John Breckinridge (2 December 1760 – 14 December 1806) was a US Senator from Kentucky from 4 March 1801 to 7 August 1805 (succeeding Humphrey Marshall and preceding John Adair) and the US Attorney General from 7 August 1805 to 14 December 1806 (succeeding Levi Lincoln Sr. and preceding Caesar Augustus Rodney). He was a Democratic-Republican.
Biography[]
John Breckinridge was born in Augusta County, Virginia in 1760, and he attended William and Mary College from 1780 to 1784; his attendance was interrupted by the American 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, and he established a plantation in Lexington, Kentucky in 1793. From 1795 to 1797, he served as Attorney General of Kentucky, and he was elected to the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1797. As a legislator, he abolished the death penalty for all crimes except for first-degree murder. In 1799, he was elected as a delegate to his state constitutional convention, and the state's government remained comparatively aristocratic, maintaining protections for slavery and limiting the power of the electorate. He emerged from the convention as the head of the state's Democratic-Republican Party, and he served in the US Senate from 1801 to 1805. In 1805, President Thomas Jefferson appointed Breckinridge as his Attorney General, and he was the first cabinet member from the West. However, he had little impact before his death from tuberculosis in 1806.