Meriwether Lewis as Slaveowner

Much has been documented about William Clark’s ownership of slaves, including the famous York who accompanied him on the Lewis & Clark Expedition. Clark, while generally considered by his white contemporaries to be a kind man, comes off as a harsh master in his own letters when he describes punishing his lazy slaves and “trouncing” York for his discontent after the Expedition’s return. Less has been written about Meriwether Lewis’ attitude toward slavery, but he too was a slave owner.

Overseeing the slaves

Lewis’s father William died in 1779, leaving his 5 year-old son Meriwether as the primary heir to his estate. This included his plantation at Locust Hill in Albemarle County, Virginia (about 1600 acres) and other property, including 24 slaves. Until Meriwether Lewis reached the age of majority, his guardians and an overseer managed the slaves at Locust Hill.  After the death of his step-father John Marks in 1791, Meriwether ended his schooling, helped his widowed mother move back from Georgia, and somewhat reluctantly took on the job of the day-to-day running of the plantation. He was 18.

By this time, wheat had become the primary agricultural crop at Locust Hill, a crop that was less depleting to the soil than tobacco – but also less profitable. It was also more complicated to grow and harvest than tobacco, and required more training of slave labor. The cultivation of wheat required permanent, plowed fields, including the need to periodically manure the fields and rotate the crops to maintain the fertility of the soil. The use of plows meant that you needed draft animals and slaves trained in their care. The need to transport grain to the mill, and fodder and manure to your farm, meant you had to maintain wagons, horses, and a blacksmith shop. Lewis had a lifetime of agricultural learning ahead of him, as well as getting used to managing the day-to-day task of assigning work and supervising the slaves.

Little is known about Lewis’s feelings about the slaves in his employ. No doubt slaves would have worked in the home at Locust Hill, as well as in the fields, so he would have gotten to know them well. The slaves would have required food, clothing, and medical care. Lewis’s mother Lucy Marks was an extremely capable woman and a skilled herb doctor, and it is known that she treated the Lewis slaves humanely, played the primary role in their supervision, and cared for their medical problems herself. Evidenced by a letter written to Lucy by one of her former slaves, at least some of them had been taught to read and write.

19th century cartoon, "Little Lewis Sold"

What is also clear is that Meriwether Lewis was ill-suited to the role of country planter and slave owner. In 1794, when the Whiskey Rebellion broke out, Lewis left his life and Locust Hill and joined the Virginia militia and then the regular army. He never looked back.

Although army officers were allowed and frequently did take a slave manservant into the field to cook their meals, clean their quarters, brush their uniforms, polish their boots, and groom their horses, Lewis apparently never did. An inveterate loner and rambler, Lewis seemed not to want the baggage and overhead of having to supervise and provide for a slave. He did, however, agree to let Clark take York along on the Expedition in 1803, as long as Clark believed that York could withstand the trip.

York by Charles M. Russell

Although Lewis no doubt got an up-close and personal look at the contradictory attitude towards slavery held by his mentor, Thomas Jefferson, he seems to have given the matter no deep thought. “With regards to blacks, he made no distinctions between them, made no study of them, had no thought that they could be of benefit to America in any capacity other than slave labor,” Stephen Ambrose wrote about Lewis in Undaunted Courage. This attitude likely held true for York as well as the other slaves Lewis had dealt with in his life. Clark was in charge of York during the expedition, and aside from assigning work to York like any other enlisted man, Lewis left any supervision or discipline of York to Clark. Nevertheless, York was allowed the special privilege of carrying a gun, and when they reached the Pacific Coast, Lewis did allow York (along with Sacagawea) to vote in the poll of where to make their winter camp. Clearly York had proved himself, and Lewis’s world view could expand enough to concede that even a slave deserved basic rights.

