To contemporaries, Pendleton may have distinguished himself most as a judge, particularly in the appellate roles in which he spent his final 25 years, including leadership of what is now known as the Supreme Court of Virginia.

On hearing of his death, Congress agreed to wear badges of mourning for 30 days and expressed "their regret that another star is fallen from the splendid constellation of virtue and talents which guided the people of the United States, in their struggle for independence".

[2] Pendleton's maternal grandfather, James Taylor, was a large landowner in nearby Rappahannock County and may have helped raise the children until the widow remarried Edward Watkins two years later.

[4] In 1737, Pendleton was made clerk of the vestry of St. Mary's Parish in Caroline, which began his involvement with practical church-related matters which would continue throughout his life.

A moderate among the revolutionaries, in a resolution at the Second Continental Congress he said: "The ground and foundation of the present unhappy dispute between the British Ministry and Parliament and America, is a Right claimed by the former to tax the Subjects of the latter without their consent, and not an inclination on our part to set up for independency, which we utterly disavow and wish to restore to a Constitutional Connection upon the most solid and reasonable basis.

When Wythe took the chair, Pendleton addressing colleagues thus: "...the people by us are peaceably assembled, to contemplate in the calm lights of mild philosophy, what Government is best calculated to promote their happiness, and secure their liberty.

This I am sure we shall effect, if we do not lose sight of them by too much attachment to pictures of beauty, or horror, in our researches into antiquity, our travels for examples into remote regions".

His oldest brother, James Pendleton, 19 years his senior, died in 1762 and left a large estate in Culpeper that Edmund administered for the widow and four children.

Another descendant, Edmund Monroe Pendleton (1815–1884), distinguished himself in developing fertilizer products, and became a professor of agriculture and horticulture at the University of Georgia.

Because of the ravages of time upon the estate's buildings, his body was removed circa 1907 and moved to Bruton Parish Church in what became Colonial Williamsburg.