Shaping the Constitution Biographies
Billy (fl. 1770s–1780s)
Billy was an African American slave born possibly about 1754 and maybe in Richmond County, Virginia. Because he was a slave, we know very little about him, not even if he had a last name. In fact the only reason that anyone knows that Billy existed is because he took part in… more »
Mary Willing Byrd (1740–1814)
Mary Willing Byrd was a wealthy widow during most of the American Revolution. With unwavering determination she protected her husband's estate from plundering troops during the fighting and preserved the inheritance of her numerous children. Willing was born on September 10… more »
Charles Cornwallis, second earl Cornwallis (1738–1805)
Charles Cornwallis was the commanding general of the British forces during the southern campaign of the Revolutionary War and was forced to surrender to American troops at Yorktown on October 19, 1781. This was the last major battle of the Revolutionary War and effectively e… more »
George III (1738–1820)
George III was king of Great Britain from 1760 until his death. He was born on May 24, 1738, in London. His parents were both educated in Germany and spoke German. George, however, was the first Prince of Wales to be born in England in three quarters of a century. While som… more »
William Grayson (1736–1790)
William Grayson was born in Prince William County and was the son of a merchant. Well-educated at what became the University of Pennsylvania and in Great Britain, he began to practice law in the Prince William County town of Dumfries during the winter of 1765–1766, whe… more »
Patrick Henry (1736–1799)
Patrick Henry was a famous lawyer and a fervent patriot. He represented Virginia at the First and Second Continental Congresses, attended four of Virginia's five Revolutionary Conventions, and was the commonwealth of Virginia's first governor. A member of the House of Burges… more »
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the United States of America, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, and the Founding Father most closely associated with promoting the ideals of republicanism in the development of the United States government. … more »
James Lafayette (ca. 1760–1830)
Very little is known about the early life of an enslaved man named James from New Kent County, Virginia. He is believed to have been born between 1748 and 1760, and was owned by William Armistead. In 1781, General George Washington, commander in chief of the Continental army… more »
Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834)
Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette was born on September 6, 1757, in Chavaniac, France, to an aristocratic family. He was orphaned young and inherited a fortune and the title of marquis from his maternal grandfather. He was educated in Paris and was a… more »
Anna Maria Lane (fl. 1776–1807)
Perhaps a native of New Hampshire, Anna Maria Lane followed her husband, John Lane, who enlisted in the Continental army in 1776 and served in the campaigns in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. During the conflict, it was not uncommon for women to work as cook… more »
Richard Henry Lee (1733–1794)
Richard Henry Lee was a prominent Virginia planter and a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses and the Continental Congress. Throughout the American Revolution, Lee played a pivotal role in politics. He introduced the resolution to declare independence from Great Britain… more »
James Madison (1751–1836)
James Madison, Virginia politician, American statesman, and fourth President of the United States, is best remembered as the father of the Constitution of the United States. He was born on March 5, 1751, in Orange County and was educated at the College of New Jersey (its nam… more »
George Mason (1725–1792)
George Mason served in the third, fourth, and fifth Virginia Revolutionary Conventions and prepared the first draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights in May 1776 and the first draft of the first Virginia constitution in June of that year. He was born on December 11, 1725… more »
John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore (ca. 1730–1809)
Born in near Perth, Scotland, John Murray became the fourth earl of Dunmore when his father, William Murray, third earl of Dunmore, died in 1756. While serving in the Third Regiment of Foot Guards, he married Lady Charlotte Stewart, daughter of the sixth earl of Galloway. Th… more »
George Nicholas (ca. 1754–1799)
George Nicholas, born in Williamsburg about 1754, was the son of Robert Carter Nicholas, treasurer of Virginia from 1766 to 1776, and a great grandson of Robert "King" Carter. He attended the College of William and Mary and became a noted attorney. Nicholas was a lieutenant … more »
Edmund Pendleton (1721–1803)
Edmund Pendleton was one of the most accomplished attorneys in Virginia at the time of the American Revolution. Born on September 9, 1721, Pendleton was orphaned in his native Carolina County when he was very young. He grew up as the ward of the county clerk, in whose office… more »
Edmund Randolph (1753–1813)
Edmund Randolph was a man of enormous political and professional achievement. Born in Williamsburg on August 10, 1753, into one of the colony's great political families, Randolph was influenced both by his Loyalist father (John Randolph) and patriot uncle (Peyton Randolph), … more »
Peyton Randolph (ca. 1722–1775)
Peyton Randolph was the son of Sir John Randolph, the only native colonial Virginian ever knighted by a king of England, and Susanna Beverley Randolph, a member of a wealthy Virginia family. He attended the College of William and Mary and spent nearly five years in London st… more »
Adam Stephen (ca. 1721–1791)
Adam Stephen was born in Scotland and became a surgeon in the British Royal Navy. He moved to Virginia in 1748 and practiced medicine in Fredericksburg and later acquired a plantation north of Winchester on what was then the frontier and is now Jefferson County, West Virgini… more »
George Washington (1732–1799)
