Attorney General: Edmund J. Randolph
Edmund Jennings Randolph was born in Williamsburg, Virginia, on August 10, 1753. He attended the College of William and Mary and read law in the office of his father, who was the King’s attorney in the Virginia colony. A strong supporter of the revolutionaries’ cause, Randolph joined the Continental Army in 1775 and served briefly as an aide-de-camp to General George Washington, its commander-in-chief. He was elected to the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1776 in the spring of that year and served on the prestigious committee that drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the state constitution. Appointed the commonwealth’s first attorney general in November 1776, he continued in that post while serving on two occasions (1779 and 1781) as a delegate in the Second Continental Congress. Elected Governor of Virginia in 1786, Randolph led its delegation to the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia the following year. He resigned the governorship in 1788 to serve in the Virginia House of Delegates.
President George Washington appointed Randolph to the newly created post of Attorney General of the United States on September 26, 1789. Randolph served as Attorney General until January 1794 when he succeeded Thomas Jefferson as Secretary of State, a position he would hold until August 1795. Randolph died on September 12, 1813, in Clarke County, Virginia.
Born in western New York in 1814, John Mix Stanley became a portrait and landscape painter that specialized in scenes of Native American life. He deposited his "Indian Gallery" of 152 paintings with the federal government, intending to sell then, in 1852. While the U.S. Congress declined to purchase his canvases, they remained in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., for several years. Much of his collection was destroyed by a fire at the Smithsonian in 1865. Stanley painted Attorney General Randolph's portrait from a family portrait in 1856. Stanley died in 1872.