After graduation and admission to the Virginia bar, Staples moved to the mountains of
Montgomery County, Virginia to begin his private legal practice in its county seat,
Christiansburg, as well as adjacent counties. He lived with and worked under the guidance of
William Ballard Preston, who had served as Secretary of the Navy during the administration of President
Zachary Taylor and was a cousin of his mother. Staples later noted that he never received a fee greater than $2000 until after 1883, when he began representing greater interests in private practice (after being removed from the Virginia Court of Appeals along with all his colleagues in a massive legislative reorganization0. Meanwhile, in 1854–1855, Staples represented Montgomery County in the
Virginia House of Delegates as a
Whig. He then ran for the
United States House of Representatives in the 12th district as a
Know Nothing, but lost to the
Democratic incumbent,
Henry A. Edmundson. By 1860, Staples lived in a Christiansburg hotel owned by Thomas Wilson, as did several other lawyers and male professionals with less wealth than he. In that census, Staples owned 41 slaves in Montgomery County, of whom three lived at his Christiansburg residence and the remainder lived and worked further out in the county. However, he opposed secession until Virginia voters accepted the recommendation of the
Virginia Secession Convention of 1861. Then he paid to outfit the "New River Grays", a militia unit led by Dr. James Preston Hammett (a VMI graduate who later studied medicine in Philadelphia), which was mustered into the Confederate Army as Company H of the
24th Virginia Infantry.
Confederate legislator After Virginia's
secession from the
Union and acceptance into the Confederate States, Staples was named one of Virginia's four delegates to the
Provisional Confederate States Congress on February 22, 1862, alongside
William C. Rives,
R. M. T. Hunter and
John W. Brockenbrough. The next year, he was elected to the
First and
Second Confederate Congresses, serving in the
Confederate House of Representatives from 1862 to the end of the war. His brother Samuel G. Staples volunteered for the Confederate States Army and served as an aide to General J.E.B. Stuart; his relatives James S. Redd and Spottswood Redd were also captains. Waller Staples appears to have served in Wade's local defense regiment for Washington and Wythe Counties, Virginia, and became a critic of President Jefferson Davis by war's end.
Postwar judicial and legal career Months after the Confederacy conceded defeat, Staples signed documentation that he would never again own any slaves, as well as assurances of future loyalty to the Union, and received a federal pardon from President
Andrew Johnson on November 3, 1865. He then resumed his law practice in Montgomery County. However, his financial condition had substantially declined, so that at age 43 in 1870, Staples only owned about $10,000 in real estate and $5,000 in personal property. In February, 1870, months after Virginia voters rejected a proposed constitutional provision making former high Confederate officeholders ineligible to hold public office (but did approve the constitution which allowed its readmission to the Union), the newly elected and reassembled Virginia General Assembly elected Staples to the
Supreme Court of Appeals for a twelve-year term. He received the second highest number of votes other than that for long-term Judge
Richard C. L. Moncure. While an appellate judge, Staples served as a member of
Washington and Lee University School of Law's faculty, from 1877 to 1878. His most famous decisions on the court may have actually been his dissents concerning the legality of the Funding Act of 1871. By the time the terms of all the Court of Appeals' judges expired 1882 (despite a controversy over the term length of a judge appointed to replace a deceased jurist), the
Readjuster Party with which Staples sympathized controlled the state legislature. However, none of the judges on the Court of Appeals were re-elected. Nonetheless, the new Readjuster-leaning justices would later adopt what had been Staples' dissents in the state bond coupon cases. Thus, Staples returned to private practice, in partnership with
Beverly Munford in Richmond, the firm being named as Staples & Munford. The state of Virginia also hired Staples to argue the Coupon cases in the U.S. Supreme Court, assisting Virginia Attorney General
James G. Field in
Antoni v. Greenhow and
Stewart v. Virginia (1885). Staples was also a
Democratic elector in the U.S. Presidential election of 1884, but refused to run for Governor nor Attorney General. Beginning in 1884, Staples was also one of the revisors 1887 Code of Virginia, along
Edward C. Burks and
John W. Riely, both of whom had also served as Justices on the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia before the 1883 reorganization. In 1893-94, Staples became president of the
Virginia Bar Association. Perhaps his most lucrative client was the
Richmond and Danville Railroad. In one of his more celebrated losses as a lawyer, Staples represented the administrators of the estate of a wealthy white man from
Pittsylvania County named Thomas estranged from his relatives after he acknowledged his daughters from a relationship with one of his former slaves, lived with those daughters, and repeatedly and on his deathbed in 1889 announced his intention to make the sole surviving daughter his only heir, but who died before actually executing a will. The Richmond Chancery Court—and later the Virginia Supreme Court in an opinion announced by Judge
Thomas T. Fauntleroy over a dissent by Judge
Benjamin W. Lacy—rejected the arguments made by Staples and his three co-counsel in favor of those made by his former colleague Burks and Republican leader
Edgar Allan and their co-counsel, making Bettie Lewis and her husband wealthy, although they soon moved to Philadelphia. Governor
Fitzhugh Lee appointed Staples to the board of visitors of
Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College in
Blacksburg on January 1, 1886, and his fellow members elected him rector (the university's highest position) on January 23, 1886, although Staples died about a year later. ==Death and legacy==