William Wirt (Attorney General)

William Wirt
9th United States Attorney General
In office November 13, 1817 – March 4, 1829
President	James Monroe John Quincy Adams
Preceded by	Richard Rush
Succeeded by	John M. Berrien
Personal details
Born	November 8, 1772 Bladensburg, Maryland
Died	February 18, 1834 (aged 61) Washington, D.C.
Political party	Democratic-Republican, Anti-Masonic
Spouse(s)	Mildred Gilmer (d. 1799) Elizabeth Washington Gamble (1784–1857)
Profession	Lawyer, Politician
Religion	Presbyterian
Signature

William Wirt (November 8, 1772 – February 18, 1834) was an American author and statesman who is credited with turning the position of United States Attorney General into one of influence. Wirt County, West Virginia, is named in his honor.

History

William Wirt was born in Bladensburg, Maryland, to a German mother, Henrietta, and a Swiss father, Jacob Wirt.^[1] Both parents died before he was eight years old and Jasper Wirt, his uncle, became his guardian. Between his seventh and his eleventh year Wirt was sent to several classical schools and finally to one kept by the Rev. James Hunt in Montgomery County, where he received over the course of 4 years the chief part of his education. For two years he boarded with Hunt, in whose library he spent much of his time, reading with a keen and indiscriminate appetite. In his fifteenth year the school was disbanded, and his inheritance nearly exhausted.^[2]

Ninian Edwards (later governor of Illinois) had been Wirt's schoolmate, and Edwards' father, Benjamin Edwards (later a member of congress from Maryland), thought Wirt had more ordinary natural ability and invited him to reside in his family as tutor to Ninian and two nephews, offering him also the use of his library for his own studies. Wirt accepted the offer and stayed twenty months, teaching, pursuing his own classical and historical studies, writing, and preparing for the bar.^[2]

Career

Wirt was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1792, and he began practice at Culpeper Courthouse. Wirt had the advantages of a vigorous constitution and a good carriage, but the drawbacks of meager legal equipment, constitutional shyness, and brusque and indistinct speech.^[2][3] In 1795, he married Mildred, daughter of Dr. George Gilmer, and moved to Pen Park, where Gilmer lived, near Charlottesville. There he made the acquaintance of many persons of eminence, including Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe. For a time, Wirt took advantage of the hospitality of the country gentlemen and the convivial habits of the members of the bar so that he was regarded by other attorneys as a bon vivant and a gay, fascinating companion, rather than as an ambitious lawyer.^[2]

In 1799 his wife died, and he moved to Richmond, where he became clerk of the Virginia House of Delegates, then chancellor of the Eastern District of Virginia, resigning after six months. In 1802, he married Elizabeth Washington Gamble, the daughter of Colonel Robert Gamble of Richmond. In the winter of 1803/04, Wirt moved to Norfolk, but in 1806, wishing for a wider field of practice, returned to Richmond.^[2]

Wirt's Attorney General nomination

In 1807, President Thomas Jefferson asked him to be the prosecutor in Aaron Burr's trial for treason. His principal speech, four hours in length, was characterized by eloquent appeal, polished wit, and logical reasoning. It greatly extended his fame. The passage in which he depicted in glowing colors the home of Harman Blennerhassett and "the wife of his bosom, whom he lately permitted not the winds of summer 'to visit too roughly'", as "shivering at midnight on the wintry banks of the Ohio, and mingling her tears with the torrents that froze as they fell", was for many years a favorite piece for academic declamation.^[2] Wirt was nicknamed the "Whip Syllabub Genius" by his enemies for the frothy, over-the-top nature of his oratory.^[4]

In 1808, Wirt was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates. In 1816 he was appointed U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia,^[5] and in 1817 President James Monroe named him the ninth Attorney General of the United States, a position he held for 12 years, through the administration of John Quincy Adams, until 1829. William Wirt has the record for the longest tenure in history of any U.S. attorney general.^[3]

In June 1830, a delegation of Cherokee led by Chief John Ross selected Wirt on the urging of Senators Webster and Frelinghuysen to defend Cherokee rights before the U.S. Supreme Court. Wirt argued, in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, that the Cherokee Nation was "a foreign nation in the sense of our constitution and law" and was therefore not subject to Georgia's jurisdiction. Wirt asked the Supreme Court to void all Georgia laws extended over Cherokee territory on the grounds that they violated the U.S. Constitution, United States–Cherokee treaties, and United States intercourse laws.

