Henry Alonzo Edmundson (d. 16 December 1890), member of the House of Representatives, was born most likely on the Montgomery County estate of his parents, Henry Edmundson and his first wife, Margaret King Edmundson. Reference works give undocumented birth dates of 8 or 14 June 1814, but his age as recorded in censuses and obituaries and on his gravestone suggest that he may have been born as early as 1813 or as late as 1817. Edmundson's mother died when he was a child, and he grew up under the care of a stepmother, Maria Antoinette Radford Edmundson. His father, a prosperous farmer, served four nonconsecutive terms in the House of Delegates and in 1828 purchased the lucrative Alleghany Turnpike. After attending Georgetown College (later University), Edmundson settled in Roanoke County and in November 1838 received a license to practice law. He became commonwealth's attorney in January 1845.

Edmundson married Mary Agnes Lewis, of Roanoke County, on 7 January 1840. Before she died on 7 June 1848, they had two daughters and two sons. He lived on a quarter-acre lot in Salem and in 1853 bought four acres of land nearby. Through inheritance and purchase Edmundson acquired tracts in Montgomery County as well. In 1850 he owned 800 acres of land there, six slaves age twelve or older in Montgomery County, and one adult and five young slaves in Roanoke County. A decade later he also held more than 1,100 acres in Montgomery jointly with his brother.

House of Representatives
In 1849 Edmundson garnered 55 percent of the vote to defeat a Whig candidate for election to the House of Representatives from the district comprising Alleghany, Bath, Boone, Botetourt, Floyd, Giles, Greenbrier, Logan, Mercer, Monroe, Montgomery, Pocahontas, Pulaski, and Roanoke Counties. During the Thirty-first Congress (1849–1851), legislators debated whether to exclude slavery from the territories that the United States had acquired as a result of the Mexican War. Like most other southern Democrats, Edmundson voted in favor of the compromise resolutions that fixed the borders of Texas, organized the territories of New Mexico and Utah without regard to the admission or exclusion of slavery, and enacted more-potent fugitive slave legislation, but he voted against the resolutions admitting California as a free state and abolishing the slave trade in the District of Columbia.

Edmundson won reelection without opposition in 1851 and 1853 but faced stiff competition in 1855 in a redrawn district without Bath and Pulaski Counties but with the additions of Craig, Fayette, Nicholas, Raleigh, Wayne, and Wyoming Counties. Edmundson received almost 54 percent of the vote to defeat the American (Know Nothing) Party candidate, Waller Redd Staples. Edmundson won reelection twice more, unopposed in 1857 and in 1859 despite a scattering of opposition votes cast for William Ballard Preston, a former congressman and secretary of the navy, and Allen Taylor Caperton, a member of the Convention of 1850–1851 and later of the Convention of 1861 and the Confederate States Senate. During his six terms in the House, Edmundson sat on the Committees on Public Buildings and Grounds (1849–1853), on Revolutionary Pensions (1853–1857), and on Public Expenditures (1857–1861). He chaired the Committee on Expenditures on Public Buildings in the Thirty-third Congress (1853–1855).

As sectional divisiveness and factional bitterness in the halls of Congress intensified, the bellicose Edmundson let his fists and his walking stick speak for him. On 11 May 1854, as the House debated passage of a bill organizing the Kansas and Nebraska Territories and declaring the Missouri Compromise of 1820 no longer in force, Edmundson stormed toward Lewis Davis Campbell, an Ohio Whig, threw off his coat, and began unbuttoning his vest as if reaching for a hidden knife or pistol. The ensuing chaos sent some congressmen scrambling onto the tops of their desks, either for a better view or to get out of the line of fire. Colleagues separated the two men, and the sergeant at arms compelled the restoration of order. On 18 January 1856, as the House struggled for the seventh week to organize and elect a Speaker, Joshua Reed Giddings, an Ohio free-soiler, bated Edmundson by sarcastically quoting Brutus's lines from Julius Caesar: "Go, show your slaves how choleric you are,/ And make your bondmen tremble." Edmundson advanced on him and threw the House into temporary confusion.

Later that session, Edmundson accompanied Preston Smith Brooks into the Senate chamber on 22 May 1856 when the South Carolina Democrat avenged insults to one of his state's senators by savagely beating Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner with a cane. Although later stories suggested that Edmundson may have encouraged Brooks to cane Sumner and may have helped prevent some shocked senators from intervening in the attack, a motion to declare the House's disapprobation of Edmundson's conduct failed. Edmundson displayed his continuing approval of Brooks's actions by serving as a pallbearer at his funeral the following year. In 1860 an admiring Bedford County resident presented Edmundson with a silver-headed cane for having assaulted Congressman John Hickman on the Capitol grounds on 10 February after the Pennsylvania Republican had ridiculed Virginians for overreacting to John Brown's raid.

