Watching what has happened to Virginia over the last twenty years is heartbreaking. It no longer feels like the Southern state that helped found the American Republic. That matters because Virginia was the most important state in the creation of the American Republic. It was the breadbasket of independence. Without Virginia, the Revolution is much harder to win, and the government the Founders built is much harder to imagine. This is a ranking of the eight greatest Virginians in the formation of the American Republic.

A note on the list: I first tried to write the ten greatest Virginians. It got crowded, and looked like an odd mix. There will be a second list: Virginia’s greatest military commanders. Ranking these eight was hard. Most of the names and their positions are interchangeable. In my view, only 1 and 2 are locked.

8. George Wythe

Wythe is the most important Virginian most Americans cannot name. He signed the Declaration of Independence, helped build Virginia’s legal system, and trained the men who had to make the new country work. Jefferson read law in his office. So did John Marshall and Henry Clay. If Jefferson is second on this list, the man who molded Jefferson’s mind belongs on it too.

Wythe was not a great orator and not a famous wartime commander. He was a teacher and a judge. In the House of Burgesses he pushed toward independence early. At William & Mary he became the first professor of law in the United States, which sounds like a footnote until you remember what a republic has to do. It has to reproduce its own lawyers, judges, and public men or it will be run by people who do not share its principles. Wythe sat in the Constitutional Convention and then left before the signing. He wanted something stronger than the Articles. He did not stay to bless every detail of the new charter.

His later life tells you what kind of man he was. As Virginia’s chancellor he tried to make the courts honest. Late in life, he freed the enslaved people in his household and tried to provide for them. In 1806, his grandnephew poisoned him over money. That is a grim ending for a founder, and it is also a Virginia story: a man who helped create the republic, killed in his own house by the generation that came after him. Wythe does not leave a single famous sentence. He leaves Jefferson, a legal tradition, and the reminder that the quiet men in the room did as much as the ones on the monuments.