Never let it be said that we can’t find the less-obvious folks in American History. Thomas Bayly was definitely one of them.

Bayly was a one-term congressman to the US House of Representatives as part of the 13^th Congress (as this is written, we’re in the 118^th). By most accounts he wasn’t especially distinguished, but only serving for the one term didn’t mean that he was politically finished. A few years after he left Congress, he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, and he was part of the Virginia Constitutional Convention.

Bayly was “minor” enough in history that we were only able to find a single image of him—the one in the cover artwork. And it’s actually a black-and-white rendering of a color painting that’s been zoomed in to the point where you can see the texture on the canvas. It’s a detail from a painting of the entire House of Delegates around 1820.