Francis Taliaferro Brooke (1763–1851), attorney and public official, was a native of Spotsylvania County. After attending several local schools, Brooke served in the Continental army as an artillery lieutenant, 1781–83. He studied law under his brother Robert Brooke, passed the bar in 1788, and was a district attorney in the counties of Monongalia and Harrison (later West Virginia). Brooke represented Essex County in the House of Delegates, 1794–95, and the counties of Culpeper, Madison, Orange, and Spotsylvania in the state senate, 1800–04, including service as Speaker, 1802–04. He was appointed a major in the militia in 1796, lieutenant colonel in 1800, and brigadier general in 1802. Brooke was a judge of the General Court, 1804–11. In the latter year he was elected to the state’s highest tribunal, the Court of Appeals, serving as its president from 1824 to 1830. Under the new state constitution of 1830, Brooke returned to the renamed Supreme Court of Appeals in 1831 and remained on the bench until his death. He maintained a decades-long personal and political connection with Henry Clay. A member of the Society of the Cincinnati, Brooke served as the state chapter’s vice president from 1816 until it disbanded in 1824. In a memoir he published late in life, he recalled TJ as “a man of easy, and ingratiating manners,” who “never would discuss any proposition if you differed with him, for he said he thought discussion rather rivetted opinions than changed them” (DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 1928–36, 20 vols. description ends ; DVB description begins John T. Kneebone, Sara B. Bearss, and others, eds., Dictionary of Virginia Biography, 1998– , 3 vols. description ends ; Brooke, A Narrative of My Life; for My Family [1849], esp. 87–8; PTJ description begins Julian P. Boyd, Charles T. Cullen, John Catanzariti, Barbara B. Oberg, and others, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 1950– , 41 vols. description ends , 39:195; Heitman, Continental Army description begins Francis B. Heitman, comp., Historical Register of Officers of the Continental Army during the War of the Revolution, April, 1775, to December, 1783, rev. ed., 1914 description ends , 122; Leonard, General Assembly description begins Cynthia Miller Leonard, comp., The General Assembly of Virginia, July 30, 1619–January 11, 1978: A Bicentennial Register of Members, 1978 description ends ; Clay, Papers description begins James F. Hopkins and others, eds., The Papers of Henry Clay, 1959–92, 11 vols. description ends ; Proceedings of the Virginia State Society of the Cincinnati from the 6th of October, 1783, to the Disbanding of the Society on October 13th, 1824 [1896], 85, 111; Richmond Enquirer, 11 Mar. 1851).