Attorney General: William Pinkney
William Pinkney was born in Annapolis, Maryland, on March 17, 1764. He studied law in the office of Samuel Chase in Baltimore and was admitted to the Maryland bar in 1786. In 1788, he was a member of the Maryland Constitutional Convention that ratified the federal constitution. He served in the Maryland House of Delegates from 1788 to 1792 and in the state’s executive council from 1792 to 1795. In 1796, Pinkney served as a commissioner under Jay’s Treaty to settle U.S. claims against Great Britain. He returned home in 1804, served as Maryland’s attorney general in 1805 and 1806, and was admitted to the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court on February 8, 1806. He traveled to Britain again in 1806 with James Monroe on a similar mission. Pinkney returned to the United States in 1811, settled in Baltimore, and was elected to the Maryland Senate.
On December 11, 1811, President James Madison appointed Pinkney as Attorney General of the United States. He served in that office until February 10, 1814. Serving as a major in the Maryland militia during the War of 1812, Pinkney was wounded while commanding a battalion of Baltimore militia during the Battle of Bladensburg on August 24, 1814. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1815 to 1816. From 1816 until 1818, he was Minister Plenipotentiary to Russia and Envoy to Naples. On his return in 1819, he was elected to the U.S. Senate. Pinkney died in office on February 25, 1822, in Washington, D.C.
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 Pinkney was copied from a portrait by Charles Willson Peale in 1856. Stanley died in 1872.