Edmundson's willingness to thrash what he regarded as ungentlemanly northern curs and scoundrels in defense of southern honor may have won him as many admirers as enemies. Supporters placed his name in nomination for lieutenant governor at the Democratic State Convention in 1855, and he finished third in a six-candidate field in 1858 in the contentious race to determine the Democratic nominee for governor.

Civil War
In August 1860 Edmundson exchanged blows with Staples, who was canvassing in Christiansburg as a presidential elector for the Constitutional Union candidates. That autumn one Pittsylvania County voter cast a ballot for Edmundson as presidential elector, presumably for the Southern Democratic ticket. While the state convention meeting in Richmond debated whether to leave the Union, Edmundson raised a secessionist flag at a mass meeting in Roanoke County on 6 April 1861 and addressed the enthusiastic crowd. After Virginia seceded, Edmundson served as a volunteer aide-de-camp to the governor for almost three months. On 4 September 1861 he was appointed lieutenant colonel of the 54th Regiment Virginia Infantry. After the regimental reorganization, Edmundson was dropped on 13 May 1862. He helped raise the 27th Battalion Partisan Rangers, which became the 25th Regiment Virginia Cavalry with himself as lieutenant colonel from its organization on 1 September 1862.

Edmundson served as a presidential elector for Jefferson Davis in 1861. While fighting in Kentucky two years later he declined solicitations to seek election as lieutenant governor of Virginia, but he bowed to former constituents' importuning and in May 1863 announced his candidacy for a seat in the Confederate House of Representatives. He lost to Staples, the incumbent.

Citing his ill health, Edmundson tendered his resignation from military service on 6 September 1864, effective 8 October of that year. In the desperate last days of the Civil War, he joined other Roanoke County farmers in pledging to emancipate any male slaves who volunteered for service in the Confederate army and to provide for their families once the war was over.

Later Years
In March 1864 Edmundson acquired from his brother one-sixth ownership of the Yellow Sulphur Spring Company, which operated a mineral springs resort that lay about four miles from Fotheringay, one of the Montgomery County properties he had inherited. He and three partners sold their interest seven years later for $25,000. In 1868 Edmundson unsuccessfully sought a position, presumably as counsel, with the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad Company. He left Salem, probably in 1869, and ceased practicing law about 1880. Henry Alonzo Edmundson died at Falling Waters, his Montgomery County home on the Roanoke River, on 16 December 1890 and was buried in the family cemetery at Fotheringay.

Sources Consulted:
Biographies in Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed., Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography (1915), 2:107 (birth date of 8 June 1814), and Dana Elson McKnight, "Henry Alonzo Edmundson" (Master's thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1971), with birth date of 14 June 1814 and variant birthplace of Blacksburg on 11; United States Census Schedules, Roanoke Co., 1850 (age 33 on 3 Aug.), 1860 (age 45 on 12 June), and Montgomery Co., 1870 (age 54 on 17 Sept.), all in Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. (NARA); Roanoke Co. Marriage Licenses; correspondence in Aylett Family Papers (1780–1942) and Edmundson Family Papers (1781–1949, 1812–1953), all Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Va.; several Edmundson letters in the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, N.Y., and in West Virginia State Archives, Charleston, W.Va.; Congressional Globe, 34th Cong., 1st sess., 252–253 (quotation from Julius Caesar, Act IV, scene iii, lines 43–44), 1639–1642; New-York Tribune, 11, 13, 14 Feb. 1860; Harper's Weekly, 10 Mar. 1860; Compiled Service Records of Confederate Soldiers (1861–1865), War Department Collection of Confederate Records, Record Group 109, NARA; Edmundson broadside "12th Congressional District. To My Fellow-Citizens of the Counties of Floyd, Montgomery, Pulaski, Mercer, Giles, Greenbrier, Botetourt, Monroe, Craig, Fayette, Raleigh, and Roanoke," 9 May 1863, Confederate Imprints 2734-1, copy at University of Illinois Library, Urbana-Champaign, Ill.; Montgomery Co. Will Book, 12:381–382; obituaries in Roanoke Times, 19 Dec. 1890 ("had reached his 77th year"), and Baltimore Sun, 20 Dec. 1890 ("aged seventy-seven years"); death notice in Washington Post, 20 Dec. 1890; "aged 75 years" on gravestone.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Sara B. Bearss.

How to cite this page:
Sara B. Bearss,"Henry Alonzo Edmundson (d. 1890)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2016 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Edmundson_Henry_Alonzo, accessed [today's date]).

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