Isaac Coles

Isaac Coles (March 2, 1747 – June 3, 1813) was an American planter, militia officer, and politician from Virginia who served three terms in the United States House of Representatives during the formative years of the federal government. Born in 1747 in Richmond in the Colony of Virginia, he was the son of John Coles, an Irish immigrant from Enniscorthy, Ireland, and the former Mary Winston of Hanover County. His father became a merchant in Hanover County, later moving to Henrico County, where he helped to settle Richmond at the falls of the James River, served as colonel of the local militia, speculated in land to the south and west, and helped found historic St. John’s Church. Coles’s maternal grandfather, Isaac Winston, for whom he and several relatives were named, was also from Hanover County. John Coles died only months after Isaac’s birth. The eldest son, John Coles, inherited land in Albemarle County, while Isaac and his middle brother Walter inherited lands along the Staunton River in what was then Brunswick County and later became Halifax County. His sister Mary married Henry Tucker and had children, while his sister Sarah married General George Muter but had no children.

As a youth, Coles was educated in a manner befitting a member of the Virginia planter elite. He attended the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, where many of the colony’s leading families sent their sons, and prepared for a life of landholding and public service. Upon reaching legal age at twenty-one, he came into his inheritance and established himself as a planter in Halifax County. He built a mansion called “Springwood” near Houston and Coles Ferry on the Staunton River, anchoring his status as a prominent local landowner. In 1785 he expanded his holdings by purchasing more than 5,000 acres of land in neighboring Pittsylvania County, near Chatham, from Philip Lightfoot, a relative of his first wife. He developed this tract into a substantial plantation known as “Coles Hill.” By 1787, Coles owned 3,896 acres of land in Halifax County alone, together with 32 enslaved adults, 34 enslaved children, 24 horses, 97 other livestock, and four phaeton wheels, reflecting the wealth and social position he derived from slave-based agriculture.

Coles married twice. In 1771 he wed Elizabeth Lightfoot, daughter of William Lightfoot, a one-term member of the Virginia House of Burgesses from Charles City County. Their marriage produced three children, but only one, Isaac Coles Jr. (1777–1814), survived to adulthood. The younger Isaac briefly inherited his father’s lands in Halifax County and also served in the Virginia House of Delegates, continuing the family’s political tradition. Elizabeth Lightfoot Coles died around 1781. In January 1790, while serving in Congress in New York City, the widowed Coles married Catherine Thompson. Contemporary accounts variously described her as the sister of a former member of the Queen’s Guards or as a beauty descended from the prominent Beekman family of New York City. Her sister Anne Thompson (1767–1848) married Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who later served as a Congressman, Governor of Massachusetts, and Vice President of the United States. Catherine Thompson Coles had several children with Isaac and survived him by many years. Their eldest son, Walter Coles, became a planter and later served in the United States House of Representatives, further extending the family’s influence in national politics.

During the American Revolutionary War, Coles joined the Virginia militia and served as a colonel in Halifax County, reflecting both his local prominence and his commitment to the patriot cause. His public career advanced further after the death of his brother Walter Coles in 1780, when Walter’s Halifax County plantations passed to his widow and children. That same year, Halifax County voters elected Isaac Coles as one of their part-time representatives in the Virginia House of Delegates. He was re-elected in 1781, took a two-session break, and then was continually re-elected between 1783 and 1787, participating in the post-Revolutionary restructuring of Virginia’s government. In 1788, Halifax County chose him as one of its delegates to the Virginia Ratifying Convention. There he opposed ratification of the proposed United States Constitution, aligning with the Anti-Federalist minority that feared centralized power, although his position did not prevail.

Despite his opposition to the Constitution at the ratifying convention, Coles went on to serve in the new federal government. As a member of the Republican Party representing Virginia, he contributed to the legislative process during three terms in the United States House of Representatives, participating in the democratic process and representing the interests of his constituents during a significant period in American history. In 1789 he was elected to the First U.S. Congress from Virginia, reportedly unopposed, and served from March 4, 1789, to March 3, 1791. During this first term he continued to express reservations about aspects of the new constitutional system but also took notable positions on national policy, including voting to abolish the transatlantic slave trade, a stance that distinguished him among Southern slaveholding planters. He was re-elected unopposed in 1793 and again in 1795, the latter time with 36.76 percent of the vote, defeating Independent candidates Simon C. McMahon and Matthew Clay, and he served in the House from March 4, 1793, to March 3, 1797. Over the course of these three terms, he was generally associated with the emerging Jeffersonian Republican opposition, although his later leanings toward the Federalist Party, influenced in part by his New York connections and his brother-in-law Elbridge Gerry’s political circle, became a source of controversy at home.

Coles’s second marriage, contracted in New York City to a non-Virginian, also became a political liability. His opponent Matthew Clay, who would later defeat him, repeatedly reminded voters that Coles had failed to remarry a Virginia woman, playing on local sensibilities and suspicion of outside influence. Combined with perceptions of his shift toward Federalist positions, these factors contributed to his eventual loss of the seat to Clay after 1797. Following his congressional service, Coles focused on managing his plantations and family affairs. Concerned about malaria and other unhealthy conditions at his Halifax County properties, and with his eldest son Isaac Jr. having reached adulthood and taken on some of the family’s planter and political responsibilities, Coles moved his second family to his Pittsylvania County estate at Coles Hill. To address financial difficulties, he sold his remaining Halifax County lands but continued to operate his Pittsylvania plantation using enslaved labor, maintaining his status within Virginia’s planter aristocracy.

Coles remained a figure of local prominence until his death. He died on June 3, 1813, at his Coles Hill plantation near Chatham in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, and was buried in the family cemetery there. His son Isaac Coles Jr. survived him by only a year, dying in 1814. His son Walter Coles carried on the family’s planter and political traditions, serving in the U.S. House of Representatives as his father had done. The broader Coles family continued to play a notable role in state and national affairs: a nephew, Isaac A. Coles (born 1780 at Enniscorthy in Albemarle County and brother of future Illinois governor Edward Coles), served as personal secretary to Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, while another nephew, Isaac H. Coles, represented Charlotte, Halifax, and Prince Edward Counties in the Virginia Senate. Through his own service in the Virginia legislature, his participation in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, and his three terms in Congress, Isaac Coles helped shape the political life of Virginia and the early United States during a critical era of constitutional formation and party development.