BACON, Edmund, lawyer, born in Virginia in January 1776; died in Edgefield, South Carolina, 2 February 1826. While quite young he was chosen by the citizens of Augusta, Georgia, where he was at school, to welcome Washington, then on an official tour through the south as president. "This delicate and honorable task," says a contemporary historian, Judge O'Neall, "he accomplished in an address so fortunate as to have attracted not only the attention of that great man, but to have procured from him, for the orator, a present of several law books." He was graduated at the Litchfield, Connecticut, law school and settled in Savannah, where he acquired a fortune at the bar before attaining the age of thirty-three. He was retained in the settlement of the estate of General Nathaniel Greene, near Savannah, and it is a curious coincidence that a quotation from one of the law books presented to Mr. Bacon by General Washington enabled him to gain a mooted point for the succession to the estate of the second general of the revolution. Owing to ill health, he removed in search of a more healthful location to Edgefield, where lie soon became a leading practitioner. He is the "Ned Brace" of Judge Long-street's "Georgia Scenes," and as a wit and humorist was conspicuous among his contemporaries. He displayed a lavish hospitality, and was the acknowledged autocrat of the table, insomuch that on a certain occasion, when the learned Dr. Jonathan Maxcy, president of South Carolina College, was present as a guest, no sooner had Mr. Bacon left the room than Dr. Maxcy enthusiastically exclaimed, "A perfect Garrick, sir! A living, breathing, acting Garrick !"