Captain George Graham (May 16, 1770 – August 9, 1830), a Virginia planter, lawyer, soldier and politician became an early federal government bureaucrat. He twice served as acting United States Secretary of War, including during the transition between the administrations of Presidents James Madison and James Monroe (1816-1817), as well as Commissioner of the General Land Office (1823-1830) under Presidents John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Early and family life George Graham was the eldest son of the former Jane Brent, and her merchant husband Richard Graham, and born on Mary 17,1770 near Dumfries in Prince William County, Virginia. He would have two brother—John and Richard—and a sister Catherine. The Brent family had emigrated to Maryland more than a century earlier to avoid persecution based on their Roman Catholic religion, and moved to Virginia to avoid political problems with the Maryland establishment, despite Roman Catholic religious practices being illegal in Virginia at the time. They operated plantations using enslaved labor. In fact, fellow northern Virginia planters tolerated the Brent family's quiet religious practices, and both his great-grandfather William Brent and his great uncle Richard Brent would win election to the Virginia House of Delegates (and Richard Brent to the U.S. House of Representatives after the American Revolutionary War). Furthermore, local Anglican clergymen officiated at the marriages both of Sarah Brent and earlier her sister Jane Brent (both daughters of Richard Brent's brother, planter/lawyer George Brent). George and John Graham inherited slaves from their maternal grandfather, as their father recited in his will. The Graham family was also respectable, although not of top rank among the First Families of Virginia, in part because Richard Graham and his brother Reginald (and Edward, who soon returned) had emigrated from Cumberland county in northern England circa 1755. Richard's father, also Richard Graham, was the third son of Reginald Graham, third baronet of Norton-Conyers, and every generation of the family would use the names Richard and George. His father Richard Graham had helped found the town of Dumfries and became a prominent local patriot in the American Revolutionary War, one of the four member delegation that requested George Washington take command of the local Independent Militia in 1774, then one of three local militia captains serving under Col. William Grayson as well as serving as a member of the local Committee of Public Safety (alongside William and Hugh Brent and others). In 1783, Richard Graham