William Smartt Pendleton: Lawyer, Politician, and Mayor of Fort Worth (1848–1933)

William Smartt Pendleton, lawyer, state legislator, mayor, and judge, son of Edmund Pendleton and Sarah (Smartt) Pendleton, was born in Warren County, Tennessee, in February 1848. In 1857 he moved to Ellis County, Texas, with his family. His father was a farmer and stockraiser who represented Ellis County in the Tenth Texas Legislature from 1863 to 1866. His brother, George C. Pendleton, served in the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Texas legislatures (1883–89), as speaker of the Texas House of Representatives (1887–89), as lieutenant governor of Texas (1891–93), and as a two-term congressional representative (1893–97). Pendleton’s sister Octavia married Maj. K. M. Van Zandt of Fort Worth. His father died in 1868, and Pendleton moved with his mother and younger siblings to Manchester, Tennessee, where Pendleton taught school and attended Manchester College. He graduated and moved to Fort Worth in 1873.

Fort Worth Legal Career and Civic Life

In Fort Worth, Pendleton commenced the practice of law with partner Joseph C. Terrell under the name Terrell & Pendleton. He was active in Fort Worth civic affairs and in the local Democratic party. He was a candidate for justice of the peace in August 1873 and a delegate to a Democratic district convention later that year. Pendleton announced his candidacy for district attorney in February 1874 but withdrew prior to the election that April.

Pendleton married Elizabeth Isabelle “Lizzie Belle” Shelton on October 5, 1875. The couple had four children who lived to adulthood: Herbert, Walter, Annabel (Anna Belle), and Edna. In early 1876 Pendleton became an editor for the Fort Worth Standard. By March of that year his partnership with Terrell had ended, and he had begun practicing independently. In 1878 he ran for county attorney and in November was elected with a plurality of votes in a five-person race.

Pendleton had a fiery temper inside and outside the courtroom. In August 1878 he got into a fistfight during closing arguments of a civil suit because the opposing attorney had insulted him. He was fined $100. In 1882 he was again fined for fighting in public. He was a member of the Queen City Lodge No. 21 of the Knights of Pythias, organized in 1877. By 1884 he had added Newton Rhea Bowlin and C. Ross Bowlin to his firm, now styled Pendleton, Bowlin & Bowlin. He and his partners operated their private practice out of the county attorney’s office in the county courthouse.

Term in State Legislature and Later Career in Fort Worth

In 1884 Pendleton ran for the Texas legislature as a Democrat and “free grass” candidate in opposition to the leasing of large tracts of public school lands to ranchers. At the Tarrant County Democratic Convention, an “overwhelming majority” of delegates endorsed the free grass position. According to the Galveston Daily News, Pendleton enjoyed “unanimous” support from Tarrant County Democrats. He was elected to represent House District 34 in the Nineteenth Texas Legislature and served for one term.

In the Texas House of Representatives, Pendleton chaired the House Committee on Towns, Cities, and Corporations and sat on the House committees on Judiciary No. 2, Privileges and Elections, and Public Land and Land Office. Two of the ten bills he proposed while in the legislature became law. H. B. 252 amended the Code of Criminal Procedure to clarify the guidelines for jury selection. H. B. 549 set the dates district court would be held in the Seventeenth Judicial District, composed of Tarrant and Parker counties.

In 1885 Pendleton was an incorporator of the Fort Worth & New Orleans Railroad Company. By that time he had formed the law firm of Pendleton & Powell, operating above the First National Bank of Fort Worth, with future Fort Worth Mayor T. J. Powell. In February 1886 the firm was restyled Pendleton, Chapman & Powell with the addition of H. M. Chapman. In April 1886, during the Great Southwest Strike, an armed clash between strike supporters and strike breakers (the latter led by Jim Courtright) took place south of Fort Worth. In the wake of this incident, Pendleton was among those appointed as special deputies to maintain order by Mayor John Peter Smith. In May of that year he was elected to serve as a director of an association to establish a law library at the Tarrant County courthouse. In 1887 Pendleton publicly spoke against a proposed prohibition amendment on multiple occasions. By this time he was a director and stockholder for the Democrat Publishing Company, which published the Fort Worth Gazette.