Lewis returned to Locust Hill for a visit after the Expedition, but he had no desire to take up his old role as plantation owner. Upon his arrival in St. Louis as governor of Upper Louisiana in 1808, Lewis once again showed his reluctance to take on the daily supervision of a slave, choosing not to take any of the slaves from Locust Hill with him. Instead he hired a free black man, John Pernia (or Pernier), to be his manservant. Lewis was no doubt aware of Clark’s conflict with York and the thrashing York got at Clark’s hands. It is unknown whether Lewis might have tried to intervene on York’s behalf or moderate Clark’s anger at York … if he did, he did not succeed.

Unfortunately, though their relationship was not one of master and slave, Lewis was destined for conflict with John Pernia. Financial problems led to him getting seriously behind in paying Pernia’s salary. Pernia was with Lewis on the Natchez Trace at the time of Lewis’s death, and some have speculated that Pernia may have played a role in Lewis’s shooting or at least robbed him of the cash he was carrying after his demise. Pernia did travel all the way to Monticello to seek out payment of the $240 in back pay that Lewis owed him, but was rebuffed by Jefferson, as well as Clark, Madison, and Lewis’s family.

In despair, John Pernia later committed suicide. The tradition that prior to his death he was confronted by a Lewis family member in his native New Orleans, supposedly carrying the gold presentation watch given to Lewis by Jefferson, is apocryphal.

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Lewis & Clark road trip: Meriwether Lewis’s grave

Location: On the Natchez Trace Parkway, seven miles southeast of Hohenwald, Tennessee (about 80 miles south of Nashville)

Lewis family vows to fight for truth

The broken shaft monument to Meriwether Lewis

Thus read the recent headline in the Omaha World-Herald. For the last 14 years, the family of Meriwether Lewis has been petitioning the National Park Service to allow them to have the body of their famous ancestor exhumed from his Tennessee grave. They’ve even banked DNA so that it can be determined beyond a doubt that the body in the grave is Lewis, and with modern forensic techiques, they hope to settle the historical mystery that surrounds his tragic death just three years after returning home in triumph from the Pacific Ocean. Was it suicide or murder?

Our novel To the Ends of the Earth is all about the mystery of Lewis’s death, so I’m keenly interested to see how the discussion comes out. I understand the feelings of those who say they wish to let Lewis rest in peace, but given the enthusiasm of the family for the project and the fact that they are willing to pay for it, I think the Park Service should allow them to proceed. While no expert on historical forensics, I have watched enough PBS documentaries to know that there are wonders being performed in the field; for example, the work being done at Jamestown is rewriting what was known about that colony. If Lewis’s body is in reasonable condition, it is possible that there is still much to learn about the death of a great American hero.

Because he died violently and in such a remote area, Lewis’s grave has quite a saga of its own, even not counting the recent controversy. The first of Lewis’s friends to visit the grave was the ornithologist Alexander Wilson, who trekked to the sight about 18 months after Lewis’s death. Wilson interviewed the Grinders, the couple who ran the remote inn where Lewis died, and noted that:

He lies buried close by the common path, with a few loose rails thrown over his grave. I gave Grinder money to put a post fence around it, to shelter it from the hogs, and from the wolves; and he gave me his written promise he would do it. I left this place in a very melancholy mood, which was not much allayed by the prospect of the gloomy and savage wilderness which I was just entering alone.

Mary on the Old Natchez Trace -- tree down!

Fortunately for Lewis’s friends today, the “gloomy and savage wilderness” has been transformed into the magnificent Natchez Trace Parkway. But numerous sections of the Old Trace remain, and I highly recommended you stop often along this road to let the ancient trail come to life in your imagination. Even on the shortest hikes, vines intertwine in the tree canopy to make a dense green roof. Along the path, fallen trees lie with generations of old leaves and sticks. At one stop we saw the graves of unknown Confederate soldiers; at another, stands of dogwood that evoked the memory of Meriwether Lewis and his companions riding this wild, lonely road in the final days of his life in October, 1809.

