Attorney General: Caesar A. Rodney
Caesar Augustus Rodney was born in Dover, Delaware, on January 4, 1772. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1789, he studied law in Philadelphia and was admitted to the bar in 1793. He practiced law in Wilmington and New Castle for the next several years. In 1796, Rodney entered the Delaware House of Representatives, where he ultimately served six successive one-year terms. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1803 to 1805.
President Thomas Jefferson appointed Rodney as Attorney General of the United States in January 1807. He continued in that post during President James Madison’s administration, resigning in December 1811. During the War of 1812, he joined a volunteer militia company and was later commissioned a major. In 1814, Rodney won election to a three-year term in the Delaware Senate. He traveled to South America in 1817 and 1818 for the South American Commission, as one of three U.S. commissioners to assess the state of the new governments there. From 1821 to 1822, he was again a Representative in the U.S. Congress from Delaware, and from 1822 to 1823 served as a U.S. Senator. Rodney was appointed U.S. Minister to the Argentine Republic in 1823, where he died on June 10, 1824.
A native of Mercer, Pennsylvania, Samuel Bell Waugh was born in 1810. Waugh travelled in France and Great Britain and spent eight years in Italy studying the Old Masters. He is best known for his landscapes, particularly panoramas, of Italy. Most of his later life was spent in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Waugh's portrait of Attorney General Rodney was painted, after an original by Bass Otis, in 1870. Waugh died in 1885.