Richard T. W. Duke
nineteenth-century congressman and lawyer from Virginia
Richard Thomas Walker Duke Sr. (June 6, 1822 – July 2, 1898) was a nineteenth-century congressman and lawyer from Virginia.
Early and family life
Born near Charlottesville, Virginia, to Elizabeth Morris Kendrick (August 23, 1802, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania - October 6, 1869, in Richmond, Virginia) and her planter husband Francis Edward Duke (November 29, 1783, in Berkeley, Virginia - November 8, 1836, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia). Duke received a private education suitable to his class, then following his father's death, was sent to Lexington, Virginia, for higher studies. He graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1844, then studied law in Charlottesville and received a degree from the law department of the University of Virginia in 1850.
Career
Following his admission to the Virginia bar later that year, Duke began his private legal practice. The Virginia General Assembly amended Charlottesville's town charter in March 1851, and three years later Duke was elected one of the town's four aldermen (with Andrew J. Brown, John B. Dodd and William Kebinger), and Drury Wood became mayor.
Duke also helped operate his family's plantation using enslaved labor. In 1858 Duke won his first election, and became the Commonwealth's Attorney for Albemarle County, Virginia, where he would be re-elected even during the American Civil War and served until 1869.
In November, 1859, following the unsuccessful raid on Harper's Ferry, and Brown's trial, Duke organized the Albemarle Rifles at Charlottesville.
“Richard T. W. Duke” enters the record as nineteenth-century congressman and lawyer from Virginia. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Richard, Duke and nineteenth-century can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2150755. VIAF identifies the subject as 43395110. The Library of Congress control number is n88156262. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1822, 1898, 1802 and 1869.
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This entry incorporates text from “Richard T. W. Duke” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.