George Washington was born on February 22, 1732, in Westmoreland County, Virginia. When he was just eleven years old, in 1743, his father, Augustine Washington, died. His share of the estate did not leave him with enough resources to continue a life among Virginia's gentry, … more »
William Woodford (1734–1780)
William Woodford was a Revolutionary War general from Caroline County. The son of William Woodford Sr. and Anne Cocke, daughter of William Cocke, secretary of the Virginia colony, he grew up on his father's plantation, Windsor, ten miles outside of Fredericksburg on the Rapp… more »
George Wythe (ca. 1726–1806)
George Wythe taught law to Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and Henry Clay, twice served as acting attorney general of the colony. He was a member of and clerk of the House of Burgesses and, after July 1776, a member of the House of Delegates. He signed the Declaration of In… more »
William Breedlove (ca. 1820–1871)
William Breedlove was a free African American who served as a member of the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1867–1868. Breedlove was born in Essex County, the son of James Davis, a white man, and Polly Breedlove, a free African American. While little is known of … more »
Henry Box Brown (1815 or 1816–after 1878)
Henry Box Brown, one of the most famous fugitives from slavery, was also an antislavery speaker, author, and performer. He was born into slavery as Henry Brown in 1815 or 1816 on the Louisa County plantation of John Barret, a former mayor of Richmond. As a teenager, Brown wa… more »
Gabriel (1776–1800)
Gabriel, an enslaved African American man, was born in 1776 probably in Henrico County on the Brookfield plantation of his master, Thomas Prosser. During his life Gabriel did not use the surname Prosser although later historians have referred to him as Gabriel Prosser. His p… more »
Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky. His parents were farmers. The family moved to Indiana in 1816 and Lincoln's mother died in 1818. Lincoln received little schooling during his childhood, but, as a teenager, he borrowed … more »
Joseph Jenkins Roberts (1809–1876)
Joseph Jenkins Roberts was born a free man in Norfolk, Virginia, on March 15, 1809, at a time when most African Americans in Virginia were slaves. He grew up in Norfolk and Petersburg and worked with his stepfather on a flatboat on the James River. He gained his early educat… more »
Nat Turner (1800–1831)
Little is known for certain about Nat Turner's life. He was born probably on October 2, 1800. Nat Turner's mother, who may been born in Africa, was owned by Benjamin Turner of Southampton County, from whom Nat Turner probably took his surname. The identity of Turner's father… more »
Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
Susan Brownell Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts. She was educated at a Quaker school near Philadelphia but had to leave before finishing the coursework to help support her family in New York. She taught for the next decade, an experience which l… more »
Sojourner Truth (1797–1883)
Noted abolitionist, woman's rights advocate, and religious leader, Sojourner Truth was born in Ulster County, New York, as Isabella Baumfree to enslaved parents. Freed in 1827 and the mother of five children, she moved in 1829 to New York City and became associated with a re… more »
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
Elizabeth Cady was born on November 12, 1815, in Johnstown, New York. Her family was well-to-do and her father was a notable lawyer and politician. She received an unusually rigorous education for a woman in the nineteenth century and learned much about the law at home in co… more »
Lucretia Mott (1793–1880)
Lucretia Coffin was born on January 3, 1793, in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Her family's membership in the Society of Friends (Quakers) was an important influence on her life. She adhered to the church's teachings of equality of all people, leading her to become an advocate fo… more »
Anna Whitehead Bodeker (1827–1904)
Born Anna Whitehead in New Jersey in 1827, she was married at age eighteen to Augustus Bodeker, a German immigrant who worked as a clerk and druggist in Richmond. They had three children and remained in Richmond during the Civil War. Inspired by her reading of newspapers and… more »
Lila Meade Valentine (1865–1921)
Lila Hardaway Meade was born on February 4, 1865, to a well-to-do family in Richmond. Her parents were Richard Hardaway Meade and Jane Catherine Fontaine Meade. While she received the formal education that was standard for a woman of her class, she read avidly and wanted to … more »
Pauline Adams (1874–1957)
Born in Dublin, Ireland, on June 29, 1874, suffragist and local activist Pauline Forstall Colclough Adams was living in Brunswick County, North Carolina, by 1898, when she married Norfolk physician Walter J. Adams. They lived in Norfolk, where he established a medical practi… more »
Elizabeth Bermingham Lacy (1945–)
A pioneer in the legal profession in Virginia, Elizabeth Bermingham Lacy holds the distinction of being the first female deputy attorney general in the state, the first female judge on the State Corporation Commission, and the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court of Virgi… more »
Mary Sue Terry (1947– )
Born in Martinsville on September 28, 1947, Mary Sue Terry received her undergraduate degree from Westhampton College and a master's degree and a law degree from the University of Virginia. After serving for four years as an assistant commonwealth's attorney in Patrick Count… more »
Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954)
Mary Eliza Church was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on September 23, 1863. Her father, Robert Reed Church, was a formerly enslaved businessman who became the first African American millionaire in the South, and her mother, Louisa Ayres, was a hair dresser. She received an exce… more »
Maggie Lena Walker (1864–1934)
Maggie Lena Walker was born in 1864 in Richmond, Virginia. Her mother, Elizabeth Draper, worked for many years as a laundress and may have been enslaved when her daughter was born. Her father was an Irish journalist. As a young girl she lived with her mother, stepfather, and… more »