Bartholomew Dandridge (25 or 26 December 1737–18 April 1785), member of the Convention of 1776, member of the Council of State, and judge of the Virginia Court of Appeals, was born in New Kent County and was the son of John Dandridge and Frances Jones Dandridge. His father and his father's brother, William Dandridge, a naval officer who served on the governor's Council, emigrated from England by the mid-1710s and were merchants in Hampton before marrying into prominent Virginia planter families. One of Dandridge's sisters, Martha, married Daniel Parke Custis and George Washington, and another, Anna Maria, married Burwell Bassett (1734–1793), a member of the Convention of 1788.
As a young man Dandridge embarked on a successful legal career and became wealthy through his inheritance, professional income, and marriages. His first marriage to a cousin, Elizabeth Macon, early in the 1760s was short-lived. She died in 1764 soon after the birth of a daughter. Not long afterward Dandridge married Mary Burbidge, who inherited a New Kent County estate called Pamocra. They resided there and had four sons and three daughters. Their large household included several live-in wards, enslaved workers, and after 1768 both of their mothers.
Dandridge won election to the House of Burgesses in January 1772 and again in July 1774. He sat on the Committee of Privileges and Elections at each assembly session he attended and on the Committee of Propositions and Grievances at all sessions except that of March 1773. In 1774 he joined the Committee for Courts of Justice. Dandridge's rising status is indicated by his membership on a select committee in June 1775 that sparred with the royal governor after he removed the colony's gunpowder from the public magazine in Williamsburg.
Dandridge represented New Kent County in all five of the Revolutionary Conventions that met between the summer of 1774 and the summer of 1776. On 17 August 1775 he came within one vote of being elected to the Committee of Safety that in effect governed Virginia for the next ten months. One of the more active members of the last two Revolutionary Conventions, Dandridge was frequently appointed to select committees to investigate charges of election irregularities, and when the Convention of 1776 finally named a standing Committee of Privileges and Elections, he was a member. In May 1776 Dandridge introduced a resolution declaring that because actions of the king and Parliament had endangered American liberties, "the Union that has hitherto subsisted between Great Britain and the American Colonies is hereby totally dissolved, and that the Inhabitants of America are discharged from any Allegiance to the Crown of Great Britain." His draft resolution and two others of similar import formed the basis for the convention's unanimous instruction, adopted on 15 May, that the Virginia delegates in the Continental Congress move that the colonies be declared independent. Dandridge was a member of the large and distinguished committee that prepared the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the first constitution of Virginia, both of which the convention unanimously adopted.
On 29 June 1776 the convention elected Dandridge to the Council of State. It is possible that he took the oath of office and began serving on 6 July 1776, the day that Patrick Henry became governor, but the surviving records of the Council do not begin until 12 July, by which time Dandridge was seated. As the governor's advisory board, the Council oversaw many details of putting the government under the new constitution into operation and raising and supplying forces to serve in the Revolutionary War. Dandridge attended Council meetings regularly, with occasional short breaks to take care of personal and family business, through 8 January 1778. Twelve days later the Speaker of the House of Delegates laid Dandridge's letter of resignation before the General Assembly.
Elected to the House of Delegates the following April, Dandridge once again served on the Committee of Privileges and Elections, was ranking member of the Committees for Courts of Justice and of Propositions and Grievances, and chaired the Committee of Trade. On 29 May 1778 the General Assembly elected him to the General Court, which had jurisdiction in cases involving common and criminal law. The following year the assembly created a new Court of Appeals, composed of the judges of the General Court, the Court of Admiralty, and the High Court of Chancery, all ex officio. Although the Court of Appeals met for the first time in the spring of 1779, Dandridge did not take his seat until 29 March 1780. One of the most interesting cases presented to the Court of Appeals during his tenure was Commonwealth v. Caton, heard in November 1782 under a statute that may have violated the state constitution. Some of the judges stated that the court had the right and power to declare the law invalid because it conflicted with the constitution, but Dandridge cautiously declined to express an opinion whether the court possessed the power of judicial review.
With his appointment to the bench at age forty, Dandridge reached the height of his public career as well as his greatest prosperity. In addition to his New Kent County plantation, he had purchased 4,000 acres of land in North Carolina and 8,000 acres in Fayette County. Engaged also in the management of Custis family land that his sister inherited and as executor of the estate of his nephew, John Parke Custis, Dandridge was a busy man with large-scale responsibilities. On 18 April 1785 Bartholomew Dandridge died of unknown causes, probably at Pamocra in New Kent County, where he was buried.
Sources Consulted:
Biographies in (4 Call), Cases Decided in the Court of Appeals of Virginia, 8:xix–xx, and Henry R. McIlwaine et al., eds., Journals of the Council of the State of Virginia, 1776–1791 (1931–1982), 5:383; birth at "12 O'Clock A.M." on 25 Dec. 1737 and death date in Dandridge family Bible records (1728–1798), Mount Vernon Library and Archives, with copies at Library of Virginia (LVA), Accession 21245, and Virginia Museum of History and Culture (VMHC), Richmond; birth date of 26 Dec. 1737 and christening date of 13 Mar. 1738 in C. G. Chamberlayne, ed., The Vestry Book and Register of St. Peter's Parish: New Kent and James City Counties, Virginia, 1684–1786 (1937), 536; family history in Wilson Miles Cary, "The Dandridges of Virginia," William and Mary Quarterly, 1st ser., 5 (1896): 30–39, and Lyon G. Tyler, "The Dandridge Family," ibid. 6 (1898): 250–251; Dandridge letters and documents in George Washington Papers, Library of Congress, in several collections, LVA, in Custis Family Papers and other collections, VMHC, and in Dandridge Papers, Special Collections Research Center, Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg; numerous references in Joseph E. Fields, ed., "Worthy Partner": The Papers of Martha Washington (1994), in William J. Van Schreeven, Robert L. Scribner, and Brent Tarter, eds., Revolutionary Virginia, the Road to Independence: A Documentary Record (1973–1983), quotation on 7:145, election to Council on 7:655, and Henry R. McIlwaine et al., eds., Journals of the Council of the State of Virginia, 1776–1791 (1931–1982), vols. 1–3; Virginia General Assembly, House of Delegates, Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1777–1778 sess., 129 (resignation from Council), May–June 1778 sess., 38 (election to General Court); Commonwealth v. Caton et al. (1782) (4 Call), Cases Decided in the Court of Appeals of Virginia, 8:5–21; David John Mays, ed., The Letters and Papers of Edmund Pendleton, 1734–1803 (1967), 2:426; death notice, without date, in Richmond Virginia Gazette, or the American Advertiser, 23 Apr. 1785.