Attorney General: Hugh S. Legaré
Hugh Swinton Legaré was born near Charleston, South Carolina, on January 2, 1797. He graduated from South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina) in 1814. For the next three years he studied law, then travelled in Europe, studying French in Paris and Roman law, philosophy, mathematics, and chemistry in Edinburgh. Upon his return to South Carolina in 1820, he was admitted to the bar and elected to the state legislature. Legaré served until 1822 and from 1824 to 1830 when he was elected state attorney general. In 1832, he was Chargé d’Affaires at Brussels. Upon his return to the United States, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He served from 1837 until 1839.
President John Tyler appointed him Attorney General of the United States in September 1841. He died in Boston, Massachusetts, on June 20, 1843, while attending ceremonies marking the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill.
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 Legaré was copied from a painting by E.D. Marchant in 1858. Stanley died in 1872.