He studied law and was admitted to the bar, commencing practice in Percivals, Virginia. By 1830, his household included five white persons and 25 enslaved persons.[2]
His uncle Thomas Gholson Jr. who died in 1816 had represented Brunswick County in the Virginia General Assembly and later the U.S. House of Representatives, and James Herbert Gholson soon carried on the family tradition. Voters elected him as one of their part-time representatives in the Virginia House of Delegates, where he served from 1824 to 1828 and again from 1830 until 1833, when he was elected to fill a vacancy caused by the death of Congressman John Claiborne. Sixty percent were the enslaved Brunswick County. He spoke about Nat Turner in Virginia General Assembly.
Elected as an Anti-Jacksonian to the United States House of Representatives in 1832, Gholson failed to win re-election, and his 1834 defeat by his sometimes co-delegate in the Virginia House of Delegates and unsuccessful opponent two years earlier, George Dromgoole, marked the demise of the Whig party in Brunswick County. Afterwards, the Virginia General Assembly elected Gholson as a judge of the circuit court for the Brunswick circuit, and he served for many years despite a controversy the year before his death alleging partiality toward his brother, who would later serve in the Second Confederate Congress.[3]
Death and legacy
Gholson died in Brunswick County on July 2, 1848, and was buried at Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia.
Electoral history
1833; Gholson was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives with 37.62% of the vote, defeating Democrat George Coke Dromgoole and Independents William Osborne Goode and Alexander G. Knox.
1835; Gholson lost his re-election bid to Dromgoole.
^1830 U.S. Federal Census, St. Andrews Parish, Brunswick, Virginia; no record of him appears in the 1820 census, unless he was the householder and slaveholder in Cumberland, Kentucky that year, or possibly because of digital misindexing.
