It was not a dark nor stormy night when one legendary great man met his tragically grim fate. In fact, it was a pleasant, remarkably normal spring morning in 1806. George Wythe—esteemed lawyer, professor, judge, and revolutionary leader—sat down for breakfast at his Richmond home with his cook Lydia Broadnax, a promising black student under his care named Michael Brown, and his 17-year-old grandnephew George Wythe Sweeney.
Sweeney sulked by the fire, as teenagers are wont to do. Broadnax saw him toss wrinkled papers into the flames and thought nothing of it as she served what historians later called a “frugal breakfast.” The exact contents are lost to time—except for the coffee, which Sweeney had hunched over moments earlier.
That coffee pot, on that all-too-ordinary day, would deliver one of Virginia’s most beloved Founding Fathers a most cruel end…