Robert Breckinridge (1754–10 September 1833), member of the Convention of 1788, was born in Augusta County, the son of Robert Breckinridge, or Breckenridge, and his first wife, Sarah Poage Breckinridge. His younger half brothers included James Breckinridge, who represented Virginia in the House of Representatives, and John Breckinridge, who was briefly attorney general of the United States, represented Kentucky in the United States Senate, and founded the distinguished Breckinridge family of that state. His mother died when he was about four years old and his father soon remarried, but he and his brothers did not get along well with their stepmother, Lettice Preston Breckinridge. The family moved to the portion of the county that in 1770 became Botetourt County, and about 1772 he and his brothers were apprenticed to a carpenter and builder in Hanover County.
Breckinridge enlisted in the army on 2 March 1776, reportedly as a sergeant in the 8th Virginia Regiment. A year later he was commissioned an officer (probably an ensign), and on 14 September 1778 he became a first lieutenant. Breckinridge was serving with the 4th Virginia Regiment on 12 May 1780 when he was taken prisoner at the surrender of Charleston, South Carolina. After his exchange in July 1781, he remained in the army until the end of the summer of 1783 and soon thereafter moved west to Jefferson County, near Louisville.
Robert Breckinridge learned surveying, which became his profession in Kentucky, where he gained a reputation as one particularly knowledgeable about the earliest Jefferson County surveys and the many conflicting claims that arose from some of them. He also speculated in land, patenting 20,545 acres in Kentucky and acting as agent for many Virginians in the management of their western landholdings. As a result he accumulated a considerable fortune. Described as shy, compassionate, and quiet, Breckinridge nevertheless quickly became a figure of importance in his new home. He was named a justice of the peace in Jefferson County and a deputy surveyor in 1785. Appointed a commissioner in 1787 to sell the town lots in Louisville not disposed of by the original trustees, he also served from 1786 until at least 1792 on the commission to assign bounty lands on the north side of the Ohio River to soldiers who had served with George Rogers Clark in the Illinois Regiment.
In 1788 Breckinridge was elected one of Jefferson County's two delegates to the convention that met in Richmond to consider ratification of the Constitution of the United States. He made no significant speeches during the June convention, but he broke ranks with the majority of his fellow Kentuckians by voting for the new constitution on 25 June 1788. Breckinridge missed or abstained from the vote two days later to impose certain limits on Congress's power to tax. In 1788 he was also elected to a seat in the House of Delegates, which began its sessions while the convention was still in progress. Breckinridge served only one year and sat on the Committees of Claims and of Propositions and Grievances.
By then Kentucky was debating the question of separation from Virginia, and Breckinridge was elected a delegate in 1787 and 1789 to conventions considering that question. He was a member of the Kentucky constitutional convention of 1792 and was subsequently elected to three one-year terms in the Kentucky House of Representatives, where he served as the first Speaker of the House. In subsequent years Breckinridge filled other important posts in Kentucky, including service as a brigadier and major general in the state militia. He never married but in 1801 became guardian of the children of his brother Alexander Breckinridge. He spent the years after 1815 in Louisville and became reclusive toward the end of his life. Robert Breckinridge died in Louisville, Kentucky, on 10 September 1833 and was buried in the Floyd-Breckinridge Cemetery on his own property.
Sources Consulted:
Birth year and death date on gravestone; Joseph A. Waddell, Annals of Augusta County, Virginia, From 1726 to 1871, 2d ed. (1902), 119–120; John Mason Brown, Memoranda of the Preston Family (1870), 6–20; James C. Klotter, Breckinridges of Kentucky, 1760–1981 (1986), xvi, 5, 8, 12; Breckinridge Family Papers, Library of Congress, University of Virginia, and University of Kentucky, Lexington; suit papers in Hite and Fishback v. Breckinridge, in Robert Emmett McDowell Papers and Preston Family Papers, both Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Ky.; certificate of Sam Finley, 23 Aug. 1783, Bounty Warrants (1779–1860), Office of the Governor, Record Group 3, Library of Virginia; Lyman C. Draper Papers, MSS 6J89, 8ZZ50, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wis.; John P. Kaminski et al., eds., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution: Ratification of the Constitution by the States, vols. 8–10: Virginia (1988–1993), 10:1539, 1540, 1565, 1651; Willard Rouse Jillson, Kentucky Land Grants (1925), 23, 148; G. Glenn Clift, "Corn Stalk" Militia of Kentucky, 1792–1811 (1957), 1, 15; description of later years and funeral in Derek Colville, "A Transcendentalist in Old Kentucky," Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 55 (1957): 326–327; will, written 7 Sept. 1833, in Jefferson Co. Archives, Louisville, Ky., and in Jefferson Co., Ky., Will Book, 2:527.