By 1843, the Chickasaw Indians had been forced to remove to Oklahoma, and the area was becoming settled by pioneers. The Tennessee state law establishing the area as Lewis County paid tribute to the Trace’s most famous, if deceased, resident, but noted that the grave was “neglected.” In 1848, the state went even further, appropriating $500 (some $12,000 in today’s money) to erect a suitable monument at the gravesite. The Kirby family of stonemasons from nearby Columbia, Tennessee was chosen to do the work, and they created a strikingly large limestone “broken shaft,” symbolic of a life cut short.

A monument committee “took great care to identify the grave,” though they recorded maddeningly few details of how they did so. By that time, Lewis had been joined by a pioneer cemetery, and it seems that more than one body was exhumed before the committee found Lewis. The coffin was positively identified by the blacksmith who had made its nails, and the  “upper portion of the skeleton examined.” This indicates that at least as of 1848, water had not entered the grave and Lewis’s body had not turned to dust.

The monument was placed over the grave, though it is unknown whether Lewis was placed in a new coffin or whether a vault was included with the reburial. The monument was then enclosed with a small iron rail fence, which remained until the Civil War when John Bell Hood’s troops liberated it to make horseshoes.

Meriwether Lewis's grave and the pioneer cemetery, probably before 1915

The war and its struggles left Tennessee, like other states of the Old South, struggling and unable to give much attention to matters of history. Visitors to the Lewis gravesite in the 1890s recorded that it was in a place of “perfect solitude and desolation,” and that moss had overgrown the inscriptions on the plinth and was creeping up the shaft itself. Interest in Lewis & Clark began to revive with the 1903-1906 centennial of the Expedition, and in 1905, travel writer John Swain wrote movingly of the isolation of the graves of Lewis and the pioneers, and speculated that “the soul of Lewis has become the spirit of this ancient roadway.”

By the 1920s, the monument was described as a “sad wreck” defaced by graffiti, and the gravestones of the pioneers were decayed and crumbling. Historians and local civic leaders formed an association to renovate the monument. They had little trouble persuading President Calvin Coolidge to designate the gravesite as a national monument. Under the enthusiastic direction of the staff at nearby Shiloh National Battlefield, the monument was reinforced and cemented and the shaft securely fastened back into place. A fence and large flagpole were erected, and the pioneer gravestones replaced with flat grave markers.

Liz leaving a flag in remembrance of this great American who has come to mean so much to us.

In the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps did extensive work at the site, cleaning up the woods, clearing trails for hiking and horseback riding, and putting in erosion control. Eventually, the site became part of the Natchez Trace Parkway, with parking, picnic tables, a great campground, and a replica of Grinder’s Stand. In 2001, the stone base of the monument was replaced with a beautiful new base that made the inscriptions once again legible, and the monument was cleaned. In 2009, a graveside memorial service was held for Lewis to mark the 200th anniversary of his passing.

For more information:

Great slideshow of the 2009 ceremony. The combination of descendants, reenactors, and members of the military is genuinely moving.

The Death of Meriwether Lewis: An Historic Crime Scene Investigation

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Old Doc Walker: Meriwether Lewis’s Exploring Ancestor

Meriwether Lewis was not the first famous explorer and journalist in his family. That honor belongs to Dr. Thomas Walker, one of the first white men to see Kentucky and the first to provide a written account of his trip through the Cumberland Gap.

1764 home "Castle Hill," bullt by Thomas Walker

Originally from Staffordshire, England, Thomas Walker’s ancestors arrived in America in 1650 and soon took a prominent place in colonial Virginia. Born in 1715 in King and Queen County, Virginia, Thomas’s early life reads like a resume for a successful Tidewater gentleman. Educated at the College of William and Mary, he studied medicine in Williamsburg under his brother-in-law, Dr. George Gilmer. In 1741, Thomas married the widow of a very rich, prominent Virginia gentleman, Nicholas Meriwether  (the great uncle of our own Meriwether Lewis). Thomas and Mildred built a home, Castle Hill, on her 15,000-acre estate in Albemarle County, east of Charlottesville, where they raised a whopping 12 children.