Mayor of Fort Worth and Bigamy Scandal

In 1890 Pendleton ran for mayor of Fort Worth. At the city Democratic convention, the delegation was deadlocked between Pendleton and William J. Bailey. Bailey chose to withdraw after thirty-three rounds of balloting, and Pendleton was unanimously nominated. Pendleton favored a more conservative financial policy than Bailey, chair of the city council’s finance committee. He was described as favoring public improvements, so long as the city did not take on excessive debt, and as desiring to bring in “more capitalists to build more houses [and] to give the workingmen constant and remunerative employment.” He lost his twenty-two-month-old son George to sickness in March but continued his campaign and was elected over the independent, incumbent mayor, Hiram S. Broiles, in April.

Pendleton’s brief mayoralty opened and ended with controversy. At his first city council meeting, he assigned Bailey to chair the committee on sewers. Bailey, affronted by his removal from the finance committee, resigned the following day, although his constituents quickly elected him to fill the seat that he had vacated.

Pendleton soon became embroiled in a personal scandal that derailed his political career. Around 1888 he began an affair with Adelaide “Addie” Cullen who worked at a telephone exchange in the same building as his office above the First National Bank. Pendleton was apparently led to believe that the law firm of Hughes & Campbell in New York could win him what amounted to a no-fault divorce and went to New York in July 1889 to secure a divorce without his wife’s knowledge. In August, alleging to have brought the divorce suit in Chicago, the firm provided Pendleton with divorce papers that had supposedly been signed by the clerk of Cook County, Illinois. Pendleton later attested that his name and his wife’s name were spelled incorrectly on these initial documents and that he had to wait in New York for the firm to provide him with corrected forgeries. He returned to Fort Worth to help care for his son George, who was dying from a prolonged sickness. Pendleton averred that he did not tell his wife about their supposed divorce until after George died, but his wife claimed that he never told her about it. In March 1890 Lizzie Belle Pendleton discovered her husband’s affair after finding love letters between him and Addie Cullen. The two concealed their marital strife from the public as Pendleton assumed the office of mayor.

On July 5, 1890, Pendleton and the nineteen-year-old Cullen eloped in New Orleans. The marriage became public knowledge during their honeymoon, and Pendleton resigned as mayor. Reporters from Chicago confirmed there was no record of the divorce there, and Pendleton’s divorce was proven to have been fraudulent. Due to his apparent ignorance of the forgery, Pendleton was not charged with bigamy, but the scandal destroyed his reputation in Fort Worth. Lizzie Bell was granted a divorce from Pendleton on October 4, 1890, and he married Addie Cullen on October 22 in New Jersey.

Later Life and Death

Pendleton relocated to New York to continue his legal career. He returned to Texas and settled in Amarillo in November 1893 after finding it difficult to practice in New York without established connections. In 1894 Pendleton moved to Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma Territory, where he continued to practice law and was active in local Democratic party politics. He served as a United States commissioner from 1894 to 1896, as county probate judge from 1901 to 1903, and as a delegate from Pottawatomie County to the Single Statehood Convention in Oklahoma City in July 1905.

His wife Addie died at the age of thirty-five on July 25, 1906. On October 20, 1907, Pendleton, then fifty-nine years old, married nineteen-year-old Rosa Addie Prather. This marriage quickly failed, and they were divorced on December 14, 1909.

Pendleton was elected Pottawatomie County judge in 1916. He held the office from 1917 to 1919 and from 1923 to 1929 and served in the Oklahoma legislature from 1921 to 1923. W. S. Pendleton retired from politics after being defeated in the 1928 election for county judge and died at the age of eighty-five at his home in Shawnee, Oklahoma, on March 22, 1933. He was buried at Fairview Cemetery in Shawnee.