Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Campbell Slemp of Lee, Virginia
The road from Turkey Cove to Washington, D.C., was not a simple one. It crossed farm country and courthouse steps, Confederate camps and Reconstruction politics, mountain ridges and party lines. Campbell Slemp, born near Turkey Cove in Lee County, Virginia, on December 2, 1839, belonged to the generation of Appalachian men whose lives were divided by the Civil War and reshaped by the hard politics that followed it.
By the time his portrait was taken in Washington during his congressional years, Slemp had already lived several public lives. He had been a Lee County farmer, a Confederate officer, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, and finally a United States congressman from Virginia’s Ninth District. In Southwest Virginia, where memory often outlasts office, his name became part of a longer family line of politics, public service, and regional influence.
He is sometimes overshadowed by his son, C. Bascom Slemp, who later served in Congress and became secretary to President Calvin Coolidge. But the elder Campbell Slemp was the one who first carried the family name from the coves of Lee County into the center of Virginia Republican power.
A Lee County Beginning
Campbell Slemp was born in the far southwest corner of Virginia, in a part of the state that looked naturally toward Kentucky and Tennessee as much as toward Richmond. Lee County was mountain country, but it was not cut off from history. The Wilderness Road, Cumberland Gap, county courts, militia networks, churches, farms, and kinship ties all helped shape public life there.
Slemp attended private school and Emory and Henry College. Like many men of his region and class, he was tied to farming and land. Official congressional records later described him as being interested in agricultural pursuits and engaged in the real estate business. Those plain words say much about the foundation of his life. Before he was a congressman, he was a man of land, local reputation, and mountain connections.
Turkey Cove mattered in that story. It was not simply a birthplace to be listed in a biography. It was the community that gave him his first public identity, the place he returned to after war, and the family ground where he would eventually be buried.
War in the Mountains
When the Civil War came, Slemp entered Confederate service. Official House records list him as a captain and lieutenant colonel of the Twenty-first Virginia Battalion and colonel of the Sixty-fourth Regiment, a command made up of infantry and cavalry elements. The National Park Service history of the 64th Virginia Mounted Infantry explains that the regiment was organized in December 1862 by consolidating the 21st and 29th Virginia Infantry Battalions. The same unit history lists Campbell Slemp among its field officers.
The 64th belonged to the war along the mountain borderlands. Its world was not only Richmond or the Shenandoah Valley. It was Cumberland Gap, East Tennessee, western Virginia, and the rough military geography where loyalties were mixed and armies moved through narrow roads and mountain passes.
Cumberland Gap was central to that story. The pass was one of the great doorways through the mountains, and whoever held it controlled a route between Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The National Park Service notes that a large part of the 64th was captured there on September 9, 1863. Congressional memorial addresses after Slemp’s death also remembered his war service in Southwest Virginia, East Tennessee, and East Kentucky.
The war did not make Slemp a national figure, but it gave him the title by which many later knew him: Colonel Slemp. In the postwar South, that title carried weight. It linked him to Confederate service, but his later politics would show that former Confederate identity did not always lead to a simple Democratic future, especially in Southwest Virginia.
Return From War
After the war, Slemp returned to Lee County. The memorial volume printed after his death described a man who came home and set himself to work in a difficult section where wealth was not easily made. He farmed, dealt in real estate, and strengthened his local standing.
The county he returned to was not the same county he had left. The Confederacy was gone. Enslavement was over. Virginia had to rebuild its government, its credit, its schools, and its politics. In Richmond, old political alignments began to crack. In the mountains, questions of debt, taxes, roads, railroads, education, and federal power mattered in practical ways.
Slemp’s rise after the war has to be understood in that setting. He was not simply a Confederate veteran who became a Republican. He was part of a complicated Virginia realignment that included the Readjuster movement, former Confederates, Republicans, Black voters, public schools, and a bitter fight over the state debt.
The Readjuster Road
In the late 1870s and early 1880s, Virginia politics turned on the question of the state debt. The Readjuster Party argued that the debt should be reduced or “readjusted” so the state could protect public services, including schools. The movement was led by William Mahone, a former Confederate general and railroad man, and it drew support from a coalition that included discontented Democrats, Republicans, and African American voters.
Slemp entered state politics during this period. The Virginia House of Delegates history records him as a Republican delegate from Lee County in the 1879 to 1880 session. During that term, he served on committees for Banks, Currency and Commerce, Counties, Cities and Towns, and Schools and Colleges. He returned for the 1881 to 1882 session, when he chaired the committee on Officers and Offices at the Capitol and also served on Agriculture and Mining and Propositions and Grievances.
Those committee assignments fit the concerns of a Southwest Virginia politician. Schools mattered in a mountain county still building its institutions. Agriculture and mining pointed toward the old and new economies of the region. Counties, towns, banks, and commerce all touched the everyday work of building public life after war.
