William host

William Wirt (born November 8, 1772 in Bladensburg , Province of Maryland , † February 18, 1834 in Washington, DC ) was an American lawyer and politician . He served as Attorney General under US Presidents James Monroe and John Quincy Adams .

Wirt was born in Maryland to a Swiss father and a German mother. He was raised privately and then studied law . In 1792 he was admitted to the Virginia bar.

After a few years as a lawyer, he became a clerk in the Virginia House of Representatives . In 1807, at the request of then President Thomas Jefferson, he was prosecutor in the high treason trial against Aaron Burr . In 1817 President Monroe appointed him as Minister of Justice in his cabinet . He held this office in the twelve years that followed until 1829. This is the longest term in office for an American attorney general to date. After retiring from office, he retired to Baltimore .

In June 1830 he was asked by a delegation of Cherokee Indians to defend their rights in the US Supreme Court . He argued that the Cherokee Indians as a "foreign nation" were not under the jurisdiction of the state of Georgia . With this in mind, he moved for the annulment of all indigenous laws of the state of Georgia.

The Supreme Court did not declare itself competent for this case, but left open the possibility of ruling in favor of the Indians in future cases. Wirt therefore simply waited until such a case arose. It did so in March 1831 when Georgia passed a new law that further restricted the rights of Indians. Again, Wirt represented the matter before the Supreme Court. This time, Chief Justice John Marshall made a personal decision , stating that the laws of Georgia should not be applied to the Indians and that the citizens of Georgia had no right to enter the Indian territory. With that, Wirt had won a legal victory. In practice, however, the judgment should hardly play a role.

In 1832, Wirt stepped into the public spotlight again by running for the highest office of the state in the 1832 presidential election as a candidate of the Anti-Masonic Party ( Anti-Masonic Party ); he had previously been a member of the Democratic Republican Party . The election ended with the re-election of the popular Andrew Jackson . Wirt, however, was the first third party candidate to win a state ( Vermont ) for itself, receiving seven electoral votes in Electoral College .

After this defeat he retired from politics and worked as a lawyer until his death in 1834.

In 1817 he published Life and Character of Patrick Henry , a highly regarded biography of Patrick Henry .

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personal data
SURNAME	Host, William
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American lawyer, politician, United States attorney general (1817–1829)
DATE OF BIRTH	November 8, 1772
PLACE OF BIRTH	Bladensburg , Maryland
DATE OF DEATH	February 18, 1834
Place of death	Washington, DC