Edmund Pettus
Edmund Winston Pettus (born July 6, 1821 – July 27, 1907) was an American politician who represented Alabama in the United States Senate from 1897 to 1907. He previously served as a senior officer of the Confederate States Army who commanded infantry in the Western Theater of the American Civil War. After the war, he was politically active in the Ku Klux Klan, serving as a grand dragon.
The Edmund Pettus Bridge across the Alabama River in Selma, built in 1940, was named in his honor. The bridge became a landmark of the American civil rights movement in 1965 when armed Alabama police attacked unarmed peaceful civil rights demonstrators, including John Lewis and Hosea Williams, as they sought to march to the state capital of Montgomery. The incident became known as Bloody Sunday.
Edmund Pettus was born in 1821 in Limestone County, Alabama. He 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. 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, under William Cooper 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 whom he had three sons, two of whom died in infancy, and two daughters. Also that year he was elected solicitor for the seventh Judicial Circuit of Alabama.
During the Mexican–American War in 1846–48, Pettus served as a lieutenant with the Alabama Volunteers, and after the end of hostilities he moved to California, where he participated in ethnic cleansing of Yukis and other Native Americans.
By 1853, he 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.
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