William Armistead Burwell (15 March 1780–16 February 1821), member of the House of Representatives, was born in Mecklenburg County, the son of Thacker Burwell, who died later in 1780, and Mary Armistead Burwell. After attending the College of William and Mary in 1798, he settled in Franklin County, where he used his inheritance to begin acquiring property. By 1820 Burwell owned 5,578 acres of land, about seventy-five enslaved workers, and a library of more than eight hundred volumes. Altogether, his personal property at the time of his death was worth about $33,000.
A moody man who was frequently ill, Burwell visited Thomas Jefferson in Washington in March 1804 while on a recuperative holiday and in May accepted the president's offer to join his household as private secretary. Off and on from the spring of 1804 until the autumn of 1806 he acted in that capacity. Burwell came to consider Jefferson a father figure. He chiefly looked after minor personal matters and took care of visiting dignitaries, but he also assisted the president in preparing two messages to Congress. Burwell was frequently absent from Washington because from 1804 to 1806 he also represented Franklin County in the House of Delegates. There he helped coordinate Jefferson's followers in the assembly when the president's policies came under attack from John Randolph of Roanoke. During the 1804–1805 session Burwell served on the Committees for Courts of Justice and of Privileges and Elections, and during the 1805–1806 session he sat on the Committees for Courts of Justice and of Finance.
In August 1806 Burwell announced his candidacy for the House of Representatives for the district comprising Bedford, Franklin, Henry, and Patrick Counties to fill the vacancy caused by the resignation of Christopher Henderson Clark. Burwell easily won election, entered Congress on 1 December 1806, and was reelected for the remainder of his life. He began his congressional career as an outspoken advocate of Jefferson's policies, and in 1811 he was appointed to the powerful Committee of Ways and Means. Burwell was never a leading member of the House, however, and his influence waned after Jefferson's retirement and slipped further after the War of 1812. He was often critical of the administration of James Monroe. The genial Henry Clay worked well with Burwell and described him as "a most excellent and intelligent person," but John Quincy Adams, a misanthropic colleague with different political instincts, wrote that Burwell "floated down the stream of time with the current, and always had the satisfaction of being in his own eyes a pure and incorruptible patriot. Virginia teems with this brood more than any other State in the Union, and they are far from being the worst men among us. Such men occasionally render service to the nation by preventing harm; but they are quite as apt to prevent good, and they never do any."
On 3 January 1809 Burwell married Letitia McCreery, niece and heir of Representative William McCreery, of Baltimore, Maryland. Their one surviving child, William McCreery Burwell, represented Bedford County in the General Assembly on several occasions between the 1830s and the mid-1860s. He later lived in New Orleans and there edited DeBow's Review. William Armistead Burwell died in Washington on 16 February 1821 and was buried beside the grave of his wife, who had died in December 1816, in a family cemetery near Reisterstown in Carroll County, Maryland. At least a portion of his remains were moved to Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., in December 1839, but later, in December 1850, remains presumed to be those of Burwell and his wife were removed from the family cemetery in Carroll County and reinterred in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore.
Sources Consulted: S. Bassett French MS Biographical Sketches, Accession 21332, Personal Papers Collection, Library of Virginia (LVA); family records in William McCreery Burwell Papers, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia (UVA), Charlottesville; correspondence in William Armistead Burwell Papers (including draft memoirs published as Gerard W. Gawalt, ed., "'Strict Truth': The Narrative of William Armistead Burwell," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 101 [1993]: 103–132), and Thomas Jefferson Papers, both Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., in Burwell Family Papers and Francis Walker Gilmer Papers, UVA, and in several collections at Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond; four letters dated 1807–1815 in Noble E. Cunningham Jr., ed., Circular Letters of Congressmen to Their Constituents, 1789–1829 (1978), 1:511–516, 577–585, 644–652, 939–948; Baltimore Co., MD, Marriage Licenses (1803–1815), 118, Maryland State Archives, Annapolis; Henry Clay to Francis Walker Gilmer, 4 Aug. 1821, in Clay Papers, 3:104–105 (first quotation); Charles Francis Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams (1874–1877), 5:281–282 (second quotation); National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser, 9 Jan. 1809; Land Tax Returns, Franklin Co., 1820, Auditor of Public Accounts, Record Group 48, LVA; Ellen G. Miles, Saint-Mémin and the Neoclassical Profile Portrait in America (1994), 259 (portrait); will and estate inventory in Franklin Co. Will Book, 2:374–376, 402–416; obituaries in Washington Daily National Intelligencer, 17 Feb. 1821, copied with a few alterations in Alexandria Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 19 Feb. 1821, Richmond Commercial Compiler, 19 Feb. 1821, and Richmond Enquirer, 20 Feb. 1821; account of funeral in Richmond Enquirer, 22 Feb. 1821.