born Dec. 1, 1826, Southampton county, Va., U.S.
died Oct. 8, 1895, Washington, D.C.
U.S. politician and railroad magnate.
After graduating from the Virginia Military Institute, he studied engineering while teaching. He joined the Norfolk–Petersburg Railroad as an engineer in 1851 and became the company's president 10 years later. In the American Civil War he was appointed quartermaster general of the Confederacy but served with the army of northern Virginia, rising to major general. After the war he resumed railroading, becoming president of the Atlantic, Mississippi, and Ohio (later Norfolk & Western) Railroad (1867). He built a political base through railroad patronage but lost control of the railroad in the 1870s. Unable to win the Democratic Party nomination for governor (1877), he organized a coalition of African Americans and poor whites to form a political party, the Readjusters (1879), which succeeded in enacting reforms. He served as a Republican in the U.S. Senate (1880–87).