Attorney General: Benjamin F. Butler
Benjamin Franklin Butler was born in Kinderhook Landing, New York, on December 14, 1795. He studied at the Academy in Hudson, New York, read law with Martin Van Buren, and when admitted to the bar in 1817 became his partner. Butler was district attorney of Albany County from 1821 to 1824. He was appointed one of three commissioners to revise the New York state statutes in 1825. Butler was a member of the state legislature from 1827 to 1833, and a member of the Board of Regents of the State University of New York from 1829 to 1832. In 1833, he served as commissioner for the State of New York to adjust the New Jersey boundary line.
Butler was appointed Attorney General of the United States by President Andrew Jackson in November 1833, though the Senate delayed his confirmation until June 1834, when he was formally sworn in to the position, which he held until 1838. From 1838 to 1841, and from 1845 to 1848, Butler was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. During the final decade of his life, he operated a successful law practice in New York City. He died in Paris, France, on November 8, 1858.
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 them, 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's portrait of Attorney General Butler was copied from an earlier portrait by Charles Bird King. Stanley died in 1872.