Philip Norborne Nicholas was born in 1775 in Williamsburg, Virginia, United States. He was a brother of George, John, and Wilson Cary Nicholas and the youngest son of Robert Carter and Anne (Cary) Nicholas. He was named for Norborne Berkeley, Lord Botetourt, the governor of the Province.
Nicholas attended the College of William and Mary. He studied law.
In 1800 Nicholas became attorney-general of Virginia. In 1804 he was made a director of the first bank to be established in Richmond, and for years was president of the Farmer's Bank of that city. In 1817 he was made a director of the Richmond branch of the Bank of the United States, of which institution his brother Wilson Cary was for a short while president. In 1823 he was made judge of the General Court of Virginia and retained this position until his death in 1849. These activities stamp him as a substantial citizen rather than as a man of action and ideas.
He spent his entire active life in Richmond, establishing his home on Shockoe Hill where John Marshall and other notable citizens had their residences. He was appointed on civic committees and presided over civic rites on important occasions when internal improvements were to be considered or when the death of a Jefferson or a Monroe was to be mourned.
As early as 1800 he consulted with Jefferson on tactical political moves, and doubtless worked in concert with his brothers, George and Wilson Cary, for the promotion of the Jeffersonian cause in Virginia. He apparently devoted his time to his banking interests during the long rule of the Virginia Dynasty, but when this period came to an end, his noted brothers were dead, and he carried on the tradition of the family by taking a powerful, though quiet, part in the political transition that followed.
Now a thorough-going Jackson man, Nicholas wrote articles condemning nullification, and he appeared against Lieutenant R. B. Randolph in the case of the personal attack upon Jackson by that young hot-spur. Though opposed to the sub-treasury, as a banker should have been, Nicholas remained faithful to Van Buren, as did his associates of the Junta. It was, in fact, in collaboration with Van Buren that the Virginia group had made the transition from the Crawford to the Jackson camp.
On one of the very few occasions when Nicholas became a candidate for office, he was elected a member of the convention which framed Virginia's second constitution in 1829.
Though never a great political figure, he yet took a very active part in politics and was one of the guiding forces in the establishment of the Jacksonian party in Virginia.
Like most of the state-rights men of the Jeffersonian school in Virginia, he supported William H. Crawford for the presidency in 1824, but on Crawford's failure, he and Thomas Ritchie, of the Richmond Enquirer, along with certain others who came to be known as the "Richmond Junta, " decided to throw their support to Andrew Jackson. They carried their state for him and continued to control it in his interest.
Nicholas was married twice: his first wife was Mary Spear of Baltimore, and his second, Maria Carter Byrd, of Clark County.
