Richard Eppes

Richard Eppes (May 2, 1824 – February 17, 1896) was a prominent planter in Prince George County, Virginia and a surgeon in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. Eppes is notable for his having kept extensive journals about his plantation and life; the journals for 1849 and 1851-1896 are held by the Virginia Historical Society and have been invaluable to historians of the antebellum South.

His Appomattox Manor was used as a base by Union general Ulysses S. Grant during his siege of Petersburg, Virginia.

Eppes was born in City Point, Virginia. He had earned his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania and inherited his ancestral home, Appomattox Manor at City Point, by the age of twenty.

After graduating from college and coming into his inheritance, he married a woman from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They started a family.

At the time of the Civil War, Eppes owned nearly 130 slaves and 2,300 acres (9.3 km²) at City Point and Eppes Island directly across the james River. He had given up his medical practice to manage his three plantations, devoted to wheat and other grains, and associated slaves. Eppes favored preservation of the Union, provided that Southern rights in slave property could be protected. In the Election of 1860, he supported John C. Breckinridge, who led the Southern faction of the Democratic party. Breckinridge represented those who were states rights and pro-slavery men, but who were not radical secessionists.

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