Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Elbert S. Martin of Lee, Virginia
The story of Elbert Sevier Martin begins near Jonesville, among the ridges and valleys of Lee County, Virginia, close to the Cumberland Gap and the old roads that tied far southwest Virginia to Tennessee and Kentucky. Today his name is easily missed. He served only one term in Congress, and the war that followed swallowed up many public men of his generation. But Martin’s short career placed a Lee County merchant in Washington at the very moment the United States was breaking apart.
Born about 1829 near Jonesville, Martin grew up in the courthouse town of a mountain county that sat closer in spirit and geography to the borderlands than to Richmond. He attended public schools and then Emory & Henry College from 1845 to 1848. Afterward he returned to Jonesville and entered mercantile work. By the late 1850s he was known enough across Virginia’s Thirteenth Congressional District to make a run for the House of Representatives.
From Jonesville to Washington
When the Thirty Sixth Congress assembled in December 1859, its official list of members and residences placed Elbert S. Martin of Virginia’s Thirteenth District at “Lee C. H.,” Lee Court House. That simple notation tied him not just to Virginia, but to the courthouse community of Jonesville at the western edge of the state.
Martin entered Congress as an Independent Democrat. His district covered a region where national politics were filtered through local loyalties, slavery, party fracture, and the pressure of mountain geography. In Washington, he joined a House divided by the same forces that were tearing apart the country. John Brown’s raid had just shaken Virginia. The 1860 presidential election was approaching. Southern Democrats were splitting from one another. Republicans were rising in the North. Border and upper South men were being forced to say whether they still believed the Union could survive.
The Last Congress Before War
Martin’s term ran from March 4, 1859, to March 3, 1861. Those two years were among the most dangerous in American political history. The Thirty Sixth Congress watched the secession crisis unfold in real time. In its debates and votes, members tried compromise, delay, accusation, and constitutional argument. Some wished to preserve the Union without threatening slavery. Some believed the South must leave if Republican power reached the White House. Others insisted the federal Union could not be broken by state action.
Martin was not one of the most famous congressional voices of that winter, but he was present in the room where those questions were fought over. The Congressional Globe and House Journal place him among the representatives serving during the crisis. The official record also preserves one of the clearer clues to his position: his effort connected with popular approval of the Crittenden Amendment.
The Crittenden Compromise, proposed after Abraham Lincoln’s election, sought constitutional protections meant to satisfy slaveholding states and prevent additional secession. On February 11, 1861, House materials tracked by the Quill Project identify a Martin resolution connected with authorizing special elections on the Crittenden Amendment. The resolution was referred to the House Judiciary Committee. It did not save the Union, but it shows Martin among those still reaching for a political settlement during the last weeks before Lincoln’s inauguration.
A Letter to the Freemen of the Thirteenth District
Martin’s most important surviving statement appears to be his 1861 pamphlet, The American Union in Imminent Peril, the Causes and the Consequences. Its full title addressed the freemen of Virginia’s Thirteenth Congressional District and considered the results to the Southern states and the country of what Martin called the late triumph of sectionalism.
That title alone reveals a great deal. Martin presented the crisis as national, Southern, and local all at once. He wrote not as an abstract theorist, but as a congressman explaining himself to the voters of southwest Virginia. For an Appalachian historian, that matters. The secession crisis did not come to Lee County only through armies and raids. It also came through pamphlets, courthouse talk, election fights, family ties, and the printed arguments of men who had to decide what loyalty meant when Virginia itself was unsure.
The pamphlet deserves a close reading in any fuller study of Martin. It was printed in Washington in 1861 by McGill & Witherow, the same world of political printing that carried congressional speeches, Union appeals, Southern warnings, and compromise proposals into the country. For Martin, print was not an afterthought. It was part of politics.
Captain Martin and Lee County’s War
Soon the argument was overtaken by war. Virginia seceded in the spring of 1861, and the old Thirteenth District, like the rest of the state, was pulled into conflict. The official House biography records that Martin served in the Confederate Army as captain of a volunteer company formed in Jonesville.
That detail brings him back home. Jonesville was not simply the hometown that sent him to Congress. It was also the place where a local company of volunteers formed under his command. Lee County’s Civil War was shaped by its geography. Roads through the Cumberland Gap, Powell Valley, Jonesville, and the mountain passes made the region important to both Confederate and Union movements. Families, farms, churches, and county courts lived under the strain of divided loyalties, raids, enlistments, scarcity, and fear.
The exact details of Martin’s Confederate service should be checked against his compiled service record, but the official outline is clear enough to show the turn his life had taken. In 1859 he was a mountain merchant sent to Washington. In 1861 he was a former congressman in a uniform, raising men from the same courthouse town where his public life had begun.
West to Texas
After the war, Martin left Virginia. By 1870 he had moved to Texas, first associated by later archival notes with Tarrant County and then remembered in connection with Dallas. The House biography says he became interested in the newspaper publishing business in Dallas. That final chapter fits the shape of his life. He had been a merchant, politician, pamphleteer, soldier, and finally a newspaper man.
Martin died in Dallas on September 3, 1876, still only about forty seven years old. The Political Graveyard lists his burial place as unknown. That uncertainty is fitting in a sad way. A man who once represented far southwest Virginia in Congress ended his life far from Lee County, and even his final resting place is not fixed in the public record.
