George Wythe

Drawing by John Trumbull, 1791

OTHER IMAGES

QUICK FACTS
BORN:
1726 in Elizabeth City County (now Hampton), Virginia
  DIED:
8 June 1806 in Richmond, Virginia
Buried at St. John’s Church in Richmond.

  • Taught law and prepared Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, and John Marshal for the bar.
PLACES TO VISIT
Portrait to come. See entry in Wikipedia.

 

But as an intellectual enterprise ... [Jefferson’s University of Virgina] proved less satisfactory to its creator when it opened the year before he died. The students turned out be not so much an aristocracy of virtue and talent as a gang of rowdy youths with a taste for drink, gambling, breaking windows, firing guns into the air, and thrashing professors who tried to stop them. The horrified Jefferson came down from his mountain to Charlottesville to reprimand them. Flanked by his dear friends and fellow trustees James Madison and James Monroe, the frail eighty-two-year-old patriarch drew himself up to his full six foot two, began to speak — and burst into tears.

Myron Magnet
The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735 - 1817 (2014)