The Virginia legislature was quick to amend its forgery laws within months of the Sweeney trial, but was unmoved in its stance against allowing blacks to testify against whites, even though it appeared obvious the murderer of one of the nation’s most influential figures had walked free as a result.

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Three decades earlier, George Wythe and his protégé Thomas Jefferson had broached the thorny issue of the legal status of blacks when they revised the Virginia Code, and even introduced an amendment calling for the emancipation of slaves, although they knew it would never be passed. Wythe and Jefferson also discussed changing court procedures for blacks—a move that could have greatly altered the outcome of Sweeney’s murder trial. But the two greatest legal minds in Virginia quickly dismissed the idea. “The public,” said Jefferson, “would not yet bear the proposition.”

New laws allowing the testimony of blacks in legal proceedings in Virginia were finally passed in 1867 under a Reconstruction government.

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