There is a family echo in Texas. Grapevine’s local history records that in 1882, L. J. “Samp” Martin, the teenage son of Col. Elbert S. Martin, purchased the Grapevine Globe and operated it for a short time as The Grapevine News. His mother had brought five children to Grape Vine after Elbert’s death and operated a boarding house while the children attended the Grape Vine Masonic Institute. The detail is small, but it carries a thread forward. The newspaper world that drew Elbert S. Martin in Dallas also touched the next generation.
Why Elbert S. Martin Matters
Elbert S. Martin is not remembered like the great secession leaders, nor like the generals whose names fill battlefield markers. Yet his life may tell us more about how the Civil War reached Appalachia. He stood at a crossroads of place and politics. He came from Lee County, a mountain county on the far edge of Virginia. He entered Congress as the old party system was breaking. He tried to address his district as the Union trembled. He supported or at least engaged compromise measures during the last winter before war. Then he returned to Jonesville and took a captain’s place in the Confederate service.
His story also reminds us that Appalachian history was not isolated from national history. The events that shook Washington echoed in courthouse towns, country stores, college halls, militia grounds, and newspaper offices. Jonesville was far from the Capitol, but Elbert S. Martin carried Lee County into the Capitol during one of the darkest sessions Congress ever held.
By following the traces he left, a residence listing, a congressional biography, a pamphlet, a referred resolution, a Confederate service notice, and Texas newspaper memories, we recover a figure who belongs in the story of Appalachian Virginia. Martin’s life was brief, divided, and unfinished in the records. But for two years, as the country came apart, a merchant from Jonesville sat in the House of Representatives and watched the Union move from peril to war.
Sources & Further Reading
United States House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives. “MARTIN, Elbert Sevier.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://history.house.gov/People/Listing/M/MARTIN%2C-Elbert-Sevier-%28M000179%29/
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. “MARTIN, Elbert Sevier.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://bioguide.congress.gov/search/bio/M000179
Martin, Elbert S. The American Union in Imminent Peril, the Causes and the Consequences: Letter of Hon. Elbert S. Martin, of Va., on the Results to the Southern States and the Country of the Late Triumph of Sectionalism, to the Freemen of the Thirteenth Congressional District of Virginia. Washington, DC: McGill & Witherow, 1861. Huntington Library. https://www.huntington.org/collections/lib-284052
Readex. “Afro-Americana Imprints, 1535–1922: Civil War.” Entry for Elbert S. Martin, The American Union in Imminent Peril. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.readex.com/titlelists/afro-americana-imprints-1535-1922-civil-war
United States Congress. The Congressional Globe: Containing the Debates and Proceedings of the First Session of the Thirty-Sixth Congress: Also of the Special Session of the Senate. Washington, DC, 1860. UNT Digital Library. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc30804/
United States Congress. The Congressional Globe: Containing the Debates and Proceedings of the Second Session of the Thirty-Sixth Congress. Washington, DC, 1861. UNT Digital Library. https://digital.library.unt.edu/explore/collections/CONGGL/
United States House of Representatives. List of Members of the House of Representatives of the United States and Their Places of Residence During the Thirty-Sixth Congress, First Session. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1859. GovInfo. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/SERIALSET-01060_00_00-003-0002-0000/pdf/SERIALSET-01060_00_00-003-0002-0000.pdf
Quill Project. “Virginia Delegation.” Negotiating the Road to Civil War. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.quillproject.net/delegation/2387
Quill Project. “Negotiation: The Road to Civil War.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.quillproject.net/negotiation/184
Voteview. “Rep. MARTIN, Elbert Sevier, Ind. Democrat, VA-13.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.voteview.uga.edu/person/6023/elbert-sevier-martin
Voteview. “36th Congress, House.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.voteview.uga.edu/congress/house/36
Bristol News. “Elbert S. Martin.” September 26, 1876. Virginia Chronicle. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=BN18760926.1.2
Texas Archival Resources Online. “Clay Elizabeth Martin Papers, 1876–1890.” Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://txarchives.org/utcah/finding_aids/05021.xml
The Political Graveyard. “Martin Family of Prestonsburg, Kentucky.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://politicalgraveyard.com/families/10848.html
The Political Graveyard. “Index to Politicians: Martin, E to F.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://politicalgraveyard.com/bio/martin3.html
United States House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives. “MARTIN, John Preston.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://history.house.gov/People/Detail/17556
National Park Service. “64th Regiment, Virginia Mounted Infantry.” Soldiers and Sailors Database. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm?battleUnitCode=CVA0064RI
The Lee County Story. “Civil War in Southwestern Virginia.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.theleecountystory.com/civil-war-in-southwestern-virginia/
National Archives. “Compiled Service Records of Confederate Soldiers Who Served in Organizations from the State of Virginia.” Record Group 109. Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/military/civil-war/confederate/service-records
National Archives. “Population Schedules for the 1860 Census.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1860
National Archives. “Population Schedules for the 1870 Census.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.archives.gov/research/census/1870
Library of Virginia. “Virginia Memory: Chancery Records Index.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.virginiamemory.com/collections/chancery/
FamilySearch. “Virginia, County Marriage Records, 1771–1989.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/2134304
Emory & Henry University. “Archives and Special Collections.” Accessed June 11, 2026. https://www.ehc.edu/academics/resources/kelly-library/archives-special-collections/
Author Note: Elbert S. Martin’s record is scattered across congressional records, rare pamphlet catalogs, and local notices, so this article treats him carefully rather than stretching beyond the evidence. Readers with Lee County, Emory & Henry, Confederate service, or Texas newspaper records may be able to help fill in more of his unfinished story.