Robert Selden Rose

Robert Selden Rose (February 24, 1774 – November 24, 1835) was a U.S. Representative from New York who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1823 to 1827 and again from 1829 to 1831. He was born in Amherst County in the Virginia Colony on February 24, 1774, and attended the common schools there. Raised in the late colonial and early national period, he came of age in an agrarian society shaped by plantation agriculture and slavery, influences that would continue to mark his life after he left Virginia.

Rose married Jane Lawson in Virginia, and the couple had seven children. Among them was Robert Lawson Rose (1804–1877), who later followed his father into public life and served as a U.S. Representative from New York from 1847 to 1851. Through marriage alliances, the family became connected to other political figures; State Senator Robert C. Nicholas (1801–1854) was his son-in-law. These family ties underscored the Rose family’s growing prominence in New York political and social circles during the first half of the nineteenth century.

In 1803, in a migration path unusual for a Southern planter of his era, Rose moved north from Virginia to Seneca County, New York. At that time, millions of acres of public land in New York were being sold at relatively low prices, attracting settlers and investors. Rose purchased land from Dr. Alexander Coventry and settled at Fayette, near Geneva, New York, where he established a substantial agricultural estate that he named Rose Hill. Continuing the plantation model he had known in Virginia, Rose held enslaved people in New York. The 1810 federal census recorded 37 enslaved people in his household, who worked on his plantation and in his home. By the 1820 census, that number had declined to 9 enslaved people. With the final abolition of slavery in New York in 1827, the 1830 census showed three free people of color in his household and no enslaved persons, reflecting the legal and social transition from slavery to free labor in the state.

Rose’s public career began at the state level. He was first elected to the New York State Assembly in 1811, representing his region during a period of rapid growth and political realignment in the state. He returned to the Assembly in 1820 and 1821, participating in legislative deliberations as New York expanded economically and demographically. In 1821 he also served as a member of the New York State Constitutional Convention at Albany, which revised the state’s fundamental law and adjusted its political institutions in response to the broadening of the electorate and changing party structures.

Rose entered national politics in the 1820s. In 1822 he was elected to the Eighteenth Congress as an Adams–Clay Democratic-Republican, aligning himself with the nationalist and pro–internal improvements wing of the old Republican Party associated with John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay. He was reelected as an Adams candidate to the Nineteenth Congress, serving continuously from March 4, 1823, to March 3, 1827. During these three terms in office, he contributed to the legislative process at a time of intense debate over economic policy, internal improvements, and the evolving party system, representing the interests of his New York constituents in the House of Representatives.

After a brief interval out of federal office, Rose returned to Congress as the emerging party system continued to fragment. In the elections for the Twenty-first Congress he was chosen as an Anti-Masonic candidate, and he served from March 4, 1829, to March 3, 1831. His affiliation with the Anti-Masonic Party placed him within one of the earliest organized third-party movements in the United States, which opposed what it viewed as the undue influence and secrecy of Freemasonry. Over the course of his political life he was associated with several evolving political labels—Adams–Clay Democratic-Republican, Adams candidate, Anti-Masonic—and was later affiliated with the Whig Party, reflecting the broader realignment of American politics in the Jacksonian era.

Following his final term in Congress, Rose returned to private life and resumed his agricultural pursuits at Rose Hill. He continued to be a figure of local prominence in the Geneva and Seneca County area, where his estate and family connections kept him engaged in regional affairs even after he left national office. His later years coincided with ongoing economic development in upstate New York and the consolidation of new political parties, including the Whigs, with whom he was identified in his final period of public engagement.

Robert Selden Rose died in Waterloo, New York, on November 24, 1835, while attending a session of the circuit court. He was initially interred in the Old Pulteney Street Cemetery. As Geneva grew and burial grounds were reorganized, his remains were later reinterred in Glenwood Cemetery in Geneva, New York. His life and career, spanning from the late colonial era through the Jacksonian period, reflected both the persistence of plantation-based agriculture and slavery in his early years and the dynamic political transformations of early nineteenth-century New York and the United States.