Author: PARDEE, Benjamin D.
Biography:
PARDEE, Benjamin D. (b c.1789)
There is little information available about Pardee. Apart from two newspaper notices, biographical details have to be inferred from his writings, which consist of speeches and a single volume of mixed prose and verse published by subscription in 1810. Pardee found a substantial number of subscribers from in and around Elizabethtown, Essex County, NY, which must have been his base at the time. He describes himself in the Preface as a young farmer--in his own words, "a person in the morning of life, who has never had the advantages of an education, whose occupation has been principally the cultivation of the field." One of the poems supplies his approximate date of birth. In 1812 he was appointed captain in an infantry regiment of the new army for the state of New York. His term as one of the local justices for Essex County ended in 1813, perhaps because of his military duties. By 1816 he was in Cincinnati OH giving speeches for the democratic Tammany Society, and there the trail goes cold. Harvard Law School owns a manuscript volume of his notes on the practice of the NY Supreme Court. (WorldCat; Plattsburgh Republican 21 Aug. 1812; Albany Argus 9 Apr. 1813) HJ