Wythe's Library
George Wythe's career as a lawyer, legislator, judge, and teacher influenced every aspect of legal life in eighteenth-century Virginia. His contemporaries widely admired “the venerable Chancellor Wythe” as a man of character, learning, and judgment: "His active mind found its only enjoyment in profound research. The languages of antiquity, the exact sciences, and the law, were the three studies which alone could be pursued with a reasonable hope of ariving at that certainty, which his upright and truth-loving mind contemplated as the only object worthy of his labors. To these he devoted himself, and he became a profound lawyer for the same reason that he was a profound Greek scholar, astronomer and mathematician."[1] Wythe supported his voracious reading habits with an extensive personal library[2] but, if he made any record of the contents of his library, it has not been found. When Wythe died in 1806, he bequeathed all his books to his favorite former protege, Thomas Jefferson. For 200 years, very little was known about Wythe's library other than its existence within Jefferson's massive collection.
Colonial Williamsburg attempted to identify specific titles as early as 1958 when Mary R.M. Goodwin, a senior researcher at the Rockefeller Library, wrote The George Wythe House: Its Furniture and Furnishings. Goodwin listed 54 titles and divided them into three categories: law books, journals, and miscellaneous. Within these categories, Goodwin identified several of the known surviving Wythe volumes. Goodwin's research laid the foundation for another Colonial Williamsburg attempt at reconstructing Wythe's library. In an internal memo[3], Barbara C. Dean expanded Goodwin's list to 189 titles. Her bibliography divided the titles into 5 categories: (1) titles definitely owned by Wythe; (2) known Wythe purchases (derived from records of the Virginia Gazette and John Norton and Sons; (3) titles in the commonplace books of Wythe's students; (4) titles Wythe read; (5) titles written by or collaborated on by Wythe; and (6) titles illustrative of Wythe's time.
Until 2008, the Goodwin and Dean bibliographies represented the extent of known information regarding Wythe's library. That changed with the discovery by Endrina Tay, a librarian at Monticello's Jefferson Library, and Jeremy Dibbell, of the Massachusetts Historical Society, of a manuscript list in the hand of Thomas Jefferson which appeared to document dispersal decisions Jefferson made regarding Wythe's books.[4] Jefferson's inventory identifies 338 titles (649 volumes) with brief notations. In some cases, specific titles and editions can be derived from Jefferson's entries. In other instances, mystery remains.[5]
References
- ↑ Beverly Tucker, The Principles of Pleading (Boston: CC. Little & J. Brown, 1846), 56.
- ↑ Douglas L. Miller, "Jefferson's Library," in Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography (New York: Scribner, 1986), pp. 157-179.
- ↑ Memorandum from Barbara C. Dean, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, to Mrs. Stiverson (June 16, 1975).
- ↑ Endrina Tay & Jeremy Dibbell, "Reconstructing a Lost Library: George Wythe's 'Legacie' to President Thomas Jefferson, Tales from the Vault, Common-Place, Jan. 2009.
- ↑ Inventory of the Books Received by Thomas Jefferson from the Estate of George Wythe, Circa September, 1806, Massachusetts Historical Society. For a transcribed version, see Library of George Wythe, Thomas Jefferson Libraries.
