George Wythe

(1726-1806)

BIRTH

1726

PLACE

Chesterville, Virginia

DEATH

June 8, 1806

PLACE

Richmond, Virginia

FAMILY

FATHER

Thomas Wythe III

(c. 1691–1729)

WIFE

Ann Lewis Wythe

(1726-1748)

WIFE

Elizabeth Taliaferro Wythe

(c. 1739-1787)

HOMES

George Wythe House

VA - Williamsburg, Virginia, USA

Delegate to the Constitutional Convention (VA)

1787

Delegate to the Continental Congress (VA)

NICKNAMES

American Aristides

POLITICAL VIEWS

ABOLITIONIST, FEDERALISM ADVOCATE, RACIAL EQUALITY ADVOCATE

RELIGIOUS VIEWS

RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION UNCERTAIN

ANGLICAN

MEMBERSHIPS

AWARDS

George Wythe (1726 or 1727–1806) was a Virginia lawyer, Declaration signer, judge, and teacher of law. He mentored Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall and taught at William and Mary. As chancellor he supported freedom claims and questioned slavery’s legal foundations. He died after an apparent poisoning in Richmond; his great-nephew was accused but acquitted. His exact birth year and private religious beliefs remain uncertain despite documented public parish service.

EARLY LIFE

George Wythe was born in 1726 at Chesterville plantation in Elizabeth City County, Virginia, the son of Thomas Wythe III and Margaret Walker Wythe. His father died when George was very young, and his mother became the central figure in his upbringing. Margaret was well educated for a colonial woman and reportedly taught him Latin and encouraged his reading. Wythe briefly attended the College of William and Mary but did not complete a degree. He studied law first under his uncle Stephen Dewey and then through extensive independent reading. His early progress was uneven; later tradition suggests that as a young man he participated in the sociable and sometimes dissipated life of Virginia gentlemen before adopting habits of intense study and discipline. He was admitted to the bar in 1746 and developed a practice in the Tidewater and Williamsburg. Legal work brought him into contact with land, debt, commerce, slavery, and the machinery of royal government. Wythe also learned Greek and deepened his knowledge of classical history and philosophy, eventually becoming one of the most scholarly lawyers in the colonies. His first wife, Ann Lewis, died within a year of their marriage. He later married Elizabeth Taliaferro, whose family connections and Williamsburg property provided stability. They had no surviving children. Wythe increasingly devoted himself to law, public service, and teaching younger men. Before becoming a signer of the Declaration and America’s first professor of law, Wythe had been shaped by paternal loss, instruction from an educated mother, incomplete college attendance, apprenticeship, self-correction, bereavement, and unusually deep independent scholarship. His experience convinced him that character could be cultivated through disciplined study. The contradiction between Virginia slavery and classical ideals of liberty also became increasingly important to him, contributing to antislavery actions later in life.

Wythe's Birthplace Marker

3700 Kecoughtan Rd, Hampton, VA 23669

A replacement W-85 metal sign commemorates George Wythe's birthplace near LaSalle Avenue and Kecoughtan Road. DHR approved replacement wording in 2020; Kathy Dennehey's May 2024 photograph documents the new panel. It directs attention to Chesterville about seven miles north, preserving an association rather than an original birth house at the sign.

MARKER

General_George_Washington_at_Trenton_by_John_Trumbull_edited_edited.jpg

George Wythe became an influential Virginia lawyer, revolutionary legislator, judge, and teacher. He built a practice in Williamsburg, served in the House of Burgesses and as its clerk, and mentored Thomas Jefferson as a legal apprentice. Supporting resistance to British authority, he entered the Continental Congress and signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Wythe helped revise Virginia's laws with Jefferson and Edmund Pendleton and served as speaker of the House of Delegates. He also participated briefly in the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention and later supported ratification in Virginia. His public work linked independence to the construction of new legal institutions, while his classical learning supplied models for republican government and professional conduct.

In 1779 William and Mary appointed him professor of law and police, the first such chair in the United States. He supplemented lectures and legal reading with mock courts and legislatures, seeking to prepare students for public service as well as practice. John Marshall and Bushrod Washington were among those he taught. He resigned the professorship in 1789 when his judicial responsibilities took him to Richmond, but continued mentoring younger men.

As a judge of the High Court of Chancery from 1778 until 1806, Wythe decided disputes involving property, contracts, and personal status. Although he had owned enslaved people, he later emancipated those he held and issued decisions advancing freedom claims. His reasoning encountered resistance and reversal in Virginia's appellate courts, revealing the limits imposed by a slaveholding legal order. He died in 1806 after an apparent poisoning; his great-nephew was accused but acquitted. His papers, teaching methods, and judicial opinions document efforts to connect legal expertise with republican citizenship. They expose conflicts between liberty, property rules, and racial exclusion. His students carried those debates into later public life.

CAREER

DEATH

By 1805, a grandson of Wythe's sister, 17-year-old George Wythe Sweeney, had come to live with his elderly namesake. The following spring, Wythe realized Sweeney had stolen some of his books, probably to repay gambling debts and support a dissolute lifestyle. Wythe also revised his will in early 1806 because Thomas Jefferson had agreed to educate the young mulatto Brown, although those new provisions would have no effect if Brown died before Sweeney, as happened. On May 25, 1806, Wythe, Broadnax, and Brown all became violently ill. Richmond's leading doctors, Wythe's old friend James McClurg, James McCaw, and his physician William Foushee at first suspected cholera, dismissing Wythe's claims of being poisoned. 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 in favor of Charles, Jane, and Ann Sweeney. Wythe also told the doctors, "Cut me." Although McClurg often used bloodletting, the doctors agreed that Wythe called for an autopsy after his death. Oddly, Houlder Hudgins was an administrator for at least two siblings, who became Wythe's heirs.

St John's Church

2401 E Broad St, Richmond, VA 23223

GRAVE