Charles Jared Ingersoll was born in Philadelphia on 3 October 1782. Following his admission to the bar as a teenager, he published poetry, wrote a play, and produced two widely-read pamphlets. A Jeffersonian Republican and Jacksonian Democrat, Ingersoll served as a U.S. representative (1813–15, 1841–49), U.S. district attorney for Pennsylvania (1815–29), and state legislator. In later years, he published a four-volume history of the War of 1812 and a memoir. Ingersoll and his wife Mary Wilcocks (1784–1862, m. 1804) had nine children. He died in Philadelphia on 14 May 1862.