George Edmund Badger was born in New Bern, North Carolina, on the 17th of April, 1795. His father, Thomas Badger, Esq., the son of Edmund and Lucretia Badger, was a native of Connecticut, and his birth is recorded to have taken place at Windham, in that State, on the 27th of June, 1766. Having received a good education, he came early in manhood to New Bern, and thence to Spring Hill, in the county of Lenoir, where for some time he taught school, but was then probably a student of the law, and was in due time admitted to the practice in this State. Fixing his residence in New Bern, he early rose to distinction as a practitioner, and appears in the published reports as one of the leading counsellors in the courts of that riding, and in the Supreme Court of the State, from 1792 till his death, which occurred from yellow fever, while in attendance on a court at Washington, in Beaufort county, on the 10th of October, 1799. The traditions of the profession and of intelligent persons of his acquaintance represent him as a man of determined character and great intellectual and professional ability, and leave the question in doubt whether at the same period of life he was more than equaled by his son. The late Peter Browne, himself one of the first lawyers and men of letters of his time in North Carolina, a contemporary at the bar of the senior Badger, spoke of him, before the entrance of his son into public life, as one of the ablest men he had ever known, and especially as possessing a power to fascinate and control masses of men in the most remarkable degree--a power, he added, which the son might exert with similar effect, if he would. His mother, by name Lydia Cogdell, was the daughter of Colonel Richard Cogdell, of New Bern, a gentleman of much consideration under the provincial rule in North Carolina, and an active and bold leader in the movement of the Revolution. As early as August, 1775, his name appears second on the list of the committee of safety for New Bern district, appointed by the first Congress of the province (that of Alexander Gaston being at the head). Lydia Cogdell was a person of singular vigor of mind and character, well fitted to encounter the cares and trials of her early widowhood. Her husband had experienced that which has been said to be the common lot of the profession in this country, "to work hard, live well and die poor," and left her with but little fortune to rear three children, of whom George was the eldest and the only son.