Managing Mildred’s lands was almost a full-time job, and Walker soon learned the art of land management and surveying. He met others interested in the same thing, most notably his neighbor Peter Jefferson, a successful planter. Thomas Walker served as Peter Jefferson’s personal physician and the two men became trusted friends. (Walker was appointed guardian of Peter’s son, fourteen year-old Thomas Jefferson, after Peter’s death in 1757.)

Walker loved the wilderness, and the exploration bug bit him hard. He began making a name for himself as an explorer and surveyor. As early as 1743, Walker led an expedition to the virgin lands to the west, getting as far as present-day Kingsport, Tennessee. In 1749, Walker joined a number of other prominent Virginia men in establishing the Loyal Land Company, which petitioned the colonial government of Virginia for a huge grant of land west of the Allegheny Mountains. In addition to Walker, charter members of the company included Peter Jefferson, Joshua Fry, James Maury, and Thomas Meriwether (Meriwether Lewis’s grandfather).

Thomas Walker's 1750 route through the Cumberland Gap

The Loyal Land Company received a patent for 800,000 acres located along the southern border of Virginia (now southeastern Kentucky). The grant contained a provision that required settlement of the land within four years. Thomas Walker took the lead in exploring the company’s new territory, heading off on a four-month expedition to find a route and document what the land was like for potential settlers. On April 13, 1750, Walker wrote the following entry in his diary:

“We went four miles to large Creek, which we called Cedar (Indian) Creek, being a branch of Bear Grass (Powell’s), and from thence six miles to Cave Gap (Cumberland Gap), the land being levil [sic]. On the north side of the gap is a large Spring, which falls very fast, and just above the Spring is a small entrance to a large Cave (Cudjo Cavern), which   the Spring runs through, and there is a constant Stream of cool air issuing out. The Spring is sufficient to turn Mill. Just at the foot of the Hill is a Laurel Thicket, and the Spring Water runs through it. On the South side is a plain Indian Road… This Gap may be seen at a considerable distance, and there is no other, that I know of, except one about two miles to the North of it, which does not appear to be so low as the other.”

This was the famous Cumberland Gap, which would form a key passageway on the Wilderness Road through the Appalachian Mountains, the primary route used by western-traveling settlers for the next fifty years.

The Cumberland Gap (Civil War era illustration from Harpers Weekly)

For the remainder of his life, Walker continued to act as surveyor and land agent and served as an Indian treaty commissioner, member of the House of Burgesses and General Assembly, delegate to the Revolutionary Convention and a member of the Committee of Public Safety. He was the kind of man people trusted. His son said of him, “(He) possesses all that life and good humor which we were all kept alive by in the woods.”

Walker died at his home in Albemarle in November 9, 1794. By that time, the Loyal Land Company had sold more than 200,000 acres, and the land that would be known as Kentucky was home to 38,000 settlers, most of whom had traveled there through Walker’s discovery, the Cumberland Gap.

Walker is immortalized in the great Appalachian folk song “Cumberland Gap,” which in some versions contains the lyric, “The first white man in the Cumberland Gap was Old Doc Walker, an English Chap.” Here’s a fun version by the great British skiffle king Lonnie Donegan.

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Meet the Parents: William Lewis & Lucy Meriwether

Lucy Meriwether Lewis Marks as an older woman, by John Toole

“Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.” So goes an old English saying (and the starting premise for the remarkable “Up” series of films, by the way — start with “Seven Up” if you have not seen them.) So what loving hands shaped Lewis and Clark and brought them up to lead such a remarkable journey into the unmapped American west?