Slemp’s political identity moved with the Readjuster era. Congressional memorial speakers later recalled that he became an advocate of debt readjustment and that he moved from Democratic politics into the Republican Party along with Mahone and other Readjusters. In later years, that made him part of a distinct Republican tradition in Southwest Virginia, where the Ninth District remained more competitive for Republicans than most of the former Confederate South.
A Republican in Southwest Virginia
To modern readers, it may seem surprising that a Confederate officer from Lee County became one of Virginia’s leading Republicans. In the political world of the late nineteenth century, it was less unusual than it first appears. The Readjuster movement had broken old party lines. Southwest Virginia had its own political geography. Mountain counties often had different economic interests and voting habits than the plantation regions and Tidewater counties of eastern Virginia.
The Republican Party in Virginia had struggled after Reconstruction, but the Readjuster alliance revived it for a time. Encyclopedia Virginia describes how the Readjusters joined with Republicans and African American voters in the early 1880s, winning power before Democratic resurgence after 1883. Slemp’s political path belongs inside that upheaval.
He did not win every race. In 1889 he ran unsuccessfully as the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor on a ticket associated with Mahone. But the campaign gave him statewide visibility. He remained active in party affairs and became one of the strongest Republican figures in the mountains.
In Southwest Virginia, where politics could be personal, local, and hard fought, Slemp built influence patiently. His power did not rest on speeches alone. It rested on county networks, party loyalty, personal relationships, and a reputation for practical work.
The Fighting Ninth
In 1902, Slemp was elected to Congress from Virginia’s Ninth District. He entered the Fifty-eighth Congress on March 4, 1903, and remained in office through the Fifty-ninth and into the Sixtieth Congress. The district was often called the Fighting Ninth because of its close elections and fierce party contests.
Slemp was a Republican in a state dominated by Democrats. That made his seat important beyond Southwest Virginia. As the only Republican member of Congress from Virginia during part of his service, he became a key figure in federal patronage under President Theodore Roosevelt. The congressional memorial addresses after his death noted that people from across Virginia came to him for help with federal matters.
He was not remembered as a great floor speaker. One memorial address stated plainly that his services were not distinguished by debate on the House floor. Instead, his colleagues remembered him as a worker, a man who handled correspondence, visited departments, managed requests, and looked after the practical side of representation. That kind of work rarely produces famous quotations, but it could make a congressman powerful.
For the people of Southwest Virginia, that mattered. Federal appointments, pensions, post offices, local improvements, and access to Washington were not abstract issues. A congressman who could open doors had real influence.
Death at Big Stone Gap
Campbell Slemp died suddenly at his home in Big Stone Gap, Wise County, Virginia, on October 13, 1907. He was sixty-seven years old and still serving in Congress. His death ended his own congressional career, but it did not end the Slemp presence in Washington.
The Sixtieth Congress later held memorial proceedings for him. On March 7, 1908, members of the House delivered addresses remembering his life, service, politics, and character. The published memorial volume is one of the strongest primary sources for how his colleagues wanted him remembered. It also shows the limits of such a source. Memorial speeches praise more than they question, but they preserve details, relationships, and political memory close to the time of his death.
Slemp was buried in the family cemetery in Lee County. That return was fitting. His public life had taken him to Richmond and Washington, but his story began and ended in the mountains of Southwest Virginia.
Father and Son
After Campbell Slemp’s death, his son C. Bascom Slemp was elected to fill the vacancy. The younger Slemp would serve in Congress from 1907 to 1923 and later become secretary to President Calvin Coolidge. Because of that later career, father and son are often confused in records, especially since both carried the Campbell Bascom Slemp name.
The distinction matters. C. Bascom Slemp inherited a political world his father helped build. The elder Slemp had carried the family from Turkey Cove into state politics, through the Readjuster and Republican realignments, and into Congress. The son expanded that inheritance into national influence.
Together, they made the Slemp name one of the most durable political names in Southwest Virginia. But the foundation belonged to Campbell Slemp Sr., the Lee County Confederate officer turned Republican congressman whose life followed the difficult road from Civil War defeat to federal power.
Remembering Campbell Slemp
Campbell Slemp’s life does not fit neatly into one label. He was a Confederate officer, but also a Republican congressman. He was a mountain man of Lee County, but also a broker of federal power. He came from a rural world of farms and coves, but his career ended in the national politics of Theodore Roosevelt’s Washington.
That mixture is what makes him important to Appalachian history. His life shows how Southwest Virginia did not always move in step with the rest of Virginia. The mountains had their own political memory, their own economic pressures, and their own paths into power.
