George Wythe

George Wythe (1726 – June 8, 1806) was an American lawyer, a Virginia judge, and a prominent opponent of slavery. He was the first law professor in the United States and a noted classical scholar in Virginia. He taught and was a mentor to Thomas Jefferson and other men who became Virginia leaders. The first of the seven Virginia signatories of the United States Declaration of Independence, Wythe served as a representative of Virginia and a delegate to the Constitutional Convention.

Opposed to slavery, Wythe freed all his slaves beginning in 1787, after the death of his second wife. As a Virginia justice, in the case of Hudgins v. Wright (1806), he tried to end slavery in Virginia by judicial interpretation, referring to the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights as the basis that all men should be considered "presumptively free." His decision in favor of freeing a family of American Indian descent was upheld by the Virginia Supreme Court, although his reasoning based on the Declaration of Rights' applying to all was not.

Wythe died in June 1806, believed to have been murdered by arsenic poisoning by his grandnephew George Wythe Sweeney. Historians believe that Sweeney was trying to kill Lydia Broadnax, Wythe's housekeeper, and Michael Brown, a 16-year-old mixed-race boy, to whom Wythe had made bequests in his will. Brown died a week before Wythe, but Broadnax survived. As blacks were prevented by law of the time from testifying at trials against whites, Broadnax and other black servants could not tell about having seen Sweeney's suspicious actions. The all-white jury acquitted him but Wythe had changed his will before his death and disinherited him.