William Wirt | Biography

Virginia lawyer and man of letters, Attorney General of the United States, William Wirt enjoyed success as an American practitioner of the Addisonian serial essay. He was also the author of a popular, if not wholly reliable, biography of Patrick Henry.

Wirt was born in Bladensburg, Maryland, in 1772 to Jacob and Henrietta Wirt. Orphaned at age eight, he was raised by an uncle and aunt, who enrolled him in a series of classical grammar schools. This education fostered a passion for literature; by age thirteen he was writing poetry in the manner of Pope. One of Wirt's classmates introduced him to Benjamin Edwards (later a member of Congress), who employed the fifteen-year-old boy as a family tutor, giving him the run of an extensive library. He left this service in 1789 for a legal apprenticeship, and three years later he began a distinguished Virginia practice that would bring him into close contact with the likes of Monroe, Madison, and Jefferson. In 1795 he married Mildred Gilmer, the daughter of a well-to-do Albemarle County physician. After her death in 1799, Wirt moved to Richmond and served as Clerk of the Virginia House of Delegates from 1799 until his appointment to the Court of Chancery in 1802. He married Elizabeth Gamble in 1803 and resigned from the Chancery post to return to private practice, the highlight of which was his role in the prosecution of Aaron Burr for treason (1807). Appointed Attorney General for the Virginia District in 1816, he became Attorney General of the United States the following year, holding office for twelve years.

His career as a publishing author began as little more than a respite from the pressures of legal life. Nervous, too, about his wife Elizabeth's approaching confinement, Wirt amused himself by composing ten sketches that appeared serially during 1803 in the Virginia Argus. The collected essays were published as The Letters of the British Spy later that year and went through ten editions during Wirt's lifetime, spawning a number of imitations. It is difficult to account for the popularity of this casual and slight production, intended more for the admonition and instruction of Virginia's rising generation than for general entertainment. A tepid jeremiad delivered in the guise of ten letters from a British traveler in Richmond, the book rambles into five areas: social and economic inequality in Virginia, the geological evolution of North America, the plight of the Indian, the need for a reawakening of amor patriae, and, the fifth and principal topic, a forensic critique of legal, political, and religious eloquence in Virginia.

In 1804-1805 Wirt contributed to a series of philosophical essays run in the Richmond Enquirer. These twenty-six essays were a collaborative effort of the Rainbow Association, a Virginia literary and intellectual club of which Wirt was a member. Ten of these essays, including two by Wirt, "On the Condition of Women" and "On Forensic Eloquence," were published as The Rainbow; First Series in 1804.

Wirt's thriving law practice kept him from further literary work at least until 1810, when, according to his biographer, John Pendleton Kennedy, he began an abortive series of essays called "The Sylph." However, none of these pieces was published, and if a manuscript survives, it has yet to be located.

At the end of 1810 Wirt began another literary project, one that did bear fruit. The Old Bachelor was a collaboration with Wirt's friends Dabney and Frank Carr, Dr. Louis Girardin, Richard E. Parker, George Tucker, and Maj. David Watson that ran to twenty-eight numbers in the Enquirer. Wirt contributed at least sixteen pieces. For the book-length collection that was published in 1814, Wirt and his friends wrote five additional essays. The series aimed at nothing less than reforming the manners and educating the literary taste of Virginia. Wirt promoted a system of public education meant to foster a Jeffersonian aristocracy of talent and virtue. Despite their didactic purpose, these essays are not mere tracts; their argument is conducted through deft satire and gentle caricature. Richer in characterization and stylistically more polished than The Letters of the British Spy, The Old Bachelor nevertheless fell far short of the earlier work's popularity.

After twelve years of fitful labor, Wirt published his Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry in 1817. Intended as the first installment in what the author projected as a "Virginia Plutarch," a series of lives of Virginia's most notable sons, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry turned out to be Wirt's only exercise in biography and, at that, more valuable as an account of Henry's oratory than of his life. It is through this popular book (fifteen editions by 1859) that we know Henry's "Give me liberty" speech--which some critics have judged more the work of Wirt than of Henry.

Raised on Laurence Sterne, Robert Blair, James Macpherson, and Thomas Gray, William Wirt wrote prose that is valuable as an American example of the preromantic sensibility and as an indication of literary taste in the early Republic. His small body of work forms a transition between the Addisonian serial essay, with its balance of rational discourse and sentimental scene, and the kind of romantic sketch--as fiction, more fully satisfying--practiced by Washington Irving.