Allen Caperton Braxton (March 6, 1862 – March 22, 1914) was a Virginia lawyer, whose career included service as a member of the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902, for which he is considered the founder of the Virginia State Corporation Commission, and as a president of The Virginia Bar Association.[1]
Braxton was born in Monroe County, West Virginia. He was born into a prominent family, with ancestors including Carter Braxton who signed the Declaration of Independence, and on his mother's side, U.S. Senator Allen T. Caperton. Braxton began his law practice in Staunton, Virginia, where he was elected Commonwealth's Attorney and city attorney for the period 1885-1889. In time his firm established a second office in Richmond, Virginia. Braxton represented Staunton and Augusta County in the state constitutional convention of 1902, where he supported the convention's mostly successful efforts to erase the gains in civil rights for African-Americans made during Reconstruction.[2] His work on the corporation committee led to the creation of the State Corporation Commission as part of the Virginia Constitution of 1902. Braxton's idea of the Commission was as an independent agency, that would balance the interests of consumers and common carriers, subject to review only by the Virginia Supreme Court.[3]
Besides his expertise in corporate law, Braxton wrote on constitutional issues, including the Eleventh and Fifteenth Amendments, the respective subjects of his best-known addresses to the Virginia State Bar Association. In his public statements, Braxton viewed the Fifteenth Amendment was an abomination aimed at the South, to which Southerners properly responded by devising the poll tax and other methods to deny the vote to black citizens - as was done in the Virginia Constitution of 1902.[4] In preparation for the constitutional convention, Braxton wrote to Booker T. Washington, on the subject of how much education should the Commonwealth provide to black children, suggesting that not much "book-learning" was required.[5] Welcoming the American Bar Association to Virginia for its twenty-sixth annual meeting in 1903, Braxton declared, "No state is more peculiarly American than Virginia."[6] Braxton was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1904.
In 1913, Braxton married in Atlantic City the nurse who helped him recovery from a serious illness.[7] He was buried in the Hollywood Cemetery, in Richmond.[8]