William Wirt Kimball

Wirt, William, (b. Bladensburg, Md., 8 Nov. 1772; d. Washington, D.C., 18 Feb. 1834), lawyer and statesman. A prominent lawyer in the early republic, William Wirt helped shape its legal system. Though Wirt was inclined toward a scholar's life, he never escaped the financial necessity of frequently arguing in court. As United States attorney general (1817–1829) in cabinets confronted with controversial issues, he seemed uninterested in politics. When nominated for president by the Antimasons in 1832, he wished to withdraw in favor of Whig candidate, Henry Clay, but did not. Originally a states' righter, he moved toward constitutional nationalism under the influence of Chief Justice John Marshall. Still, he seemed not to understand the connections between law and politics.

Wirt argued 174 cases in the Supreme Court, some as attorney general for the government and more as counsel for private clients. (He and his contemporaries saw no impropriety in a mixture of the two roles.) In his long tenure as attorney general, he strengthened that office, which before his term had been quite weak. His advocacy of state power over a chartered corporation was unsuccessful in Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819). But in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), the Court's first Commerce Clause case, he assisted Daniel Webster in breaking New York's steamboat monopoly. His argument for the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) was strong, though overshadowed by William Pinkney's powerful exposition of nationalism. In a valiant effort near the end of his life, he won the case of Worcester v. Georgia (1832), yet found that Indian removal to the West was unavoidable (see Cherokee Cases).

Maurice Baxter

Letters of the British Spy, ten Addisonian essays by William Wirt, published in 1803. Purportedly from an English traveler to a member of Parliament, they present a vivid picture of life in the contemporary Southern states of the U.S.

William Wirt Kimball 1848-1930, American naval officer, b. Paris, Maine, grad. Annapolis, 1869. One of the first to serve on torpedo boats, he did much in the 1880s to develop magazine and machine guns, and he designed armored cars. In the 90s he did important work in the development of the submarine, and in the Spanish-American War, having organized the navy's first torpedo-boat flotilla, he commanded the Atlantic torpedo-boat flotilla. Kimball was made rear admiral in 1908, and in 1909 he commanded the expeditionary forces sent to Nicaragua. He retired from active duty in 1910.