Nelson was born probably into slavery, perhaps in
Charlotte County, but the county's records do not preserve the date, the names of his
parents, or whether he married or had children. His name does not appear in the
county's tax rolls during the first five years after the end of slavery. Whether he
was closely related to Price Nelson, the only other known African American with a
surname of Nelson in the county in the 1860s, is not known. He was probably the
Edward Nelson whom an agent of the [Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands] paid to transport a
mentally ill freed women from Charlotte County Court House to Drake's Branch in the
county in August 1867. During the following winter the commanding general of the First Military District
described Nelson as an illiterate, honest, laboring man who had an excellent
character.
Very little is known about the political
conditions in the county that allowed Nelson to emerge into prominence soon after the
end of slavery. He and another African American, Joseph R. Holmes, attended the
Republican State Convention in Richmond in April 1867 as representatives from
Charlotte County. They supported political reforms proposed by radical
Republicans and in June 1867 they addressed a letter to the editor of the
Daily Richmond Whig criticizing the moderate proposals of
conservative white Republicans. Politics in the county was racially polarized as in
most parts of the state. About 64 percent of the county's population had lived in
slavery in 1860, but a majority of the white voters there had elected an advocate of
secession to the Convention of 1861. Prior to the 1867 election for members of the
convention called to write a new state constitution, registered African Americans
outnumbered white men in Charlotte County 2,080 to 913, as some former Confederates
were ineligible, and others, as elsewhere, apparently refused to participate. On
October 22, when African Americans voted for the first time in Virginia, Nelson won
election to represent Charlotte County in the convention. Incomplete unofficial
returns from two of the county's four or more voting districts indicate that all the
men who voted for him were African American. At the same election, Holmes won
election to the convention from the separate district that consisted of the counties
of Charlotte and [Halifax].
The convention met in the Capitol in Richmond
from December 3, 1867, through April 17, 1868. Nelson served on the Committee on
Public Institutions and voted with the radical reformers on almost all the key votes
except for a proposal to prohibit racial segregation in the new public school system
for which the constitution provided. He also served on a special committee that
investigated and reported on a complaint lodged against a white delegate, [Charles H. Porter], that he
had knowingly presented a petition from residents of Nansemond County that contained
forged signatures. Nelson approved the report that exonerated Porter as having acted
without knowing that the signatures were forged. Incomplete published accounts of
debates in the convention indicate that Nelson spoke only three words. On January 24,
1868, during a debate on taxes, a member complained, "One would imagine, from the
wonderful list of grievances that gentlemen bring up here, that Virginia has been the
most thoroughly accursed State, in the way of laws, that ever was heard of." Nelson
then said, "That is so." When he received his per diem convention salary and travel
expenses Nelson signed with his mark.
Few other references to Nelson appear in public
records or newspaper reports for the remainder of the decade. He attended the January
1869 National Convention of the Colored Men of America, which gathered in Washington,
D.C., to protest the denial of voting and other civil rights guaranteed by the
recently passed Fourteenth
Amendment. He may have been the Edward Nelson elected as a delegate from the
city of [Richmond] to attend the state
Republican convention in March 1869. Nelson was present in the crowd at Charlotte
Court House on May 3 when Joseph R. Holmes was shot and killed and gave testimony a
few days later during an inquiry that produced conflicting evidence. That Nelson's
name does not appear in the 1870 census for Charlotte County suggests that he died
between then and the summer without that fact being recorded in the county's official
register of deaths or that he moved away. Perhaps he changed his name, which some
people did, and disappeared from public records under the name of Edward Nelson.
