50. United States Attorney General John Nelson(28) was born in 1794 in Frederick, Maryland. He died on Jan 18 1860 in Baltimore, Maryland. John Nelson was elected to Congress from Frederick County, Maryland, at the age of twenty-five (the constitutional minimum) and after serving a term he moved to Baltimore and lived there the rest of his life. In the words of T. J. C. Williams in his History of Frederick County, Maryland, "In Baltimore he soon established himself as a great lawyer--one of the greatest that the Maryland bar has ever produced. He was always brief and clear in his statements scarcely ever making a speech longer than half an hour."
In 1835 he was appointed by President Andrew Jackson as Minister to the Kingdom of Naples.
In 1843 he was named United States Attorney General by President John Tyler and served until the end of Tyler's term in 1845. He served briefly as ad interim Secretary of State, a position that put him next in sucession to the President, under the law then in effect, as there was no sitting vice president.
He died at his home on Mt. Vernon Place, Baltimore.
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28. T. J. C. Williams. History of Frederick County, Maryland. Regional Publishing Company
Baltimore, Maryland, 1967 (a reprint of the 1910 original).
