Early Life and Career
Edmund W. Pettus was born in 1821 in Limestone County, Alabama. He was a son of John Pettus and Alice Taylor Winston, brother of John J. Pettus, and a distant cousin of Jefferson Davis. Pettus was educated in local public schools, and later graduated from Clinton College located in Smith County, Tennessee.
Pettus then studied law in Tuscumbia, Alabama, and was admitted to the state's bar association in 1842. Shortly afterward he settled in Gainesville and began practicing as a lawyer. On June 27, 1844, Pettus married Mary L. Chapman, with which he would have three children. Also that year he was elected solicitor for the seventh Judicial Circuit of Alabama.
During the Mexican–American War in 1847–49, Pettus served as a lieutenant with the Alabama Volunteers, and after hostilities he moved to California. By 1853 he had returned to Alabama, serving again in the seventh circuit as solicitor. He was appointed a judge in that circuit in 1855 until resigning in 1858. Pettus then relocated to the now extinct town of Cahaba in Dallas County, Alabama, where he again took up work as a lawyer.
Read more about this topic: Edmund Pettus
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecution of science as imagination. Find me a people whose early medicine is not mixed up with magic and incantations, and I will find you a people devoid of all scientific ability.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“In every woman’s life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will melt.”
—Barbara Dale (b. 1940)