Although the Court determined that it did not have original jurisdiction in this case, the Court held open the possibility that it yet might rule in favor of the Cherokee. Wirt therefore waited for a test case to again resolve the constitutionality of the laws of Georgia. On March 1, 1831, Georgia passed a law aimed at evicting missionaries, who were perceived as encouraging the Cherokee resistance to removal from Cherokee lands. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, an interdenominational missionary organization, hired Wirt to challenge the new law. On March 3, 1832, the decision in Worcester v. Georgia, authored by Chief Justice John Marshall, held that the Cherokee Nation was "a distinct community, occupying its own territory, with boundaries accurately described, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force, and which the citizens of Georgia have no right to enter but with the assent of the Cherokees themselves or in conformity with treaties and with the acts of Congress".

Societies

During the 1820s, Wirt was a member of the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences, which included as members former presidents Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams and many prominent men of the day, including well-known representatives of the military, government service, medical and other professions.^[6]

Wirt was also an honorary member of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society.^[7]

Later life

After leaving his position as Attorney General, he resided to Baltimore, Maryland. He became a candidate for President in 1832, nominated by the Anti-Masonic party, which held the first national nominating convention of any U.S. political party. Wirt was, in fact, a former Freemason. He had taken the first two degrees of Freemasonry in Jerusalem Lodge #54 Richmond, Virginia. Although some sources assert that he regretted having been a member, Wirt wrote a letter to the convention stating that he found Freemasonry unobjectionable and that in his experience many Masons were "intelligent men of high and honourable character" who would never choose Freemasonry above "their duties to their God and country".^[8] In the election, Wirt carried Vermont with seven electoral votes, becoming the first candidate of an organized third party to carry a state.

Wirt practiced law until his death in 1834. He was buried in Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

The house he occupied in Richmond from 1816 to 1818, known as the Hancock-Wirt-Caskie House, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970.^[9][10][11]

Published works

William Wirt Monument, Congressional Cemetery, Washington D.C.

Wirt's earliest work was Letters of the British Spy, which he first contributed to the Richmond Argus in 1803, and which won immediate popularity. The letters are chiefly studies of eloquence and eloquent men, are written in a vivid and luxuriant style, and may be regarded, in spite of the exceptional excellence of "The Blind Preacher", as rather a prophecy of literary skill than its fulfilment. They were soon afterward issued in book form (Richmond, 1803; 10th ed., with a biographical sketch of the author by Peter H. Cruse, New York, 1832).^[2]

In 1808 Wirt wrote for the Richmond Enquirer essays entitled The Rainbow, and in 1810, with Dabney Carr, George Tucker, and others, a series of didactic and ethical essays, entitled The Old Bachelor, which, collected, passed through several editions (2 vols., 1812). These papers treat of female education, Virginian manners, the fine arts, and especially oratory. An essay from this collection, "Eloquence of the Pulpit", a vigorous and passionate protest against coldness in this genre, has been singled out for praise.^[2]

In October 1826, Wirt delivered before the citizens of Washington a discourse on the lives and characters of the ex-presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who had died on 4 July of the same year (Washington, 1826). The London Quarterly Review, in a paper on American oratory several years afterward, pronounced this discourse "the best which this remarkable coincidence has called forth". In 1830 Wirt delivered an address to the literary societies of Rutgers College, which, after its publication by the students (New Brunswick, 1830), was republished in England, and translated into French and German.^[2]

His other publications are:

