Attorney General: Edwin M. Stanton
Edwin McMasters Stanton was born in Steubenville, Ohio, on December 19, 1814. He attended Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, studied law in the office of his guardian Daniel L. Collier, and commenced practice in Cadiz, Ohio. Stanton served from 1837 to 1839 as prosecuting attorney of Harrison County. From 1842 to 1845, he served as recorder of the Ohio Supreme Court in Columbus. He relocated to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1847, and from 1850 to 1851, he represented the state of Pennsylvania before the U.S. Supreme Court in a suit against a Virginia company. In 1857, Attorney General Jeremiah S. Black appointed him special counsel on disputed California land grant cases.
On December 20, 1860, Stanton was appointed Attorney General of the United States by President James Buchanan. He held that office until March 3, 1861. President Abraham Lincoln appointed him Secretary of War on January 14, 1862. Stanton remained in that position until August 1867, when he was suspended from office by the President. He was reinstated in January 1868 by order of the Senate. In February 1868, President Johnson made a second effort to remove him, but he continued in office until May of that year. In 1869, President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Stanton to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. His appointment was confirmed by the Senate on December 20, 1869, but he died four days later in Washington, D.C., before he could assume office.
Francis Bicknell Carpenter was born in Homer, New York, in 1830. He spent most of his career in New York with professional visits to Washington, D.C., in the 1850s and 1860s. His portrait of Attorney General Stanton was painted in March 1865. Probably his most famous work, First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln, hangs today in the U.S. Capitol. Carpenter died in New York City in 1900.