On the very day of his commission, November 13, he sketched on the fly-leaf of a record-book a simple plan which revealed his purpose of keeping careful records and of obtaining from the heads of departments who might consult him copies of all documents concerning which he might be asked for opinions.[1] Some months later, under date of March 27, 1818, Wirt addressed a letter to Hugh Nelson, chairman of the judiciary committee of the House of Representatives. In this letter he set forth what he conceived to be some defects of the law of 1789, the law establishing his office, and drew attention to such improvements as he hoped that congress might be induced to make. It was an illuminating, if not a constructive statement. It probably accomplished little, if any, change, for it never reached the House directly, but was filed away with other committee material, and gained publicity only in 1849, fifteen years after Wirt's death, when it was printed at length in the Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt, written by Wirt's friend, John Pendleton Kennedy. Then it attracted attention, especially among the members of the legal profession. Its substance merits consideration.[2]
Wirt began with an examination of the Judiciary Act of September 24, 1789. There the duties of the attorney-general were briefly set forth. They had not been more clearly elaborated in any later enactment. Wirt next sought for the records of opinions as given by his predecessors in the office—for letter-books, official correspondence and documentary evidence, but could not find a trace of these. Accordingly he concluded that there could have been neither consistency in the opinions nor uniformity in the practices of the attorneys-general. He indicated that in various ways he had discovered that his forerunners had been called on for opinions from many sources—committees of Congress, district attorneys, collectors of customs
- ↑ The original record is quoted by James S. Easby-Smith, The Department of Justice: Its History and Functions (1904), page 10.
- ↑ Kennedy, Memoirs of. . .Wirt (1st ed., 1849), vol. ii, pp. 61-65. The Monthly Law Reporter, December, 1850, pp. 373–379. This article reprints from Kennedy the Wirt letter of March 27, 1818, and comments thoughtfully on Kennedy's book, but makes several erroneous statements.
