John Robinson (28 October 1825 or 1826–15 or 16 January 1908), member of the Convention of 1867–1868 and of the Senate of Virginia, was born free in Cumberland County. His father was likely a member of the Isbell family, white farmers in the county. His mother was Catharine "Kitty" Lipscomb, a free woman of mixed race who inherited land and two enslaved persons. White officials recorded his name in public documents as John Lipscomb until the 1850s or 1860s when he, his mother, and siblings adopted the surname Robinson, likely after Nathaniel Robinson, who was apparently the father of his brother Jeter. Some public records of the time include references to the name change. In none of the legal documents filed after 1866 does the name Lipscomb appear, although his son signed his name as James Henry Lipscomb Robinson when applying for a Confederate pension for work done at a saltworks during the Civil War. As with many other mid-nineteenth-century Virginians, especially people who changed their names, references to him in surviving documents contain inconsistencies and inaccuracies (his surname appears variously as Robinson, Robertson, and Roberson) and possibly confusion about which person of that name is mentioned.
The extended Lipscomb family included a dozen or more households of free African Americans in Cumberland and Powhatan Counties, several of whom in each county owned land. He was first cousin, once removed, to James F. Lipscomb, who represented Cumberland in the House of Delegates from 1869 to 1877. Registers of free Blacks disclose that more than one John Lipscomb lived in Cumberland County in the 1850s and 1860s. An 1855 list includes a man of that name and of approximately the right age who was then "Trading in Oysters &c." Contemporaries described him as of very light complexion and intelligent, although he may never have learned to read and write.
On 10 April 1851 John Robinson registered as a free man in Lynchburg, but it is unclear whether he remained long in the city. He registered again in Cumberland County on 26 January 1857, two years after he purchased a small tract of land there and not long before he purchased another, the two together containing twenty-three acres. The county tax rolls for 1861 indicate that a free Black man named John Robinson owned two parcels of land in the same part of the county that together contained twenty-four acres and were worth $705 and that he also owned one enslaved person between the ages of twelve and twenty-one. The census of 1860 listed him as Lipscomb and identified him as a wagon driver who owned real estate worth $700 and personal property worth $2,100.
He may have been the free person identified as John Lipscomb who in July 1862 was forced into service briefly at a Confederate military hospital in Farmville. In September 1863 county officials requisitioned an enslaved worker from John Robinson to work on military fortifications. He did not comply, but the following month when the county repeated the requisition he sent his son James Henry Robinson as a laborer. In the summer of 1864 Robinson was twice mobbed and beaten and then fled to Amelia County. After the war he sued two groups of white men (several men were in both groups) for assault and battery and eventually obtained judgments against most of them. On a change of venue, one of the cases was tried in Prince Edward County and was not concluded until September 1871.
In September 1864, shortly after fleeing Cumberland County, Robinson sold 143 acres of land there for $4,000 and agreed to receive $3,000 of that in Confederate currency, but he later charged that the sale was a forced fraud and refused to acknowledge the receipt of Confederate paper money as legal payment. The resulting lawsuit was the first of about ten in which he was engaged in the courts of Amelia, Cumberland, and Powhatan Counties to try to protect his financial interests and property.
Robinson entered politics in 1867 after Congress placed the states of the former Confederacy under military supervision and required each to hold a convention and write a new state constitution. Congress also required that African American men be permitted to vote in the election of delegates and to be eligible to serve in the convention. When African Americans voted in Virginia for the first time, Robinson won election on 22 October 1867 to represent Cumberland County in the convention that met from 3 December of that year to 17 April 1868. He received 1,203 votes that Black men in the county cast and none from white men, and his white opponent received 383 votes from white men and 40 from Black men. General John Schofield, the commander of the First Military District, wrote that Robinson was intelligent and energetic and had the confidence of other African Americans. A later observer noted that Robinson did not often speak during the convention, but let his votes express his opinion.
Robinson served on the Committee on County and Corporation Courts and County Organizations. He voted with the radical reformers in the convention on every major issue. In January, Robinson introduced several resolutions: one to send a committee to Washington to urge Congress to assist the impoverished freedpeople; another to request that Congress exclude from office all men who could not swear that they had taken no part in the war on the side of the Confederacy; a third that the poll tax not exceed twenty-five cents so as not to disfranchise poor freedpeople; and a fourth to require that loyal men who had been forced to sell their property during the war for Confederate currency—as he said that he had been—be able to recover their property and also that unpaid balances on land transactions entered into during the war be paid in United States currency only. The new state constitution granted the vote to adult African American men, provided for a new statewide system of free public schools, introduced democratic reforms in local government, and established a $2,000 homestead exemption that prohibited seizure and sale of property to that amount for payment of debts. On 6 July 1869 Virginia voters ratified the constitution but rejected two clauses designed to disfranchise most former Confederates.
