General James Kemper was badly wounded in Pickett’s Charge, but he was carried back to Confederate lines and became the only one of Pickett’s three brigade commanders to survive the charge. Born and raised in Madison County, Virginia, before the war Kemper was a lawyer and a politician. He had been in the militia and had served an uneventful stint as a volunteer during the Mexican War, and that was the limit of his military experience before the War. When it began, he was serving as Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates.
His wound incapacitated Kemper from further field command, so he saw no combat after Gettysburg. When the War ended, he was commanding the Virginia Reserve Forces. General Kemper was paroled in Danville on May 2, 1865.
After the War, Kemper returned to Madison County and eventually re-entered politics. When Reconstruction ended in Virginia he ran for Governor, winning election easily in 1873. At the time of his election, he was a widower with six children.
During Kemper’s term in office Virginia had little state revenue and faced extremely difficult budget challenges. With state funds so scarce, Kemper cut his own budget to the bone. He made one of his children serve as his secretary. While not a progressive, as governor he drew the ire of more strident conservatives. Kemper insisted on enforcing the civil rights guaranteed in the constitution, he worked to increase funding for schools (for both races) and to reform and improve prisons, and he insisted that Virginia’s state debts must be paid, even if they had been incurred during Reconstruction. Hardliners such as Jubal Early criticized Kemper for meeting with President Grant and seeking to attract Northern capital into the state. After Kemper vetoed a bill that would have removed the duly elected city government of Republican-controlled Petersburg (where a number of the elected officials were black), reactionary conservatives burned him in effigy. Kemper was also criticized for allowing a black militia unit to participate in the dedication of the Stonewall Jackson monument in Richmond.
When his term in office ended, Kemper returned to Madison County and resumed his law practice. As he grew older the pain and complications from his wound at Gettysburg worsened. He had been shot in the abdomen—a wound that was inoperable in those days—and the bullet remained in him the rest of his life. He suffered increasingly disabling groin pain and, eventually, became paralyzed in his left side. On April 7, 1895 at age 71, he died of complications from the wound he had received at Gettysburg over 30 years earlier.
James Lawson Kemper was born on June 11, 1823, one hundred ninety-nine years ago today.
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