One of the benefits/burdens of my esteemed position as the Director of the National State Attorneys General Program here at Columbia Law School (http://www.stateag.org) is that I have a rather obsessive interest in history of prosecution in the United States.  I suppose this is why I have been spending time on this beautiful August day purusing the "Memoirs of William Wirt" who is our country's longest serving U. S. Attorney General.(1817-1829). 

 

Wirt was a Virginian who first broke onto the national scene when he was appointed by Presdent Jefferson to be the Speciial Prosecutor in the matter of Vice President Aaron Burr.  (Wirt had previously published a number of speeches by one Patrick Henry and might have embellished a bit.  He is reputed to have created the cry "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death" a full forty years after Henry's alleged peroration.) 

 

Wirt then served as Attorney General in the cabinet of Presidents Monore and JQ Adams, but in 1828, he noted the inevitable rise of Andrew Jackson and the resulting end to his career in government.  In March of that year, he wrote to a friend:

 

"A man is bound to do all he can for his country.  But if his countrymen all choose to become Bedlamites, I see no good that can be done by committing himself to its manic fury. So I leave things to those "who hold winds in his fist"...and am content to paddle my canoe along the still suface of a mill pond, well satisfied to catch my little mess of fish, and eat them in peace, surrounded by my wife and children." (page 243 - Memoirs of William Wirt, edited by John P. Kennedy and published in 1849.)

 

Wirt's retreat to a bucolic life and the rise of Jacksonian democracy did not sideline the former AG for long.  Wirt soon agreed to the request of Sen. Daniel Webster to represent the Cherokee Tribe (Cherokee v. Ga.) in landmark litigation.  Further, and in a precursor to Sen Obama's decision to turn down tenure at U of Chicago, Wirt turned down a slot at UVa Law School (a request made by then former President Jefferson) and decided to run for President on the Anti-Masonic ticket (notwithstanding he was an active Freemason.)

 

He didn't win, but he did carry Vermont.

 

(Access to this book was made possible by those individuals employed by Google who are spending today in the basement of the New York Public Library digitizing long out-of-print books.  I thank each and every one of them!)