Peyton Randolph

Peyton Randolph, attorney general of the Virginia colony, speaker of the House of Burgesses, and chairman of the First and Second Continental Congress, sits for a portrait by English-born artist John Wollaston. Although Silas Deane, a Connecticut delegate to the Continental Congress, made note of Randolph's "majestic deportment," and "noble appearance," Randolph's cousin Thomas Jefferson had a less sanguine opinion. "He was indeed a most excellent man," Jefferson said, but he was "heavy and inert in body … [and] rather too indolent and careless for business."