Caroline-Richmond City County Virginia USGenWeb Archives Biographies.....Pendleton, Edmund 1741 - 1803
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File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by:
Alice Warner http://www.rootsweb.com/~archreg/vols/00015.html#0003503 March 22, 2008, 1:58 pm

Author: Henry Howe

Edmund Pendleton bio from Caroline County section of Henry Howe's Historical
Collection of Virginia p.215

Edmund Pendleton was born in this county in 1741, and died in Richmond in 1803.
He was president of the Court of Appeals, and of the Virginia convention of
1775. He was twice appointed a member of Congress. In 1788 he was chosen
president of the convention of Virginia which met to consider the adoption of
the Federal constitution. When the Federal government was organized, he was
selected by Congress to be district judge for Virginia, but declined the
appointment. Wirt says "He had in great measure overcome the disadvantages of an
extremely defective education, and by the force of good company, and the study
of correct authors, had attained to great accuracy and perspicuity of style....
His manners were elevated, graceful, and insinuating. His person was spare, but
well proportioned, and his countenance one of the finest in the world; serene,
contemplative, benignant; with that expression of unclouded intelligence, and
extensive reach, which seemed to denote him capable of any thing that could be
effected by the power of the human mind. His mind itself was of a very fine
order. It was clear, comprehensive, sagacious, and correct; with a most acute
and subtle faculty of discrimination; a fertility of expedient which never could
be exhausted; a dexterity of address which never lost an advantage and never
gave one; and a capacity for continued and unremitting application which was
perfectly invincible. As a lawyer, and a statesman, he had few equals and no
superiors. For parliamentary management, he was without a rival. With all these
advantages of person, manners, address, and intellect, he was also a speaker of
distinguished eminence. He had that silver voice of which Cicero makes such
frequent and honorable mention; an articulation uncommonly distinct; a perennial
stream of transparent, cool, and sweet elocution; and the power of presenting
his arguments with a great simplicity and striking effect. He was always
graceful, argumentative, persuasive; never vehement, rapid, or abrupt. He could
instruct and delight; but he had no pretensions to those high powers which are
calculated to "shake the human soul."

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