President Thomas Jefferson credited George Wythe as having made him “the most honest advocate of my country’s rights.”

George Wythe sat up in bed on the morning of May 25, 1806, and rubbed his eyes with his thin, bony fingers. Frail, stooped and nearly bald at age 80, he hardly looked like one of the most respected men in America. A much younger George Wythe had earned the moniker “the father of American jurisprudence” and counted among his protégés such leading intellects as James Monroe, John Marshall and Henry Clay. But Wythe’s prize pupil was President Thomas Jefferson, who credited his “faithful and beloved mentor” as having made him “the honest advocate of my country’s rights.” In turn, Wythe had the honor of topping the list of seven Virginians who, in 1776, signed Jefferson’s magnum opus: the Declaration of Independence.

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No pair of public men in the upstart republic had been so close for so long as Jefferson and Wythe. In 1759, when Jefferson was a 16-year-old freshman at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg he met Wythe, then 35, a lawyer and member of the House of Burgesses representing the college. Jefferson’s father had died two years earlier, and Wythe and his wife, Elizabeth, who had no children of their own, took a special liking to the brilliant but emotionally rudderless youth. After completing his studies, Jefferson served as Wythe’s law clerk for five years and sat in on state legislative sessions, where he met George Washington, Patrick Henry and George Mason. Jefferson and Wythe would serve in the legislature together, and from 1776-79, the two spearheaded an effort to overhaul and rewrite the code of laws in Virginia.

After the death of his wife, Wythe left Williamsburg for the new state capital in Richmond in 1791, where he continued to dispense legal wisdom as the chief judge of the Virginia Chancery Court. On this Sunday morning, the elderly magistrate followed his usual routine at his elegant home in Richmond’s fashionable Shockoe Hill neighborhood. He doused himself with a bucket of ice-cold water from the well in his backyard, then returned to his room to dress and read the newspapers until his maid, Lydia Broadnax, brought him his breakfast of eggs, toast, sweetbread and hot coffee.

Broadnax, 66, had been Wythe’s faithful servant since he freed her from slavery two decades earlier. She carried the breakfast tray upstairs and then returned to the kitchen to have a cup of coffee with Michael Brown, a 16-year-old mulatto boy who lived in the house and was Wythe’s latest intellectual protégé. A few minutes later, Broadnax was stricken with horrific pains, and Brown collapsed on the table. Upstairs, Wythe finished his coffee and then vomited. When a doctor arrived to find all three in terrible agony, the judge raised himself up on the pillows of his bed and said in a hoarse whisper, “I am murdered.”

For the next 3 1/2 months, all of Richmond would be fixated on the fate of one of its most famous residents and on what turned out to be an increasingly bizarre tale of familial greed, incompetence on the part of attending physicians and local officials, and grandstanding lawyers. Overshadowing the affair were intractable race laws that Wythe and Jefferson had failed to untangle when they revised the Virginia Code and which ultimately contributed to a tragic miscarriage of justice.

Richmond’s three most renowned physicians, James McClurg, William Foushee and James McCaw, all showed up to tend to the members of the Wythe household. The doctors had trained at the world’s finest medical school at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and had helped Virginians through smallpox and yellow fever epidemics during the past 10 years. They were soon convinced that the symptoms exhibited by Wythe, Broadnax and Brown—sudden, severe stomach cramps, vomiting, diarrhea and acute pain—pointed to cholera, not attempted murder. All three victims had eaten strawberries the night before, and the fruit had a whitish hue that looked like mold. Though cholera was usually caused by contaminated water, it had also been linked to overripe fruits and vegetables.

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