From Turkey Cove to Big Stone Gap, from Cumberland Gap to Capitol Hill, Campbell Slemp carried the contradictions of his time. He belonged to the old war generation, but he helped shape a new political order in the mountains. In the history of Lee County and the Fighting Ninth, his name marks one of the clearest bridges between the Civil War world and the modern political life of Southwest Virginia.
Sources & Further Reading
U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives. “SLEMP, Campbell.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://history.house.gov/People/Listing/S/SLEMP%2C-Campbell-%28S000485%29/
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. “SLEMP, Campbell.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://bioguide.congress.gov/search/bio/S000485
United States Congress. Campbell Slemp, Late a Representative from Virginia: Memorial Addresses, Sixtieth Congress, First Session, House of Representatives, March 7, 1908. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909. https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/SERIALSET-05539_00_00-008-1518-0000
United States Congress. Campbell Slemp, Late a Representative from Virginia: Memorial Addresses, Sixtieth Congress, First Session. PDF. GovInfo. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/SERIALSET-05539_00_00-008-1518-0000/pdf/SERIALSET-05539_00_00-008-1518-0000.pdf
U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives. “SLEMP, Campbell Bascom.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://history.house.gov/People/Listing/S/SLEMP%2C-Campbell-Bascom-%28S000486%29/
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. “SLEMP, Campbell Bascom.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://bioguide.congress.gov/search/bio/S000486
Virginia House of Delegates. “Campbell Slemp.” A History of the Virginia House of Delegates. Session served 1879 to 1880. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://history.house.virginia.gov/members/6296
Virginia House of Delegates. “Campbell Slemp.” A History of the Virginia House of Delegates. Session served 1881 to 1882. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://history.house.virginia.gov/members/6143
National Park Service. “64th Regiment, Virginia Mounted Infantry.” Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm?battleUnitCode=CVA0064RIT
National Park Service. “Soldiers and Sailors Database.” Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/soldiers-and-sailors-database.htm
Library of Congress. “Portrait Photograph of Slemp, Honorable C, C. M. Bell Studio.” C. M. Bell Studio Collection. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/item/2016706157/
Library of Congress. “C. M. Bell Studio Collection.” Prints and Photographs Division. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/88716088/
Library of Virginia. “Chancery Records Index.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/chancery/
Internet Archive. “Chancery Records, Lee County, Virginia.” Library of Virginia digitized records. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://archive.org/details/lee-co-va-chancery-records-1881
Virginia Chronicle. “Virginia Chronicle: Digital Newspaper Archive.” Library of Virginia. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://virginiachronicle.com/
The Roanoke Times. “Colonel Campbell Slemp.” August 9, 1905. Virginia Chronicle. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=TRT19050809.1.1
United States War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880 to 1901. https://ehistory.osu.edu/books/official-records
GovInfo. Congressional Directory for the 60th Congress, 1907 to 1909, First Session, Third Edition, April 15, 1908. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/CDIR-1908-04-15
Commonwealth of Virginia. “Elections Database.” Virginia Department of Elections. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://historical.elections.virginia.gov/
Commonwealth of Virginia. “William Francis Rhea.” Virginia Elections Database. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://historical.elections.virginia.gov/candidates/view/William-Francis-Rhea
Library of Virginia. “William Mahone and the Readjusters.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://edu.lva.virginia.gov/dbva/items/show/257
Encyclopedia Virginia. “The Republican Party of Virginia in the Nineteenth Century.” Virginia Humanities. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/the-republican-party-of-virginia-in-the-nineteenth-century/
Encyclopedia Virginia. “Peery, George Campbell, 1873 to 1952.” Virginia Humanities. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/peery-george-campbell-1873-1952/
Tyler, Lyon Gardiner, ed. Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography. Vol. 5. New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1915. https://archive.org/details/encyclopediavir05tyle
Quillen, Rose Slemp. “Colonel Campbell Slemp.” Historical Sketches of Southwest Virginia, no. 6. Southwest Virginia Historical Society, March 1970. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~vahsswv/historicalsketches/slemp%20colcampbell.html
Hathorn, Guy B. “C. Bascom Slemp: Virginia Republican Boss, 1907 to 1932.” The Journal of Southern History 21, no. 3 (1955): 330 to 347. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2126466
Mize, Martha Grace Lowry. “History and Heritage Made Accessible: The Lee County, Virginia Story.” Honors thesis, University of Mississippi, 2017. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1641&context=hon_thesis
Cardinal News. “172 Years of Slemp Public Service.” January 4, 2022. https://cardinalnews.org/2022/01/04/172-years-of-slemp-public-service/
Find a Grave. “Campbell Bascom Slemp Sr.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.findagrave.com/
Author Note: Campbell Slemp’s life is a reminder that Appalachian political history rarely fits into simple categories. His story connects Lee County farms, Confederate service, Readjuster politics, and the rise of Southwest Virginia Republican power.