Conventional wisdom held that arsenic took the lives of its victims in three or four days, but Brown lived for seven days, and Wythe for 14. Therefore, McClurg, McCaw and Foushee each testified, arsenic might have killed Wythe and Brown, but it was also possible that the stomach bile was the culprit. They could not be absolutely sure.

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The defense also had little difficulty casting doubt on the material evidence—the arsenic found in Sweeney's room and in the packet he'd tossed over the jailhouse wall. Wirt and Randolph pointed out that half the residents of Richmond had arsenic in their homes for the legitimate purpose of killing rats.

Finally, the law itself played into the hands of the defense. Since 1732, Virginia had prohibited blacks, free or slave, from testifying against whites, a provision in the state code that Wythe and Jefferson let stand. None of the black witnesses could be called by the prosecution. Lydia Broadnax could not tell the court that she saw Sweeney put something in the coffeepot the morning she and the others became ill. Neither could any of the whites that she'd told her story to because even second-hand testimony from blacks was inadmissible.

That left the prosecution with a very circumstantial case against Sweeney. After less than an hour's deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

Sweeney still faced forgery charges that carried a sentence of several years in prison. There was little doubt that, in the language of Virginia's forgery law, he was able to "falsely and deceitfully obtain or get into his hands or possession" money from his uncle's account by using a "false token or counterfeit letter." But Sweeney's forgery trial started—and ended—the day after his murder acquittal when the defense told the jury and the courtroom full of startled spectators that the law applied to forgery against a person, not an institution like a bank. When Wythe and Jefferson had revised the Virginia Code in the late 1770s, there were no commercial banks in the state, and in the intervening 30 years, no one had thought to amend the law to include public financial institutions. Sweeney, therefore, could not be tried for breaking a law that did not exist. The judge dropped the forgery charges. George Wythe Sweeney was a free man.

A few weeks after Wythe's death, Richmond Mayor William DuVal sent a touching letter to President Thomas Jefferson. "I believe that the great and good Mr. Wythe loved you as sincerely as if you had been his son; his at­tachment was founded on his thorough knowledge of you, personally," DuVal wrote. Some years ago, he mentioned that if there was an honest man in America, Thomas Jefferson was that person; everything he said has been verified."

Jefferson wrote back to DuVal: "I had reserved with fondness, for the day of my retirement, the hope of inducing [Wythe] to pass much of his time with me. It would have been a great pleasure to recollect with him first opinions on the new state of things which arose soon after my acquaintance with him; to pass in review the long period which has elapsed since that time." The president was also saddened by the death of Michael Brown, whom he had agreed to take in as a White House boarder if Wythe should die while the young man was still in his care: "I sincerely regret the loss of Michael not only for the affliction it must have cost Mr. Wythe in his last moments, but also as it has deprived me of an object for attention which would have gratified me unceasingly with the constant recollection and execution of the wishes of my friend."

Wythe bequeathed his treasured collection of books to the president, adding to Jefferson's voluminous collection that would form the basis of the Library of Congress in 1815.

George Wythe Sweeney left Richmond soon after the trial. He drifted to Tennessee, where he was later convicted of horse theft and served several years in prison. After his release, Sweeney vanished without a trace from the historical record.

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