Attorney General: Amos T. Akerman
Amos Tappan Akerman was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on February 23, 1821. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 1842. Relocating to the southern United States, he taught school in North Carolina and Georgia and served from 1846 to 1848 as tutor in the Savannah home of U.S. Senator and former Attorney General John M. Berrien. Akerman read law, and in 1850, was admitted to the bar. He moved his law practice to Elberton, Georgia, in 1856. In 1863, Akerman joined the Georgia State Guard and served intermittently until the end of the Civil War as an ordnance officer and quartermaster. He was elected to the Georgia Constitutional Convention of 1867–1868 and was a presidential elector in 1868. In 1869, Akerman was appointed U.S. Attorney for the District of Georgia by President Ulysses S. Grant.
President Grant appointed Akerman as Attorney General of the United States on June 23, 1870. He was the first Attorney General to serve as head of the newly-created Department of Justice, an office he held until January 1872 when he resumed the private practice of law in Georgia. Akerman died in Cartersville, Georgia, on December 21, 1880.
Freeman Thorp was born in Ohio in 1844 and served in the 2nd Ohio Cavalry during the American Civil War. In 1870, at the age of 26, he became an honorary member of the Berlin Society of Artists. The next year, Thorp began using a small loft in the U.S. Capitol dome as a portrait studio. He painted many presidents, cabinet officials, congressmen, governors, and military leaders. One of his portraits of President Abraham Lincoln, made from earlier sketches, was purchased in 1920 for exhibition in the U.S. Capitol. Thorp's portrait of Attorney General Akerman was painted in 1875. Thorp died in 1922.