Attorney General: John J. Crittenden
John Jordan Crittenden was born in Woodford County, Kentucky, on September 10, 1787. He graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1807, studied law under George M. Bibb, and was admitted to the bar. Crittenden was attorney general of the Illinois Territory from 1809 to 1810. In 1811, he was elected to the Kentucky legislature, where he eventually served six consecutive terms. During the War of 1812, he served on the staffs of General Sam Hopkins and Governor Isaac Shelby, commander of Kentucky forces. In 1817, he was appointed to fill a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate, where he served for the next two years. Crittenden was appointed a U.S. Attorney by President John Quincy Adams in 1827 but was removed by President Andrew Jackson in 1829. He was reelected to the U.S. Senate in 1835.
At the expiration of his term on March 5, 1841, Crittenden was appointed Attorney General of the United States by President William Henry Harrison. He held that office until resigning on September 13, 1841, at the start of John Tyler’s presidency. Crittenden was appointed U.S. Senator in 1842 to complete the unexpired term of Henry Clay. He was reelected at the conclusion of the term, then resigned from the Senate and was elected Governor of Kentucky in 1848. On July 22, 1850, President Millard Fillmore appointed Crittenden as Attorney General of the United States, the first time a former Attorney General was reappointed to a second non-consecutive term. In 1854, he was again elected Senator, and on the expiration of his term was elected to the House of Representatives. He died near Frankfort, Kentucky, on July 26, 1863.
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 Crittenden in 1856. Stanley died in 1872.