Attorney General: James Speed
James Speed was born in Jefferson County near Louisville, Kentucky, on March 11, 1812. He graduated from St. Joseph’s College in Bardstown, studied law at Transylvania University in Lexington, and was admitted to the bar in 1833. He was elected to the state legislature in 1847, and in 1849, ran as a delegate to the state Constitutional Convention but lost. Speed served as a Louisville alderman from 1851 to 1854 and taught law at the University of Louisville from 1856 to 1858 and again from 1872 to 1879.
President Lincoln appointed Speed as Attorney General of the United States on December 2, 1864. He continued in that office under President Andrew Johnson, resigning in July 1866. He was a delegate to the Southern Loyalists’ Convention at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in September 1866 where he served as president of the convention. Speed was also a delegate to the Republican national conventions of 1872 and 1876, serving on the resolutions committee. He died in Jefferson County, Kentucky, on June 25, 1887.
George Peter Alexander Healy was born in Boston in 1813 and began his artistic career at the age of 17. Largely self-taught, he became internationally known and was patronized by the royal families of the United Kingdom and France. From 1840s through the 1860s, Healy filled hundreds of commissions throughout Europe and the United States. He was one of the most successful and prolific portrait painters of the nineteenth century. Healy's portrait of Attorney General Speed was painted in 1865. His career has been the subject of several books, including his own, Reminiscences of a Portrait Painter. Healy died in 1894.