William Lewis, the father of Meriwether Lewis, was born in 1733, one of the eleven children of Robert Lewis and Jane Meriwether. Both of William’s parents came from the strong cousin network of old, respected Virginia families sometimes nicknamed “FFV” (First Families of Virginia). Like the rest of the FFVs, the Lewises and the Meriwethers worked together, pioneered together, and frequently intermarried.

William’s father Robert was a pioneer in the Piedmont territory where Albemarle County and Charlottesville would take root, and amassed over 21,000 acres. Under the laws and customs of the day, the oldest son stood to inherit most of Robert’s property, but Robert had done well enough that he could leave something to each of his sons. To William he left Ivy Creek, a tobacco plantation on which William built a sturdy home named Locust Hill.

Locust Hill, birthplace of Meriwether Lewis

Having come into his inheritance at about age 35, William was ready to settle down and find a wife, and he didn’t have to look very far. His mom had died a few years back, and his father had remarried a widow named Elizabeth Thornton Meriwether. Elizabeth had eleven children of her own, one of whom was an intelligent, energetic, and slender daughter named Lucy who was about 17 — prime marrying age. The marriage probably seemed very natural to both of them.

By the time their first son was born on August 18, 1774, Lucy had already known both joy and sorrow. She and William had a four-year-old daughter, Jane, but another named Lucinda had died as an infant. To honor both of their families, they named the boy Meriwether. The boy was said to have been tough and fearless from an early age, slipping out of the house to go hunting barefoot in the dark. I wonder if the name had something to do with it? Seems like he’d have to get tough or die.

Anyway, as rough-and-tumble as Meriwether may have been, his mother was more than a match for him. A family story goes that once, when Lucy decided to switch Meriwether and Reuben, his younger brother, for getting their clothes dirty, Meriwether defied her, saying, “Now Mammy, you find a switch and I will fend back.” Apparently that only happened once!

Revolutionary militia soldiers and officer. Years later Meriwether Lewis would follow his father's example as a militia volunteer.

Lucy herself soon had to grow tough and wise beyond her years. The American Revolution was underway, and William was one of the rebels. He was the third signer of the Albemarle County Declaration of Independence, and accepted a lieutenant’s commission in the Virginia militia. With her husband away, Lucy was in charge of the plantation and its 24 slaves. It was up to her to make sure that the tobacco crop was planted, harvested, and gotten to market, in the middle of a war zone, while caring for three small children. Family stories tell of the time that Lucy bagged a huge buck deer in front of the house, and the time she brandished a rifle to drive off a party of drunken British officers who showed up at Locust Hill.

Things were soon to get worse. While returning home to visit his family in the fall of 1779, William was caught in a flood of the Rivanna River. His horse was drowned and he arrived home soaked and chilled to the bone. A few days later, William Lewis was dead of pneumonia at age 43. Lucy was 27 years old. Meriwether was scarcely five.

It is said that on his deathbed, that William recommended his own successor, a friend and fellow patriot, Captain John Marks. In any case, six months after his father’s death, Meriwether had a new stepfather. Not a lot is known today about John Marks except that he too had the pioneer spirit. At the end of the Revolution, when Meriwether was 10, the Markses were among several families of the “cousin network” to move to a frontier settlement in Georgia. Tempered by war, sorrow, and motherhood, Lucy had by this time developed a commanding presence. It is said that she fired the drunken overseer of their wagon train and took charge of the procession herself.

In Georgia, Lucy and John had two children together, a son they named John Hastings and a daughter Mary. But in 1791, when Lucy was 39, her husband died. The cause is lost to history, though it appears the death was sudden and unexpected. At the completion of the school term, seventeen-year-old Meriwether, who had been away at school, came back to Georgia and helped his mother and the little ones move back to Locust Hill.

Lucy found postwar Virginia a changed world from the one in which she had grown up and begun her married life. The Rivanna River had been dredged and was now navigable to the James River and beyond to Richmond. Charlottesville and the surrounding towns were bursting with new stores, mills, and enterprises, not to mention the spectacular energy generated by Charlottesville’s leading resident (and part of Lucy’s cousin network), Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson.

