George Wythe

George Wythe was born about 1726 in Elizabeth City County, Virginia, studied law, and became one of the most respected lawyers in the colony. He taught Thomas Jefferson and, later, other young men who would shape the country, including John Marshall, and in 1779 he became the first professor of law in an American college, at William and Mary. He was in Virginia during the summer of 1776 and signed the Declaration later in the year, after returning to Congress. He helped revise Virginia's laws, sat in the convention that ratified the Constitution, and spent his later years as a judge in Richmond. Wythe had held people in slavery; in later life he freed those he still held and used his place on the bench to limit slavery where the law allowed. In 1806 he died after being poisoned, almost certainly by a grandnephew who stood to inherit. His life is one of the clearest examples among the signers of a mind willing to be corrected by the principles he had signed.

See also: Signers of the Declaration · Richard Henry Lee · Thomas Jefferson · Benjamin Harrison V · Thomas Nelson Jr. · John Marshall