Attorney General: Charles Lee
Charles Lee was born in Leesylvania, Virginia, in 1758. He received his bachelor’s degree from the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1775 and studied law with Jared Ingersoll in Philadelphia before returning to Virginia. Lee was licensed to practice law at the Virginia bar in 1781, beginning his profession in the local county courts of northern Virginia. He also served as a district naval officer (1779 -1789) and customs collector of the port of Alexandria (1789 -1793). In early 1793, he resigned his federal post to devote more attention to his law practice in partnership with Edmund Jennings Lee, his younger brother. That same year he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, where he served for two sessions.
Lee was appointed Attorney General of the United States by President George Washington in December 1795. He continued in that office under President John Adams, serving until March 1801. Returning to private practice, he took up several notable cases, including Marbury v. Madison (1803), in which he represented William Marbury against the United States. Lee died in Fauquier County, Virginia, June 24, 1815.
Cephas Giovanni Thompson was born in 1775 and is known as one of the most prolific portrait painters of the early nineteenth-century United States. A native of Middleboro, Massachusetts, he received little to no formal training and did not apprentice with an established American artist. Thompson worked chiefly as an itinerant artist, with much of his time spent in the mid-Atlantic and southern states of the eastern seaboard. It is thought that the Justice Department painting is a copy of Thompson's original portrait. Thompson died in 1856.