For the next three years, Meriwether was her right arm. Lucy, her son, and her newly-married daughter Jane worked tirelessly to put the worn-out farm on some kind of paying basis, eventually converting from tobacco to wheat. Lucy also became famous for her sugar-cured hams, which local gourmet Jefferson considered the “nicest” around; every year he ordered several for Monticello’s table.

President Washington reviewing the troops putting down the Whiskey Rebellion, 1794

Hard as he worked, young Meriwether hated the confining life of the plantation; at the earliest decent opportunity, he enlisted in the Virginia militia (which needed volunteers to put down the “Whiskey Rebellion” in Pennsylvania) and then the regular army, never to live at Locust Hill again except when home on visits. We can only speculate about Lucy’s thoughts. Pride, certainly. But was there anger that the army that had taken William had also lured Meriwether away? Could she have been a little envious of his freedom to choose to roam? Certainly her son thought so:

so violently opposed is my governing passion for rambling, to the wishes of all my friends that I am led intentionally to err and then have vanity enough to hope for forgiveness. I do not know how to account for this Quixottic disposition of mine in any other manner or its being affected by any other cause than that of having inherited it in right of the Meriwether Family and it therefore more immediately calls on your charity to forgive those errors into which it may at any time lead me – Meriwether Lewis to Lucy Marks, May 22, 1795

Thanks, Mom: When struck with a violent stomachache and fever in the Montana wilderness, Meriwether Lewis knew just what to do with this chokecherry, brewing its twigs into a tea

Just 42 when her son left home for his life of history and adventure, Lucy Meriwether Lewis Marks had only begun to write her own legend. Somewhere along the line, Lucy had trained as a “yarb” or herb doctor, and earned a reputation as a skilled midwife. Her father was known as a healer, and she may have begun her training in childhood. There were many doctors in her family, both formally trained and in the folk tradition. Lucy probably began her medical practice by treating the slaves that worked on her and William’s plantation. As her reputation grew, she became sought after by her neighbors to deliver their babies and treat their ailments.

In her practice, Lucy would have grown herbs, compounded medicine, and kept books of herbal remedies known as “simples.” Though none of Lucy’s “reciepts” have survived, some of her son’s have; Meriwether Lewis was a remarkably adept and knowledgeable field doctor, with medical knowledge as good or better than most formally trained physicians of his day. He learned at his mother’s knee and from her library of books on herbs and medicine. Lucy’s younger sons Reuben and Jack went on to become doctors.

For the next forty years, Lucy would ride the hills around Charlottesville, bringing comfort to the sick and new life into the world. Her intelligence and hard work were bolstered by an underlying faith. During her time in Georgia, she had converted to Methodism, a faith that was known, among other things, for an imperative to evangelize the slaves. Apparently, Lucy did work to bring Christianity to the 47 slaves she owned at Locust Hill, and taught a number of them to read and write. It seems, though, that she never considered the (financially ruinous) step of freeing them.

Lucy’s faith doubtless helped her endure the cruel blows that her older years were to bring. She probably wasn’t too surprised when her son Meriwether became a national hero after the Lewis & Clark Expedition, with a fame equivalent in our own time to that of a John Glenn or a Neil Armstrong. Some even thought Meriwether might become president one day. Mother and son were making plans that Lucy might move to St. Louis to be near him. But in the fall of 1809, Lucy received word that at age 35, Meriwether had been found shot to death at a remote inn along the Natchez Trace in Tennessee. Was it murder or suicide? The controversy never raged in Lucy’s mind. She believed her son’s valet, a Creole by the name of John Pernia, had murdered her son in order to steal his watch. When Pernia committed suicide not long after Meriwether’s death, did she see a guilty conscience at work ? Or only poetic justice?

