Author and advocate, born at Bladensburg, MD, on the 8th of November 1772. Losing his Swiss father in infancy and his German mother before he was eight, he was cared for by an uncle and sent to school at Georgetown, DC, and then in Montgomery county, MD. He was a diligent student, an early writer, did some tutoring, was admitted to the bar 1794, and began to practice law at Culpepper Court House, VA. He married in 1795 a daughter of Dr. Gilmer, of Pen Park, near Charlottesville, where he resided till his wife’s death four year’s later. Then he became clerk to the House of Delegates, and in 1802 chancellor of the Virginia eastern district. Marrying again, he resumed practice at Norfolk, but returned to Richmond 1806. The next year he gained much repute as prosecuting counsel in Aaron Burr’s trial: his speech lasted four hours, and was greatly admired. His only legislative experience was in the Virginia Assembly 1807–8. In 1816 he was appointed by Madison U.S. attorney for the district of Virginia, and the next year by Monroe U.S. attorney-general. Till 1829 he filled this post with a contemporary reputation well stated by Story as “among the ablest and most eloquent of the bar of the Supreme Court.” In the Dartmouth College case (1818), wherein he represented New Hampshire, his exertions fell below his fame. In 1829 he removed to Baltimore, and in 1832 was the anti-Masonic candidate for president although himself a mason, receiving the vote of Vermont alone. His writings, apologetically issued as “the work of a very small portion of leisure,” were the basis of his popular reputation. The earliest and best, Letters of a British Spy, appeared in the Richmond Argus (1803); the tenth edition (1832) contained a sketch of the author by P. H. Creese. Some of its chapters, especially “The Blind Preacher,” were vastly popular. The Rainbow (1804), and The Old Bachelor (1812), both essays from the Richmond Enquirer, were less noticed, being oppressed with rhetoric. His most ambitious work, a Life of Patrick Henry (1817), reached a fifteenth edition 1852. Its biographical facts, rather than its style, have given it value. Wirt died at Washington on the 18th of February 1834. (See his Life, by J. P. Kennedy, 2 vols., 1849.) His second wife, Elizabeth Washington (1784–1857), daughter of Colonel Gamble, of Richmond, published in Baltimore a quarto Flora’s Dictionary (1820–1855).
