George Wythe

He'd signed the Declaration of Independence, and he'd personally mentored many great men, including Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and Henry Clay.

And now, with his final reserves of strength, George Wythe delivered a self-diagnosis that none of his attending physicians were willing to accept.

He looked at the men gathered around his bed and told the men that he had been poisoned.

To understand why Wythe's death sent shockwaves across the nation, you have to understand who he was.

There was Lydia Broadnax, a freedwoman who'd been his housekeeper and cook for over 20 years.

There was also Michael Brown, a freed teenager Wythe was personally educating.

And then there was George Wythe Sweeney, Wythe's grandnephew, sent to live with the old judge in the hopes that some of his character might rub off.

Sweeney was 17 or 18, and he was a disaster to say the least.

Working on Virginia's laws continued into 1777.

He worked with his old mentor and friend, George Wythe, and Edmund Pendleton on the Committee of Revisers, and their job was to take England's old laws, take the king's influence out of them, and figure out how maybe they could work for Virginia.

Here were a couple of their big projects.

Number one, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

On to 1780.

In April, the capital city officially moved so they could check that off the list.

Do you remember how Thomas Jefferson became a lawyer? He had studied with George Wythe, a prominent lawyer and politician.

Well, in the spring of 1780, it was Thomas Jefferson's turn to mentor somebody else.

This worthy man treated his stepson kindly and put him into a retail store at the age of fourteen, no better educated than most country lads, too poor to go to college but with aspirations which all bright and ambitious boys are apt to have, especially if they have no fitness for selling the common things of life and are fond of reading.

Henry's stepfather, having an influential friend, secured for the disgusted and discontented youth a position in the office of the clerk of the High Court of Chancery, of which the eminent jurist George Wythe was chancellor.

The judge and the young copyist thus naturally became acquainted, an acquaintance ripened into friendship, for the youth was bright and useful and made an excellent amanuensis to the learned old lawyer, in whose office both Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall had been students of law.

After serving four years, Clay resolved to become a lawyer, entered the office of the Attorney General of the State, and one year after was admitted to the bar, having in all probability acquired much legal knowledge from the communicative chancellor, whom everybody loved and honored, one of the earliest in Virginia to emancipate his slaves and provide for their support.

And his death is attributed to that, the wasting away in his 84th year.

And the migraines, which he called periodical headaches, curiously began in 1764 when he first set out on the circuit as a lawyer when he left the home of George Wythe, his legal... professor and lifelong friend, one of the great jurists of late colonial, early Republican Virginia, and a noted abolitionist as well.

Wythe was beloved and willed his library to Jefferson.

So 1764, he leaves Wythe, goes out on the road, to make his living as a lawyer.

from the state of Georgia, before I read them, well, Burton Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton from the state of North Carolina, William Hooper, Joseph Hughes, John Penn from the state of South Carolina, Edward Rutledge, Thomas Hayward Jr., Thomas Lynch Jr., Arthur Middleton from the state of Massachusetts, John Hancock, Maryland, from the state of Maryland, Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton.

From Virginia, George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton.

From the state of Pennsylvania, Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross from the state of Delaware, Cesar Rodney, George Reed, Thomas McKean from the state of New York, William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris from the state of New Jersey, Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark, From the state of New Hampshire, Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple.

From the state of Massachusetts, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Payne, Elbridge Gary.