Edmund Pendleton was born to humble beginnings, but ultimately achieved prominence in Virginian society as a lawyer, judge, and politician. Born in Caroline County in 1721 to a poor, widowed mother, he began an apprenticeship under Colonel Benjamin Robinson, Caroline County’s Clerk of Court, at the age of thirteen. In 1745, he was admitted to the Virginia Bar and in 1751 became Caroline County’s justice of the peace. The next year he was elected to the House of Burgesses, where he served until the American Revolution.
During the American Revolution, Pendleton was a leader at many major political gatherings. He attended the 1st and 2nd Continental Congress and served as the president of the Virginia Committee of Safety, which briefly governed the colony after British authorities fled Williamsburg in the summer of 1775. Pendleton also served as the president of the 4th and 5th Virginia Conventions, with George Washington commenting that there were "few better judges of such subjects." Pendleton helped write several important resolutions, including the one instructing Virginia’s Congressional representatives to introduce a resolution for independence. In 1776, Pendleton became the first speaker of the newly founded House of Delegates and held important roles in Virginia’s newly formed judiciary.
While Pendleton was an omnipresent figure during this period, he did not initially support the idea of independence. In 1775, Pendleton urged colonists to not take hostile action against Britian. He believed the “unhappy dispute” was “not an inclination on our part to set up for independency, which we utterly disavow and wish to restore to a Constitutional Connection upon the most solid and reasonable basis.” This moderate stance led him to be at odds with more radical Virginians, such as Patrick Henry, who ardently advocated for revolution. As time progressed and revolution became inevitable, Pendleton supported the formation of the United States. Pendleton is credited with proposing the explicit exclusion of enslaved people from the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights, gaining the support of enslavers like himself.
After the Revolution, Pendleton was the president of the Virginia Ratifying Convention of 1788, which ratified the Constitution of the United States. As a self-made man he proclaimed, “I am an advocate for fixing our Government on true republican principles, giving to the poor man free liberty in his person and property. Whether a man be great or small he is equally dear to me.”
In 1788, George Washington appointed Pendleton to the United States District Court of Virginia, but he declined the appointment due to poor health. The following year, he became the head of Virginia’s Court of Appeals where he served as a judge until his death in 1803. While lesser known than some of his more famous colleagues, Pendleton spent his life in public service and played an important role in many of the major moments in Virginia’s revolutionary history, while also exemplifying the same contradictions as many of his contemporaries.
