Arsenic and an old case
Jun. 21st, 2023 12:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileGiven the bookmark it would appear that it was at Brattleboro Books some years ago that I picked up a copy of Bruce Chadwick’s I Am Murdered: George Wythe, Thomas Jefferson, and the Killing that Shocked a New Nation. I think I bought it because honestly, how can you pass up a book titled “I Am Murdered,” especially when it’s just a few dollars? Also I enjoy a good historical crime book.
This book did not quite follow the plot twists and turns I’ve apparently come to expect even from nonfiction–the historical events that get picked to be turned into this type of popular history book are apparently the more novelesque ones–in that the ‘shocking twists’ involved seemed mostly to be every conceivable party except the defense lawyers bungling an open-and-shut case. Nothing got pulled out of the bag at the last minute; it just bungled, and there’s absolutely no reason to believe that the surprising verdict was anything other than a colossal cock-up on the part of numerous parties, from the complacently over-respected medical doctors to the fucked-up laws of Virginia, which, in a twist of irony that mostly just makes me as a reader make a sort of “ugh” face, the murder victim in question was largely responsible for having written.
The real short version here is that George Wythe, a highly respected judge and the U.S.’s first law professor, was poisoned by his gambling addict grandson, along with two other members of his household–Michael Brown, a free Black teenager who was studying with him and who died a week after being poisoned, and Lydia Broadnax, the cook, a formerly enslaved free Black woman who survived the poisoning, and who witnessed the grandson slip something into the coffee but whose testimony was inadmissible in court due to her race. As a narrative, it’s a little thin.
The book, while not very long, is therefore filled out with a bunch of historical context, covering Judge Wythe’s entire biography, a careful accounting of his prodigious social network, and the decline of Williamsburg and the rise of Richmond as Virginia’s capital cities before and after the Revolutionary War. I thought the history of these two cities over a few decades was really the most interesting part of the book, with the life and death of George Wythe providing an interesting skeleton to build such an account around. We learn about boomtown Richmond’s out-of-control gambling culture, the Commonwealth of Virginia’s attempt to update its laws from English law to a new American body of law, the trials and tribulations of the College of William and Mary, and an interesting foray into the state of the medical field and medical training in the early 1800s. It’s a little all over the place–and there’s a distinctly moderate political sensibility to the whole thing, resulting in a few side-eyes on my part–but overall it’s an intriguing look into a dramatic news story at a very particular time and place.
This book did not quite follow the plot twists and turns I’ve apparently come to expect even from nonfiction–the historical events that get picked to be turned into this type of popular history book are apparently the more novelesque ones–in that the ‘shocking twists’ involved seemed mostly to be every conceivable party except the defense lawyers bungling an open-and-shut case. Nothing got pulled out of the bag at the last minute; it just bungled, and there’s absolutely no reason to believe that the surprising verdict was anything other than a colossal cock-up on the part of numerous parties, from the complacently over-respected medical doctors to the fucked-up laws of Virginia, which, in a twist of irony that mostly just makes me as a reader make a sort of “ugh” face, the murder victim in question was largely responsible for having written.
The real short version here is that George Wythe, a highly respected judge and the U.S.’s first law professor, was poisoned by his gambling addict grandson, along with two other members of his household–Michael Brown, a free Black teenager who was studying with him and who died a week after being poisoned, and Lydia Broadnax, the cook, a formerly enslaved free Black woman who survived the poisoning, and who witnessed the grandson slip something into the coffee but whose testimony was inadmissible in court due to her race. As a narrative, it’s a little thin.
The book, while not very long, is therefore filled out with a bunch of historical context, covering Judge Wythe’s entire biography, a careful accounting of his prodigious social network, and the decline of Williamsburg and the rise of Richmond as Virginia’s capital cities before and after the Revolutionary War. I thought the history of these two cities over a few decades was really the most interesting part of the book, with the life and death of George Wythe providing an interesting skeleton to build such an account around. We learn about boomtown Richmond’s out-of-control gambling culture, the Commonwealth of Virginia’s attempt to update its laws from English law to a new American body of law, the trials and tribulations of the College of William and Mary, and an interesting foray into the state of the medical field and medical training in the early 1800s. It’s a little all over the place–and there’s a distinctly moderate political sensibility to the whole thing, resulting in a few side-eyes on my part–but overall it’s an intriguing look into a dramatic news story at a very particular time and place.