George Wythe was born on this day in history on a plantation in what is now Hampton, Virginia.
Wythe was admitted to the bar in 1746, and then moved to Spotsylvania County in Virginia to begin legal practice. He married the daughter of his mentor, Zachary Lewis, but she died only eight months later. Wythe then moved to Williamsburg and began a distinguished career in education and public service.
Wythe served as a judge for much of his life, first as a justice of the peace and then on the Virginia Court of Chancery. He was hired as the first law professor at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg in 1779.
At William & Mary, Wythe introduced a lecture system based on the Commentaries published by William Blackstone, as well as Matthew Bacon’s New Abridgement of the Law, and Acts of Virginia’s Assembly. Wythe also developed experiential tools, including moot courts and mock legislative sessions, tools that are still used today. However, apprenticeship remained the main mode of learning law in that era, followed by examination before several practicing lawyers.
For more than twenty years, Wythe mentored many legal apprentices, as well as teaching students at the college. Among his most famous students were future presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe; future senators Henry Clay, Littleton Waller Tazewell and John Breckinridge; future Virginia judges St. George Tucker and Spencer Roane; future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall; and future Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Bushrod Washington.
Of all these men, Wythe remained closest to Jefferson, with whom he worked and corresponded many times in the ensuing decades.
From Paris in 1788 Thomas Jefferson wrote about what he thought about Wythe as a teacher:
He is one of the greatest men of the age, having held without competition the first place at the bar of our general court for 25. years, and always distinguished by the most spotless virtue. He gives lectures regularly, and holds moot courts and parliaments wherein he presides and the young men debate regularly in law, and legislation, learn the rules of parliamentary proceeding, and acquire the habit of public speaking. Williamsburg is a remarkeably healthy situation, reasonably cheap, and affords very genteel society. I know no place in the world, while the present professors remain, where I would so soon place a son.”
Portrait of George Wythe by David Silvette (1979). At the William & Mary School of Law, via Wikipedia
Wythe served as one of Virginia’s representatives to the Continental Congress and the Philadelphia Convention and was the first of the seven Virginia signatories of the Declaration of Independence. He left the convention before signing the Constitution to tend to his dying wife. He was elected to the Virginia Ratifying Convention and helped ensure that his home state ratified the Constitution.
Wythe became increasingly troubled by slavery in his later years. He emancipated four of his slaves before his death. After Wythe’s death by apparent poisoning in 1806, his grand-nephew was tried and acquitted for Wythe’s murder. George Wythe Sweeney had come to live with Wythe but it was not a happy relationship. In April, 1806, Sweeney forged his granduncle’s name of six checks drawn on the Bank of Virginia, probably to cover gambling or other debts. During the preceding year, Sweeney had taken some books from Wythe’s library trying to sell them at public auction. He was also suspected of having disposed of a terrestrial globe that Wythe had intended to bequeath to Jefferson.
Sweeney, hoping to have his monetary problems solved when he inherited his grand-uncle’s fortune, was dismayed to discover that Wythe revised his will in early 1806, leaving some of his estate to a mixed-race youth, Michael Brown, who also lived in Wythe’s household, and to another adult slave, Benjamin, who had worked as Wythe’s servant.
Sometime late in May, 1806, Sweeney procured what must have been a considerable quantity of yellow arsenic, much of which was later found in his room.
On Sunday morning, May 25, Wythe, Brown, and Lydia Broadnax, one of Wythe’s manumitted slaves who now worked as his cook, all became violently ill. Wythe claimed they had been poisoned. Sweeney was the only person in the household who escaped poisoning. Two days later, Sweeney tried to cash a $100 check drawn on Wythe’s account, which the bank found suspicious because Wythe’s illness had become news throughout the city. The bank retrieved several earlier checks, which Wythe had previously denied signing. Gravely ill but still trying to work on legal matters, Wythe refused to post bail for Sweeney, who was jailed. Upon hearing that Brown had died on June 1, Wythe signed a codicil to his will drafted by Edmund Randolph that disinherited George Sweeney. Wythe succumbed on June 8.
Broadnax recovered, although she suffered ill effects for the rest of her life. Broadnax told many people that she had seen Sweeney read the revised will, and she had also seen Sweeney put a powder in their morning coffee. Other black witnesses saw Sweeney dispose of paper from the jail, which appeared to contain rat poison. However, both trial judges agreed that Virginia race laws prohibited Blacks from testifying at the trial.
Sweeney was in fact charged with poisoning Wythe and Brown with arsenic, however, but to no effect. Early on, the judges quashed the murder charge relating to Brown, because of his race. Prominent attorneys William Wirt and Edmund Randolph defended Sweeney. A jury acquitted Sweeney of Wythe’s murder in part because of a botched investigation and the lack of “eligible” witnesses.
In a separate trial for check forgery, Sweeney was convicted. However, that conviction was overruled on appeal based on a technicality in the forgery law that Wythe and Jefferson had drafted years earlier (recognizing the crime only against individual victims, not against corporations such as the bank). Sweeney left for Tennessee. There, he reportedly was later convicted and jailed for stealing a horse. Afterward he disappeared in history.
Legal Legacy 
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