Edmund Randolph was a lawyer, statesman, and political figure in colonial America who was instrumental in the ratification of the Constitution and the country's first Attorney General.

Randolph was born on Aug. 10, 1753, in Tazewell Hall, Williamsburg, Va. He grew up having a private tutor and later attended the College of William and Mary. He followed that up with a study of the law under his father, John, and his uncle Peyton. He passed the bar in Virginia and began practicing law in Williamsburg.

John Randolph was a Loyalist who went with Lord Dunmore, the royal governor, to England in 1775, after the Revolutionary War began. Edmund joined the colonial cause and lived with his uncle, Peyton Randolph, who was well-known in the Virginia political realm.

Edmund Randolph served as an aide-de-camp to General George Washington during the first part of the war. In 1776, Randolph, age 23, was the youngest member of the Virginia state constitutional convention. Also in that year, he married Elizabeth Nicholas; they had six children.

Randolph chose politics as a career. He won election as mayor of Williamsburg and was appointed attorney general of Virginia. He was elected governor of Virginia in 1786 (after which he handed over his law practice to his partner, future Chief Justice of the United States John Marshall,) and was also a delegate to the Annapolis Convention, a precursor to the Constitutional Convention. (He had earlier been a delegate to the Continental Congress.)

At the Constitutional Convention, on May 29, 1787, Randolph introduced the Virginia Plan, a blueprint for the new national government that the delegates had identified the need for, to replace the Articles of Confederation. He was on the Committee of Detail, which created the first draft of the new governmental blueprint. The Virginia Plan survived, in large part, as the framework of the Constitution, although the Virginia Plan called for members of both houses of Congress to be determined based on population. Another key difference was the Convention's implementation of one person, the President, at the head of the Executive Branch. Randolph thought that that branch of government should be headed by a committee of three because, with the example of King George III fresh in everyone's memory, he distrusted a strong central executive. He also thought that the federal judiciary would be too much of a check on state courts. In fact, he was distrustful of Congress's power as well. As a result, Randolph refused to sign the Constitution. He changed his mind, however, with the addition of the Bill of Rights, the embodiment of the idea of amendments to the Constitution. With this provision adopted, Randolph was happy to work hard in order to convince the people of Virginia to ratify the Constitution, which they did on June 26, 1788.

Randolph served as the new country's first Attorney General, in a Cabinet that initially had only three other members, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of War Henry Knox, and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. When Jefferson resigned as Secretary of State, Randolph served in that capacity, in 1794–1795. He presided over a few significant achievements, helping bring about the Treaty of San Lorenzo, a 1795 agreement with Spain that allowed American navigation of the Mississippi River.

Stung by a scandal in which he was found to be revealing confidential Cabinet discussions to France, he retired from politics and returned to his law practice. He also wrote a history of his home state.

His last high-profile role was a senior counsel to Aaron Burr, who went on trial for treason in 1807.

Randolph's wife died in 1810. He died on Sept. 2, 1813.