At the same time, Robinson won election to the Senate of Virginia with almost forty percent of the vote in a three-way race to represent the district of Amelia, Cumberland, and Nottoway Counties. Some districts were redrawn in 1871, and for the remainder of his four-year term he represented the counties of Amelia, Cumberland, and Prince Edward. Robinson served on the Committee on Public Institutions that drafted the laws to create the new statewide free public school system. On 8 October 1869 he voted to ratify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which Congress required that Virginia do before admitting the state's senators and representatives and restoring it to full statehood. In March 1871 Robinson voted against the Funding Act of 1871 that led to a prolonged political crisis because of the high interest rate the act authorized to pay the antebellum state debt. While serving in the assembly, he attended the Republican Party's state conventions in 1871 and 1872 and the party's national convention in 1872. Robinson ran for reelection in 1873 but after a contentious campaign lost to a white Republican, Edgar Allan.
In June 1877 Robinson bought for $2,500 and began operating the Effingham House tavern near the Cumberland County Courthouse and later returned to Cumberland County to live. He suffered financial difficulties, but continued to operate the tavern and hotel until his death. Many details of his personal life remain undocumented or unclear according to available records. The 1860 and 1870 census returns document his wife Emily M. Johns Robinson, with whom he had at least thirteen children. She died by 1874 after which time he had married Martha Johns, who was likely related to his first wife. They had at least two sons and two daughters before she died in childbirth on 10 December 1883.
John Robinson died at Effingham House in Cumberland County during the night of 15–16 January 1908 and was buried in Jetersville, in Amelia County. In a brief obituary in the Richmond Planet, 25 January 1908 a friend wrote about Robinson that "he was known far and wide as a man wholly devoid of fear, far-seeing, keen and resourceful. He was not book-learned, but his store of common sense and legal lore seemed unbounded."
Sources Consulted: Birth date of 28 Oct. 1825 on original Lynchburg registration filed in Cumberland County Free Negro and Slave Records, 1753–1865, Local Government Records Collection, Library of Virginia (LVA); birth date of 28 Oct. 1826 in Lynchburg Free Negro Register (1843–1865), 72, LVA; biographies in Luther P. Jackson, Free Negro Office-Holders in Virginia, 1867–1892 (1945), 35–36, and Sally Phillips, "John Lipscomb Robinson," unpublished manuscript, Personal Papers Collection, Accession 44399, LVA; family genealogy in Dale G. Robinson, "Robinson Lipscomb Family Genealogical Notes, unpublished manuscript, Accession 53204, Personal Papers Collection, LVA; first quotation and being age thirty in 1855 List of Free Negroes, Cumberland County Free Negro and Slave Records, 1753–1865, Local Government Records Collection, LVA; documents identifying John Lipscomb as John Robinson, Robertson, or Roberson in Cumberland County Deed Books 28:229–230, 487, and 29:475, and Amelia County Deed Book 40:560, LVA; prosecutions for assault and battery recorded in Cumberland County Common Law Order Book (1860–1884), 141, 150–151, 207–208, 280, 284–285 (change of venue to Prince Edward Co. approved), and Prince Edward County Common Law Order Book 1 (1870–1893), 10, 81, LVA; purchase of tavern property in Cumberland County Deed Book 31:287–288, 310 and Deed Book 34:179–180, LVA; Amelia County Chancery Causes, John Robinson v. Heller & Co., 1876-007, John Robinson v. Trustees of E. G. Leigh et al., 1877-017, and John Robinson v. Thomas Scott, sheriff, et al., 1878-005, LVA; Cumberland County Chancery Causes, William D. Talley v. John Robinson et al., 1873-050, John Robinson v. Moses Venable, 1877-005, John Robinson v. Willis J. Dance, 1885-010, William Netherland v. John Robinson, 1886-007, John Robinson v. William B. Johnson, Sunny Robinson (alias Horace), 1905-013, B. B. Woodson v. Mattie Williams et al., 1910-002, and William M. Smith and B. B. Woodson v. J. C. Robinson et al., 1911-019, LVA; Powhatan County Chancery Causes, Henry F. Brooks et ux. v. John Robinson, 1895-002, LVA; Secretary of the Commonwealth, Election Records, 1776–1941, no. 427 (1867), no. 2 (1873), Accession 26041, 38055, Record Group 13, State Government Records Collection, LVA; Debates and Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Virginia (1868), 60, 458, 486, 519, 604; Richard G. Lowe, "Virginia's Reconstruction Convention: General Schofield Rates the Delegates," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 80 (1972): 351; Richard L. Hume, "The Membership of the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1867–1868: A Study of the Beginnings of Congressional Reconstruction in the Upper South," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 86 (1978): 483; General Orders and Circulars, Headquarters First Military District, 1869 (1870), "Summary of the result of the election for members of the State Senate of Virginia, held July 6, 1869," 13; Journal of the Senate of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1870 sess., 27, 295; National Anti-Slavery Standard, 13 Nov. 1869; Richmond Whig and Public Advertiser, 17 June, 29 Aug. 1873; obituaries in Farmville Herald, 24 Jan. 1908, with death date of 15 Jan. 1908 (identified as "John Robertson") and Richmond Planet, 25 Jan. 1908, giving time of death as the night of "January 16th, about 12 o'clock," and second quotation.