Cuthbert Bullitt
Quick Facts
Biography
Cuthbert Bullitt (c. 1740 – 1791) was a planter and lawyer from Prince William County, Virginia. He was a local and colonial political leader during the American Revolution.
Bullitt was descended from French Huguenots.Cuthbert was one of the five children of Benjamin and Elizabeth (Harrison) Bullitt. He and his brother Thomas Bullitt both settled in Prince William County and became locally prominent, Cuthbert as a planter,and lawyer and Thomas as a soldier.
Bullitt developed his plantation, known as Mount View on a peninsula where Quantico Creek enters the Potomac River. He married Helen Scott in the summer of 1761, and the couple had six children: Alexander Scott, who became a pioneer settler in Louisville, Kentucky, Thomas James, Frances, Sarah, Helen, and Sophia.
As the revolution neared, Bullitt became more active politically. He joined Prince William County's Committee of Safety along with Lynaugh Helm and Henry Lee. In 1776 he and Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee were the county's delegates to a revolutionary Provincial Congress of Virginia. That meeting became a constitutional convention, producing an interim constitution used by the province for the next several years.
Under the new state's government, Bullitt became the Commonwealth Attorney (prosecutor) in Prince William County. He held that post until appointed to the bench of a state court in 1780. When the Virginia Ratifying Convention met to ratify the United States Constitution in 1788, Judge Bullitt was again the delegate for the County.
He remained a judge until his death at Mount View in 1791.