Dudley McIver Du Bose

Dudley McIver DuBose (October 28, 1834 – March 2, 1883) was an American lawyer, Confederate field officer, and politician who rose to the rank of brigadier general in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War and later served one term in the United States House of Representatives from Georgia from 1871 to 1873. A member of the Democratic Party, he participated in the legislative process during a significant period in American history, representing the interests of his Georgia constituents during Reconstruction.

DuBose was born on October 28, 1834, near Memphis, Shelby County, Tennessee, to Alfred Bishop Cassells DuBose (born 1804), also known as A.B.C. DuBose, and his second wife, Camilla Dunn, the daughter of a local physician. His parents had married in November 1833 at a Methodist church. The DuBose family was of French Huguenot origin; their ancestors had settled in South Carolina’s midlands, where they developed and operated plantations dependent on the labor of enslaved African Americans, turning increasingly to cotton as a principal commodity crop by 1800. By 1850, A.B.C. DuBose was living in Shelby County, Tennessee, where he owned a plantation and 84 enslaved people. Dudley was one of several children, including brothers Alfred Jr. (born 1838), Julius (born 1840), and Swepson (born 1858), and sisters Elizabeth (born 1835), Catherine (born 1841), Harriet (born 1843), and Mytis (born 1850). He grew up in this plantation environment on the Mississippi River frontier, within a family that combined South Carolina planter traditions with the expanding cotton economy of the lower Mississippi Valley.

In the 1850s DuBose attended the University of Mississippi at Oxford, reflecting the family’s status and regional connections. He later returned to Tennessee to pursue legal studies and enrolled at Cumberland University, a prominent law school in Lebanon, Tennessee. He graduated from Cumberland University in 1856 and was admitted to the bar in 1857. DuBose began his private legal practice in Memphis, Tennessee, and soon expanded his professional activities into Georgia. Before the outbreak of the Civil War, he and his wife ultimately established themselves in Augusta, Georgia, where he maintained a law practice in the former state capital on the Savannah River near the South Carolina border.

On April 15, 1858, in Washington, D.C., DuBose married Sallie Toombs (1835–1866), a distant cousin and the last surviving child of United States Senator Robert Toombs, a prominent Georgia lawyer, planter, and slaveholder from Wilkes County. Initially a Unionist, Robert Toombs became an ardent secessionist on the eve of the Civil War and later served as Confederate Secretary of State. The marriage linked DuBose to one of the most influential political families in Georgia. By 1860, after establishing himself professionally, DuBose moved with his family for a time to Arkansas, where he owned a plantation and supervised its operations through an overseer and enslaved labor. Dudley and Sallie DuBose had several children: sons Robert Toombs DuBose (1859–1929), who later became a minister, and Dudley DuBose, who became an attorney and judge in Montana, as well as daughters Camilla and Julie.

With the secession crisis and the onset of the Civil War, DuBose volunteered for service in the Confederate States Army. He was commissioned a lieutenant in the 15th Georgia Infantry Regiment, which was initially assigned to a brigade commanded by his father-in-law, Brigadier General Robert A. Toombs. As an officer in this unit, DuBose saw extensive combat in the Eastern Theater. The regiment fought in the Seven Days Battles around Richmond in the summer of 1862, at the Second Battle of Bull Run (Second Manassas) in August 1862, and at the Battle of Antietam in Maryland in September 1862. In January 1863 DuBose was promoted to colonel and assumed command of the 15th Georgia. Under Brigadier General Henry L. Benning, in Major General John B. Hood’s division of Lieutenant General James Longstreet’s corps, DuBose and his regiment participated in the Siege of Suffolk in Virginia. At the Battle of Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, his regiment took part in Hood’s attack on the Union III Corps, fighting in the fierce engagement at Devil’s Den. During this period, a South Carolina cousin, William Porcher DuBose, served as chaplain of his Tennessee regiment in 1863, reflecting the extended family’s broad participation in the Confederate cause.

In September 1863 DuBose returned with his troops to Tennessee, where he led the 15th Georgia at the Battle of Chickamauga and was wounded in that engagement. He subsequently took part in the Knoxville Campaign later that year. When Longstreet’s corps returned to Virginia in 1864, DuBose again saw heavy combat. He fought at the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864 and, during the subsequent Overland Campaign, temporarily led Benning’s brigade at the Battles of Spotsylvania Court House and Cold Harbor. On November 16, 1864, DuBose was promoted to brigadier general and given command of a brigade in Major General Joseph B. Kershaw’s division, succeeding Brigadier General William T. Wofford. As a brigadier general, he led his brigade during the later stages of the Siege of Petersburg and in the Appomattox Campaign. On April 6, 1865, in the closing days of the war, he was captured with many other Confederates at the Battle of Sailor’s Creek while still serving in Kershaw’s division, only days before General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House. During and after the war, his father-in-law Robert Toombs, who had left Washington, D.C., to return to Georgia and had been appointed Confederate Secretary of State, became a vocal critic of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. After the Confederate defeat, Toombs fled the United States with his wife to avoid arrest and trial.

Following the war, DuBose and his family settled in his wife’s hometown of Washington, in Wilkes County, Georgia. There he resumed his legal career and became deeply involved in Democratic Party politics. With the support and influence of Robert Toombs, who returned to the United States in 1867, avoided arrest, and resumed his legal practice, DuBose emerged as a statewide Democratic leader in the turbulent years after the formal end of Reconstruction. Although former high-ranking Confederates were temporarily barred from voting or holding office, Toombs, who never sought a presidential pardon, nonetheless regained considerable political power in Georgia by 1872, working closely with longtime ally Alexander H. Stephens and with his son-in-law DuBose. In 1866 DuBose’s wife, Sallie Toombs DuBose, died at the age of 30. Her mother returned to Georgia to assist the widowed DuBose in managing his household and caring for his young children, while Robert Toombs gradually reestablished his presence in Georgia political life.

In the contentious political climate of Reconstruction, marked by racial violence and efforts by white Democrats to suppress the Black Republican vote, DuBose entered national politics. Following controversy surrounding the election of Confederate veteran Stephen A. Corker of Burke County, mostly white voters in Georgia elected DuBose as a Democrat to the Forty-second Congress in 1870. He served one term in the United States House of Representatives, from March 4, 1871, to March 3, 1873, representing Georgia during a critical phase of federal Reconstruction policy and the reassertion of Democratic control in the South. As a member of the Democratic Party representing Georgia, Dudley McIver DuBose contributed to the legislative process during his single term in office, participating in the democratic process and advocating for the interests of his constituents in a period of intense political realignment. In the 1872 election he was defeated by Republican James C. Freeman of Spalding County, who himself served only one term in Congress.

After his congressional service ended in 1873, DuBose returned to Washington, Georgia, and resumed his legal practice, working for roughly a decade, often in association with his father-in-law, Robert Toombs. Toombs took pride in being an “unreconstructed” Confederate and, by the early 1870s, had regained substantial influence within Georgia’s Democratic Party, a political environment in which DuBose continued to operate as a lawyer and party figure. DuBose remained a notable member of the postwar Southern legal and political establishment in Wilkes County and the surrounding region until his final illness.

In early 1883, while traveling, Dudley DuBose suffered a stroke. He was brought back to his home in Washington, Georgia, where he died on March 2, 1883. His life spanned the antebellum plantation era, the secession crisis, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction period, and his career reflected the trajectory of many former Confederate officers who reentered public life in the postwar South.