Declaration of Independence
George Wythe served Virginia as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, attending from September 5, 1775, until June 13, 1776.[1]
Wythe appears above the other signatories from Virginia, despite the fact that he did not sign the Declaration of Independence until after he returned to Congress, on or about in September 15, 1776.[2] Tradition has it that the other signers from Virginia — Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, and Carter Braxton — left room above their names for Wythe to sign.
Did he or didn't he?
Historians question whether or not Wythe actually signed the Declaration. In a footnote in his biography of Wythe, Robert B. Kirtland writes:
Wythe wrote out his given name so rarely that [W. Edwin] Hemphill[3] ... doubted the authenticity of an otherwise apparently authentic signature partly, at least, for that reason; the only other example he knew when he wrote was on the Declaration, although others do exist: an indenture deed of 15 June 1753 (Library of Congress, Ambler papers) and an oath of allegiance to King George II, dated 4 June 1750, in a book in [the Library of Congress] recording the oaths of Virginia public officials, reprinted in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, LXXV, Jan., 1967, issue 35-51. The question with respect to the signature on the Declaration is its position: large and not crowded, it is the first of the Virginia Delegation's signatures, and one can hardly imagine such worthies as Carter Braxton or R. H. Lee leaving Wythe a generous space at the head of the list. Moreover, all the examples in which George is written out, noted above, are from very early in his adult life, if we except the Declaration and a form letter sent out in October, 1775, by a Congressional committee on which Wythe served; several copies are in the Massachusetts Historical Society (Warren-Adams Papers, 1767-1822), and they were surely signed by a clerk with a skill not uncommon then for imitating the hands of the principals; even in that leisurely era, Wythe, John Adams, and Silas Deane were very busy men.[4]
See also
References
- ↑ Edmund C. Burnett, ed. Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, vol. 1, August 29, 1774-July 4, 1776 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1921), lxvi.
- ↑ Edmund C. Burnett, ed. Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, vol. 2, July 5, 1776-December 31, 1777 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution, 1923), lxxii.
- ↑ William Edwin Hemphill, "George Wythe the Colonial Briton: A Biographical Study of the Pre-Revolutionary Era in Virginia" (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1937).
- ↑ Robert B. Kirtland, George Wythe: Lawyer, Revolutionary, Judge (New York: Garland Publishing, 1986), 108, note 36.
