America’s First Law Professor | The 56 #10
Whose murder his own legal system couldn’t punish
On a Sunday morning in May 1806, George Wythe sat down to breakfast in his yellow wooden house on the corner of Fifth and Grace streets in Richmond, Virginia.
At eighty years old, George Wythe was one of the last surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson‘s mentor. The first law professor in America.
The coffee had already been poured
In the kitchen, Wythe’s cook, a freed Black woman named Lydia Broadnax, had seen the only other person awake in the house.
George Wythe Sweeney, Wythe’s eighteen-year-old grandnephew, poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove. Then he fiddled with the coffeepot’s lid and threw a small piece of white paper into the fire.
Within hours, three people in the house were violently ill: Wythe, Broadnax, and a sixteen-year-old boy named Michael Brown, whom Wythe had taken in as a ward and was teaching Greek and Latin. They had shared the same breakfast. Now they shared the same symptoms.
Michael Brown died first, on June 1. George Wythe held on for another week, awake enough enough to know what had happened. From his bed, he ordered a search of Sweeney’s room. He dictated a new will, cutting Sweeney out of the estate entirely.
He told his doctor two words: “Cut me.”
He wanted an autopsy so doctors could prove he had been poisoned.
His last words, on June 8: “Let me die righteous.”
But who would poison an eighty-year-old man?
And why?
To understand that, you have to understand what George Wythe built, and what someone stood to take from him.
The Teacher
Wythe lost his father at three. His mother, Margaret Walker Wythe, was well-educated, rare for a woman in colonial Virginia. She filled his childhood with Latin, Greek, and classical literature, holding an English Bible alongside his Greek text so he could work through both at once.
That foundation shaped everything that followed.
He became a lawyer, then a judge. But his true calling was teaching lawyers. In an era when legal education meant copying documents in a senior attorney’s office and picking up whatever your mentor bothered to share, Wythe did something no one in America had done before.
He built a classroom.
In 1779, the College of William and Mary created the first law professorship at any American university and gave it to Wythe. Half the college’s eighty students enrolled in his first year.
His method was rigorous. Students arrived at sunrise for Greek. Latin came at noon. Algebra and French filled the afternoon. English literature and current events took the evening. He assigned readings not just from law books but from Montesquieu, Horace, and Virgil. He wanted lawyers who could think, not just cite.
But the real innovation happened on Saturdays.
Wythe marched his students to the empty Capitol building at the end of Duke of Gloucester Street in Williamsburg. In the courtroom, they argued mock cases while Wythe and his colleagues sat as judges and townspeople watched from the gallery. In the legislative chamber, students debated actual bills pending before the Virginia General Assembly, with Wythe presiding as Speaker.
He was training not just lawyers but citizens who could govern.
His students proved it. Thomas Jefferson studied under Wythe for five years, calling him “my second father” and “my earliest and best friend.”
John Marshall, who would shape constitutional law for three decades as Chief Justice, attended Wythe’s lectures in 1780 while on leave from the Continental Army.
Henry Clay, the “Great Compromiser” who would dominate American politics for forty years, served as Wythe’s personal secretary for four years before Wythe arranged for him to finish his legal studies elsewhere.
Jefferson wrote the nation’s laws. Marshall interpreted them. Clay negotiated the compromises that held the republic together.
All three learned their craft from the same teacher.
The Signer
Wythe was already one of Virginia’s most respected lawyers when the Revolution came.
He served in the Continental Congress in 1775 and 1776, voting for independence alongside his former student Jefferson. When he signed the Declaration, his name was placed above Jefferson’s on the Virginia delegation. The teacher’s position of honor, preserved in ink.
After signing, Wythe returned to Virginia to help design the new state. He worked with Jefferson and Edmund Pendleton for three years, drafting 126 bills to replace Virginia’s entire colonial legal code with republican principles. He served as Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates and then as the head judge of Virginia’s highest court of fairness.
From the bench, he made a declaration that went further than anything in the document he had signed.
“Freedom is the birthright of every human being.”
He freed every person he had enslaved.
In one ruling, he ordered the release of more than eight hundred enslaved people held under a single will. He required his own clients to sign sworn statements before he would represent them, and returned their fees if they lied.
Through all of it, he kept teaching.
Even as he held public offices, even as the nation he helped create took shape, he focused on preparing the people who would run it.
