George Wythe
George Wythe was probably born in 1726 in Elizabeth City County at his family’s home of Chesterville. As a second son in a family of moderate means, he chose to embrace the legal profession and qualified to practice law in 1746. From that modest beginning, Wythe launched a successful career augmented by a variety of public service positions, including a brief stint as Virginia’s youngest Attorney General. By 1762, he had also accepted apprentices to his practice, enriching his chosen profession by carefully guiding their education. When revolution erupted, Wythe participated as a delegate to the Continental Congress, signed the Declaration of Independence, and briefly represented the Commonwealth at the Constitutional Convention.
In addition to his contributions on the national stage, Wythe’s fellow Virginians selected him to help rewrite Virginia’s code of laws, to preside over Virginia’s Constitutional ratifying Convention, and, in 1778, to serve on the newly created High Court of Chancery. A year later, then-governor Thomas Jefferson convinced the Board of Visitors of the College of William & Mary to reorganize the college and to create the chair of Professor of Law and Police (roughly the equivalent to contemporary political science). Jefferson further persuaded the Board to appoint Wythe to fill the new chair, a choice which effectively made him the first law professor in the country.
During the next decade, a wide array of the future judicial and political stars of the fledgling nation attended Wythe’s popular classes where he introduced the use of both mock trials and legislatures to American legal education. A measure of his influence on the law and history of Virginia, and by extension that of the United States, may be seen in the careers of a United States Supreme Court chief justice, three Virginia Supreme Court Justices, two presidents, and numerous Congressmen and Senators. Required to relocate with his court and disagreeing with the direction of academic life at the College, Wythe left William & Mary in 1789 and moved to Richmond, where he lived until his death in 1806.
