George Hunt Pendleton (1825-1889), American politician and a leader of the Democratic party, sponsored the first civil service reform law in 1883.

George Pendleton was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on July 29, 1825. He graduated from Cincinnati College in 1841 and, in 1844, traveled extensively in Europe and the Near East. He married into an aristocratic Southern family, studied law, and was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1847.

After 3 years in the Ohio Senate, Pendleton was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1856. He succeeded Stephen Douglas as a leader of Midwestern Democrats when Douglas died. At the time of the Civil War, southern Ohio was a center of antiwar sentiment in the Union, and Pendleton became the head of a group of Democrats who opposed President Abraham Lincoln's policies at every turn.

After the war Pendleton became a harsh critic of Republican Reconstruction measures, but he increasingly emphasized currency questions...