The Murderer
George Wythe Sweeney. Named for the man he would kill.
Sweeney was Wythe’s grandnephew, the grandson of Wythe’s sister. He had burned through his own money on gambling and drinking. In 1805, Wythe caught the seventeen-year-old stealing books from his library to sell.
Sweeney had recently moved into Wythe’s Richmond house as a companion to the aging man. At least that’s what he wanted the old man to think. In reality, he was waiting for Wythe to die and leave him the estate.
But Wythe had also taken responsibility for Michael Brown, a young mixed-race boy he was educating in Greek and Latin and treating as his own student. He intended to leave most of his estate to Michael.
Around this time the Bank of Virginia began noticing something strange.
Checks bearing Wythe’s signature, at least six of them, each for a hundred dollars, started turning up. But the handwriting was off, causing a bank teller to grow suspicious. Nearly everyone in Richmond knew the elderly chancellor and the bank knew his signature.
The signatures did not match and the bank determined someone had been forging checks.
The culprit?
Sweeney.
He had been forging checks on his granduncle’s account.
When Wythe discovered the forgeries, he sent for his attorney and began drafting a new will.
Sweeney would be cut out entirely and the estate would now go to Michael Brown.
Sweeney could not allow that to happen.
In late May 1806, he purchased a large quantity of yellow arsenic. On the morning of May 25, he went to the kitchen and laced the coffeepot.
The Trial
After Wythe’s death, investigators searched Sweeney’s room. They found yellow arsenic in a glass container, strawberries dusted with what looked like arsenic and sulfur, and brown paper with arsenic residue. After his arrest, a packet of arsenic was found in the garden adjacent to his jail cell, apparently thrown from his window.
The prosecution had what they needed: motive, physical evidence, and opportunity.
Most important, they had a witness.
Lydia Broadnax had been part of the Wythe household for nineteen years. Wythe had freed her himself in 1787.
She had seen Sweeney reading Wythe’s will the evening before the poisoning.
She had watched him fiddle with the coffeepot and throw a piece of paper into the fire.
She could place him in the kitchen that morning when no one else was awake.
Her testimony, one lawyer later wrote, “would have sunk Sweeney.”
But under Virginia law in 1806, Black witnesses could not testify against white defendants in court.
Lydia Broadnax had seen everything.
But the law, which George Wythe had helped draft, said her words did not count.
Without her testimony, the case collapsed.
The jury heard about the arsenic, the motive, the forged checks.
But no one could place Sweeney in the kitchen that morning.
On September 8, 1806, the jury retired.
They returned in minutes.
Not guilty.
Sweeney fled to Tennessee on the advice of his lawyers, where he was eventually convicted of horse theft, and vanished from history.
Broadnax survived the poisoning, but the arsenic slowly destroyed her eyesight. Years later, she wrote to President Jefferson asking for money to buy eyeglasses. When she died in the 1820s, she had to sign her will with an X.
She could no longer see well enough to write her name.
The murder of one of America’s founding lawyers went unpunished.
The only eyewitness lived the rest of her life bearing the scars.
What Wythe Teaches Us
From the bench, Wythe declared that freedom was the birthright of every human being.
He freed the people he had enslaved.
He trained the men who built the legal system.
He devoted his life to the idea that law should serve justice.
But when he needed the law to ensure his murderer was punished, the legal system could not deliver justice for him.
The man who insisted that Black people could be educated identically to whites was murdered, and the one person who could prove it was silenced by the color of her skin.
Virginia did not change that law for another sixty years.
By the time a Black witness could have testified against George Wythe Sweeney, every person involved was long dead.
But the students Wythe trained went on to write the laws, interpret the Constitution, and hold the republic together.
The teacher was gone, but the teaching survived.
Next: Stephen Hopkins
From Virginia’s murdered mentor, we turn to Rhode Island’s trembling elder.
Stephen Hopkins was sixty-nine years old when he signed the Declaration, second oldest among the signers. His hand shook from palsy. His body was failing. But his mind was sharp, and his heart, as he reportedly said, did not tremble.
Hopkins had been in politics for fifty years. He brought something invaluable to the Congress: the wisdom of experience.
Next time, we tell the story of the elder statesman who signed with a trembling hand.
This is Essay #10 of 56 in the “The 56” series, profiling every signer of the Declaration of Independence. New essays every Friday and Sunday, culminating on July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of American independence.
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