John Breckinridge (U.S. Attorney General), Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

John Breckinridge (U.S. Attorney General)

American politician

Date of Birth: 02-Dec-1760

Place of Birth: Staunton, Virginia, United States

Date of Death: 14-Dec-1806

Profession: lawyer, politician

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Sagittarius


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About John Breckinridge (U.S. Attorney General)

  • John Breckinridge (December 2, 1760 – December 14, 1806) was a lawyer and politician from the U.S.
  • state of Virginia.
  • He served in the state legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky before being elected to the U.S.
  • Senate and appointed United States Attorney General during the second term of President Thomas Jefferson.
  • He is the progenitor of Kentucky's Breckinridge political family and the namesake of Breckinridge County, Kentucky. Breckinridge's father was a local politician, and his mother was a member of the Preston political family.
  • Breckinridge attended the William and Mary College intermittently between 1780 and 1784; his attendance was interrupted by the Revolutionary War and his election to the Virginia House of Delegates.
  • One of the youngest members of that body, his political activities acquainted him with many prominent politicians.
  • In 1785, he married "Polly" Cabell, a member of the Cabell political family.
  • Despite making a comfortable living through a combination of legal and agricultural endeavors, letters from relatives in Kentucky convinced him to move to the western frontier.
  • He established "Cabell's Dale", his plantation, near Lexington, Kentucky, in 1793. Breckinridge was appointed as the state's attorney general soon after arriving.
  • In November 1797, he resigned and was elected to the Kentucky House of Representatives the next month.
  • As a legislator, he secured passage of a more humane criminal code that abolished the death penalty for all offenses except first-degree murder.
  • On a 1798 trip to Virginia, an intermediary gave him Thomas Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions, which denounced the Alien and Sedition Acts.
  • At Jefferson's request, Breckinridge assumed credit for the modified resolutions he shepherded through the Kentucky General Assembly; Jefferson's authorship was not discovered until after Breckinridge's death.
  • He opposed calling a state constitutional convention in 1799 but was elected as a delegate.
  • Due to his influence, the state's government remained comparatively aristocratic, maintaining protections for slavery and limiting the power of the electorate.
  • Called the father of the resultant constitution, he emerged from the convention as the acknowledged leader of the state's Democratic-Republican Party and was elected Speaker of the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1799 and 1800. Elected to the U.S.
  • Senate in 1800, Breckinridge functioned as Jefferson's floor leader, guiding administration bills through the chamber that was narrowly controlled by his party.
  • Residents of the western frontier called for his nomination as vice president in 1804, but Jefferson appointed him as U.S.
  • Attorney General in 1805 instead.
  • He was the first cabinet-level official from the West but had little impact before his death from tuberculosis on December 14, 1806.

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