21 Facts About Edmund Pettus

Edmund Winston Pettus was an American lawyer, politician and military officer who represented Alabama in the United States Senate from 1897 to 1907.

Edmund Pettus served as a senior officer of the Confederate States Army, commanding infantry in the Western Theater of the American Civil War.

Edmund Pettus was born in 1821 in Limestone County, Alabama.

Edmund Pettus was the youngest of nine children of John Pettus and Alice Taylor Winston, a brother of John J Pettus, and a distant cousin of Jefferson Davis.

Edmund Pettus then studied law under William Cooper in Tuscumbia, Alabama and was admitted to the bar in 1842.

On June 27,1844, Pettus married Mary L Chapman, with whom he had three sons, two of whom died in infancy, and two daughters.

Edmund Pettus was appointed a judge in that circuit in 1855 until resigning in 1858.

Edmund Pettus then relocated to the now extinct town of Cahaba in Dallas County, Alabama, where he again took up work as a lawyer.

In 1861, Edmund Pettus, an enthusiastic champion of the Confederate cause and of slavery, was a Democratic Party delegate to the secession convention in Mississippi, where his brother John was serving as governor.

Edmund Pettus helped organize the 20th Alabama Infantry, and was elected as one of its first officers.

Edmund Pettus served in the Western Theater of the American Civil War.

Edmund Pettus was captured again on May 1,1863, while part of the surrendered garrison that had been defending Port Gibson in Mississippi.

Edmund Pettus managed to escape and return to his own lines.

Edmund Pettus was wounded in this fight, hit in his right leg during the battle's first day.

Edmund Pettus served as chairman of the state delegation to the Democratic National Convention for more than two decades.

In 1877, during the final year of Reconstruction, Edmund Pettus was named Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.

In 1896, at the age of 75, Pettus ran for the US Senate as a Democrat and won, beating incumbent James L Pugh.

Edmund Pettus's campaign relied on his successes in organizing and popularizing the Alabama Klan and his prominent opposition to the constitutional amendments following the Civil War that elevated former slaves to the status of free citizens.

Edmund Pettus died at Hot Springs, North Carolina, in the summer of 1907, at age 86, while still in office and elected for the next term.

Edmund Pettus is buried in Live Oak Cemetery in Selma.

My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father.