spottswood Redd were also captains. Waller Staples appears to have served in Wade's local defense regiment for Washington and Wythe Counties, Virginia, and became a critic of President Jefferson Davis by war's end.
Postwar judicial and legal career
Months after the Confederacy conceded defeat, Staples signed documentation that he would never again own any slaves, as well as assurances of future loyalty to the Union, and received a federal pardon from President Andrew Johnson on November 3, 1865. He then resumed his law practice in Montgomery County. However, his financial condition had substantially declined, so that at age 43 in 1870, Staples only owned about $10,000 in real estate and $5,000 in personal property.