Representative Peterson Goodwyn

Peterson Goodwyn (1745 – February 21, 1818) was an American planter, lawyer, soldier, and politician from Virginia who served eight terms in the United States House of Representatives from 1803 until his death in 1818. Born in 1745 at his father’s plantation, “Martins,” near Petersburg in the Colony of Virginia, he was the son of Joseph Goodwyn and his wife, the former Martha Thweatt. He grew up in a large family with at least eleven siblings, including a brother, Joseph Goodwyn Jr., who also served in the American Revolutionary War, and Dr. William Boswell Goodwyn, a physician in Southampton County whose son and grandson, both named William S. Goodwyn, later served as Commonwealth’s attorney and then judge of Greensville County, on a railroad line that would eventually link Petersburg with North Carolina. Educated by private tutors in his youth, Peterson Goodwyn later read law in preparation for a professional career.

Goodwyn became a planter in Dinwiddie County and established his own estate, which he named “Sweden.” In 1776 he was admitted to the Virginia bar and began practicing law in Petersburg and the surrounding areas, combining his legal work with the management of his plantation. On February 11, 1779, he married Elizabeth Peterson in Dinwiddie, Virginia. Their marriage, which lasted until her death in 1817, produced three sons—Edward Osborne Goodwyn, Albert Thweatt Goodwyn, and Peterson Goodwyn Jr.—and four daughters—Martha Goodwyn, Lucy Ann Goodwyn, Eliza Peterson Goodwyn, and Emma Eppes Goodwyn. Through their daughter Eliza, the family line extended into the twentieth century; she was the great-grandmother of the American actor Joseph Cotten. The Goodwyn family became closely interwoven with regional political and professional life, including through the marriage of their daughter Martha to Patrick Magruder, who would serve one term in Congress from Maryland (1805–1807) and later as Clerk of the House of Representatives and the second Librarian of Congress until his retirement for health reasons in 1815.

During the American Revolutionary War, Goodwyn played an active military role on the patriot side. He personally equipped his own company of Virginia militia and entered service as a captain. Over the course of the conflict he rose through the ranks to major and was ultimately promoted to colonel for gallantry in action, particularly noted at the Battles of Smithfield and Great Bridge, both fought in Virginia. His service in the Revolutionary War placed him among the generation of Virginia planter-lawyers who combined military leadership with civic prominence, and after the war he joined the Society of the Cincinnati, an organization of Continental Army and militia officers formed to preserve the ideals and fellowship of the Revolutionary struggle.

Following independence, Goodwyn turned increasingly to public office in Virginia. Voters in Dinwiddie County elected him multiple times as one of their two representatives in the Virginia House of Delegates, a part-time legislative position. He served there from 1789 to 1802, with the exception of the 1795–1796 session, when Drury Jones and Alexander McRae, both of whom he had previously served alongside, represented the county. As a member of the Republican Party—then commonly known as the Democratic-Republican Party—Goodwyn aligned with the Jeffersonian political tradition that was dominant in Virginia, emphasizing states’ rights and agrarian interests. His legislative work in Richmond helped establish his reputation among constituents as a capable representative of Dinwiddie County’s planter and rural communities.

In 1802, Goodwyn was elected as a Democratic-Republican to the United States House of Representatives. He took his seat in the 8th Congress in 1803 and was re-elected repeatedly, serving continuously through the 8th to the 15th Congresses (1803–1818). Over these eight terms in office, he represented first Virginia’s 18th congressional district and, following reapportionment after the 1810 census, Virginia’s 19th congressional district. Both districts later disappeared in the 1840s as Virginia’s relative political weight declined with the growth of western states. Serving during a formative period in the early republic, including the administrations of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, Goodwyn participated in the legislative process at the national level, representing the interests of his Virginia constituents through debates over issues such as federal power, trade, and war. His tenure encompassed the Louisiana Purchase era, the Embargo and Non-Intercourse Acts, and the War of 1812, during which his family again contributed militarily: his son Edward Osborne Goodwyn (1776–1841) served as a captain.

Goodwyn’s personal and family life remained closely tied to his Dinwiddie County estate. His wife Elizabeth died in 1817, and a year later, on February 21, 1818, Peterson Goodwyn himself died at “Sweden” in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, while still serving in Congress. He was interred in the family cemetery on the estate. A cenotaph in his honor stands at Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., commemorating his service as one of the members of the United States Congress who died in office between 1790 and 1899. The family burial ground also includes the grave of his son-in-law Patrick Magruder, linking the Goodwyn estate to the institutional history of the House of Representatives and the Library of Congress.

The Goodwyn family’s presence in Dinwiddie County and the surrounding region continued long after Peterson Goodwyn’s death. In the 1830 U.S. Federal Census, his son Peterson Goodwyn Jr. headed a household that included six additional white persons and owned sixty-three enslaved persons, in a county that then counted 1,048 free white males, 2,372 male slaves, 2,309 female slaves, and 332 free people of color. In the 1850 U.S. Federal Census, Edward “A.” Goodwyn owned twenty enslaved persons, while William H. Goodwyn held considerably more. By the 1860 census, his grandson Dr. John P. Goodwyn owned fifteen enslaved persons, with his earlier holdings in 1850 recorded on a Virginia census not available online. These records illustrate the family’s continued role as substantial slaveholding planters in the antebellum South. A later descendant, Peterson M. Goodwyn, served in the 12th Virginia Infantry during the American Civil War, extending the family’s military tradition into another major American conflict.

The physical and geographic legacy of the Goodwyn family was also visible in local place names and settlement patterns. By 1835, a post office on the stage road in southern Dinwiddie County bore the name Goodwynsville, a community that still existed in 1892. However, the development of a railroad linking Petersburg to North Carolina after the Civil War shifted regional economic activity, fostering the growth of McKinney, Virginia, while Goodwynsville declined; even the tavern that once stood there eventually disappeared. The wooden plantation house at “Sweden,” where Peterson Goodwyn had lived and died, was reported to be near collapse by 1900. The nearest town, Sutherland, Virginia, later became notable as the site of a Confederate defeat on April 2, 1865, which disrupted the South Side Railroad, the last major Confederate supply line in the closing days of the Appomattox Campaign that ended the Civil War. Into the twentieth century, remnants of Goodwyn’s world—chimneys, stone foundations, and the family graveyard—could still be found about a mile beyond the intersection of county roads 613 and 631, marking the landscape once dominated by the plantation of Congressman Peterson Goodwyn.