• The Two Principal Arguments in the Trial of Aaron Burr (Richmond, 1808)
• Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry (Philadelphia, 1817)^[12] This work has been severely criticized both for its hero worship and its style, the subject of the biography having been regarded by many as a creation of Wirt rather than Patrick Henry.^[2] The book contained the supposed text of some of Henry's speeches, many of which had never been published. Some historians have since speculated that some of Henry's phrases that have since become famous, such as "Give me Liberty, or give me Death!", were fabricated by Wirt for this book. Even Wirt's contemporary Thomas Jefferson shelved his copy of the biography under fiction.^[3]
• Address on the Triumph of Liberty in France (Baltimore, 1830)
• Letters by John Q. Adams and William Wirt to the Anti-Masonic Committee for York County (Boston, 1831)

Wirt had the distinction of being regarded for many years as the chief man of letters in the South.^[3]

Grave robbery

In the early 2000s, after a series of mysterious phone calls to the cemetery, it was discovered that in the 1970s someone had broken into the Wirt Tomb at Washington, D.C.'s Congressional Cemetery and had stolen Wirt's skull. After the skull was recovered from the house of a historical memorabilia collector, it spent time in D.C. Council member Jim Graham's office while he tried to get it returned to its rightful crypt. Finally in 2005 investigators from the Smithsonian Institution were able to determine the skull, which had gold block letters saying "Hon. Wm. Wirt" painted on the tin box containing it, was indeed his and had it returned.^[13]

Major cases argued

• Gibbons v. Ogden
• McCulloch v. Maryland
• Cherokee Nation v. Georgia
• Worcester v. Georgia

References

1. Kennedy, John P. (1872). Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt: Attorney-General of the United States 1. New York: G.P. Putnam and Sons. p. 16. Retrieved March 23, 2015.
2.  Wilson, James Grant; Fiske, John, eds. (1889). "Wirt, William". Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton.
3. Fulton, Maurice Garland (1917). Southern Life in Southern Literature. Kessinger Publishing. p. 1. ISBN 0-7661-4624-3.
4. Jabour, Anya. "'No Fetters but Such as Love Shall Forge': Elizabeth and William Wirt and Marriage in the Early Republic." The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (1996): 211-250.
5. Davis, Loretta Hirschfield; Apuzzo, Matt (November 7, 2014). "Loretta Lynch, Federal Prosecutor, Will Be Nominated for Attorney General". New York Times. Retrieved January 26, 2015.
6. Rathbun, Richard. The Columbian institute for the promotion of arts and sciences: A Washington Society of 1816–1838. Bulletin of the United States National Museum, October 18, 1917. Retrieved 2010-06-20.
7. Thomas Spencer Harding (1971). College literary societies: their contribution to higher education in the United States, 1815–1876. Pageant Press International. p. 39. Retrieved 16 May 2012.
8. Letter of William Wirt to the Anti-Masonic Party Convention, 9/28/1831, reprinted in Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt, Attorney-General of the United States, vol. 2, ed. John P. Kennedy (Blanchard & Lea, 1849), 355, quoted in Jesse Walker (2013). The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory. Harper. ISBN 978-0-062-13555-1., page 371, footnote 49.
9. Virginia Historic Landmarks Commission Staff (November 1969). "National Register of Historic Places Inventory/Nomination: Hancock-Wirt-Caskie House" (PDF). Virginia Department of Historic Resources.
10. Bryan Clark Green and Jennifer Parker (July 2007, April 2008). "National Register of Historic Places Inventory/Nomination: Hancock-Wirt-Caskie House" (PDF). Virginia Department of Historic Resources. Check date values in: |date= (help)
11. Staff (2010-07-09). "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service.
12. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Library of Southern Literature: Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry, accessed September 30, 2014
13. Carlson, Peter (October 20, 2005). "Tale From the Crypt". The Washington Post. Retrieved September 30, 2014.

Further reading

• Jabour, Anya. Marriage in the Early Republic: Elizabeth and William Wirt and the Companionate Ideal. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
• Raphael, Ray. Founding Myths: Stories that Hide our Patriotic Past. New Press, 2004.

External links

• U.S. Department of Justice biography (in the public domain)
• Works by William Wirt at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about William Wirt at Internet Archive