He was born and died in
Amelia County, where he built his home,
The Wigwam. Giles attended Prince Edward Academy, now
Hampden–Sydney College, and the College of New Jersey, now
Princeton University; he probably followed
Samuel Stanhope Smith, who was teaching at Prince Edward Academy when he was appointed President of the College in 1779. He then went on to study law with Chancellor
George Wythe and at the
College of William and Mary; he was admitted to the bar in 1786. Giles supported the new Constitution during the ratification debates of 1788 but was not a member of the ratifying convention. Giles was elected to the
U.S. House of Representatives in a special election in 1790, taking the seat of
Theodorick Bland, who had died in office on June 1; he is believed to be the first member of the
United States Congress to be elected in a
special election. He was to be re-elected three times; he resigned on October 2, 1798, on the grounds of ill health and in disgust at the
Alien and Sedition Acts. During this first period in Congress, he fervently supported his fellow Virginians
James Madison and
Thomas Jefferson against
Alexander Hamilton and his ideas for a
national bank preferring Jefferson's idea of an
agrarian republic. Working with Jefferson and Madison, he introduced three sets of resolutions in 1793, which attempted to
censure Hamilton's "administration of finances" as
Secretary of the Treasury to the point of accusing him of maladministration in office under the
Funding Act of 1790 to force the US to repay America's debts to France following the
French Revolution. Per this goal, he opposed the pro-British
Jay's Treaty and resisted naval appropriation to be used against France during the
Quasi-War. In the same year, he voted for the
Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions in the House of Delegates to declare the
Alien and Sedition Acts unconstitutional. After another term in the House, from 1801 to 1803, Giles was appointed as a
Senator from Virginia after the resignation of
Wilson Cary Nicholas in 1804. Giles served in the US Senate and was reappointed in 1810 until he resigned on March 3, 1815. Giles strongly advocated the removal of Justice
Samuel Chase after his
impeachment, urging the Senate to consider it as a political decision (as to whether the people of the United States should have confidence in Chase) rather than as a trial. Giles was deeply disappointed by the acquittal of Chase. He supported the election of Madison as president in 1808, in preference to the Federalist candidate
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. Giles was Madison's chief advocate in Virginia. After the election, however, he joined with Senator
Samuel Smith of
Maryland and his brother
Robert Smith, the Secretary of State, in criticizing Madison; first as too weak on Britain and then, in 1812, as too precipitate in going to war; however, voted for the
declaration of war. He disliked
Albert Gallatin, the Secretary of the Treasury, who was primarily responsible for preventing his nomination as Secretary of State and defeating Gallatin's bill of 1811 for a new Bank of the United States. Giles's refusal to accept the General Assembly's instructions led to his rejection at the next poll for a senator. (The state legislatures elected senators in those days.) Giles served one relatively uneventful term in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1816–1817 and then retired from political office for a time. He, however, published opinion pieces and columns, chiefly in the
Richmond, Virginia,
Enquirer, in which he deplored the
Era of Good Feelings as false prosperity, given over to banks, tariffs, and fraudulent internal improvements; these would centralize and corrupt government, and ruin the farmers. He attacked
John Quincy Adams and
Henry Clay as he had attacked Hamilton, calling them corrupt Anglophiles. Giles also published a criticism of the Jeffersonian program for public education. Giles argued that it was unjust to tax one man to educate another man's children, and the teachers that the government employed would constitute a special interest, always ready to vote for higher taxes and government spending. Besides, he said, giving every boy in Virginia three years of school would have limited practical utility, deprive farm families of much-needed labor power, and leave the typical "scholar" unfitted for the return to hard labor that awaited him. When
James Barbour left the Senate in 1825, Giles attempted to persuade the legislature to appoint him as a replacement; they appointed
John Randolph instead. In 1826, Giles was again elected to the House of Delegates, and in 1827 he was elected Governor; Giles served as
Governor of Virginia for three terms, from March 4, 1827, to March 4, 1830. From the governorship, Giles encouraged Virginia's Senator
Littleton Waller Tazewell to organize a southern resistance to the
American System of
Henry Clay centered on a boycott on northern manufactures. Tazewell found little support for it among southern senators. In Giles's last term, he was a member of the
Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829–1830 where he strongly supported the existing apportionment of the House of Delegates, giving the eastern counties of Virginia, with a minority of the voters, control of the legislature. He did favor reform of the suffrage requirements, however. Giles also opposed the movement in the convention to strengthen his own office, the governorship. Strong governorships in other states, such as
New York, were at the center of political machines kept together by patronage and corruption, he said, and the reason that Virginia had not suffered from those ills was that the governorship in his state was too weak to be worth fighting for. Rather than follow the example of New York, with its party machine, it was better for Virginia to retain
George Mason's executive model. Giles lost to some extent: while the governor's term remained short and was still accountable to the General Assembly, the
Constitution of 1830 abolished the privy council, thus making the governorship a bit more independent. ==Legacy==