Nicholas Trist

Portrait of Nicholas Trist by John Neagle in 1835. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

Nicholas Philip Trist (June 2, 1800 – February 11, 1874) was a famous diplomat who was originally from Charlottesville. He negotiated the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 at the end of the Mexican–American War, greatly expanding the size of the continental United States.

Trist was married to Virginia Jefferson Randolph (Thomas Jefferson's granddaughter) and served as a personal secretary to both Jefferson and President Andrew Jackson in the 1820's. He also served as clerk to the University of Virginia's Board of Visitors and was an owner of the Virginia Advocate newspaper before being appointed as American consul in Spanish-controlled Havana, Cuba in 1833. Trist held this post for multiple years until being recalled in the 1840's and assigned by President James K. Polk to discreetly negotiate a peace treaty with the Second Federal Republic of Mexico.