The Maryland Hospital, later known as Spring Grove, where John Marks died

Lucy’s youngest son John Hastings also met a tragic fate. Trained as a physician, young Jack’s promise seemed unlimited. But he suffered from debilitating mental illness which included symptoms of paranoia. At one point he was apparently committed to the mental hospital in Williamsburg, where he refused to stay, fleeing the family for a hard life in Baltimore. Eventually, he was forcibly committed to the insane asylum there, where he died with pneumonia-like symptoms at age 37.

Lucy continued to practice medicine until very shortly before her death in 1837 at age 85. In her last years, she lived at Locust Hill with her daughter Jane, surrounded by Jane’s nine children and many grandchildren. Her son Reuben, once a fur trader up the Missouri River, had returned home to marry and live nearby, and her youngest daughter Mary had married a Georgian and returned to the old Marks family plantation in Georgia, where she became the mother of twelve children.

A great description of Lucy Marks was written by John Bakeless, who interviewed many Lewis family descendants in the 1940s while researching his ground-breaking Lewis & Clark: Partners in Discovery: “a Virginia lady of the patrician breed, a benevolent family autocrat, with a character so sharp and definite that her twentieth-century descendents still refer to her as Grandma Marks.”

Thanks to the fantastic exhibit on Lucy at Monticello, from which much of this information was gleaned. For more great reading, check it out at Lucy Meriwether Lewis Marks: Virginia Planter and Doctoress.

Next week: Meet John Clark and Ann Rogers

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Murder and Madness in the Lewis Family

While reading Larry Morris’s great book, The Fate of the Corps, we were shocked to learn that Meriwether Lewis’s younger half-brother John Marks suffered a debilitating mental breakdown some years after Lewis’s death. He fled his family’s attempts to confine him, disappearing without a trace. You can only imagine the pain it must have given to their mother to lose a second son.

Lewis's mother, Lucy Meriwether Lewis Marks

This puzzling detail adds to our speculation about Lewis’s own fate, and gives credence to the purported struggles with mental illness within his family. In 1812, three years after Lewis died along the Natchez Trace, his mentor Thomas Jefferson wrote in a biographical sketch:

Governor Lewis had from early life been subject to hypochondriac affections. It was a constitutional disposition in all the nearer branches of the family of his name, and were more immediately inherited by him from his father. They had not however been so strong as to give uneasiness to his family. While he lived with me in Washington, I observed at times sensible depressions of mind, but knowing their constitutional source, I estimated their course by what I had seen in the family.

Jefferson was related to the Lewis family by marriage, and from the time he first heard about Meriwether’s death, he believed that Lewis had committed suicide as a result of an inherited tendency towards depression and mental disturbance. Subsequent events could only have reinforced Jefferson’s feelings, for at the time he wrote this sketch of Meriwether, the former president was reeling from the news of a bizarre and scandalous murder committed by his own nephews, Lilburn and Isham Lewis.

Jefferson’s sister Lucy was married to Charles Lewis, the brother of Meriwether Lewis’s grandfather. Lucy and Charles moved from Virginia to Smithland, Kentucky, in 1808, hoping to escape financial troubles and personal unhappiness. Unfortunately for the luckless Lucy, she died soon after, leaving three unmarried daughters. Apparently, Charles Lewis wasn’t much help, for leadership of the family seems to have passed to her oldest son, Randolph, himself the father of eight children. In another blow to the family, Randolph and his wife soon died.

At that point, the responsibility fell on Lilburn Lewis, a widower with five children of his own. If he did in fact have a genetic predisposition to depression, it would be little wonder if Lilburn succumbed, burdened as he was with a staggering amount of debt and responsibility. Lilburn apparently took to drinking and spending most of his time with his younger brother Isham, who had come to live with the family in Smithland after bumming around St. Louis and Natchez, unable to find work despite his family connections.

Lilburn Lewis’s frustrations took a murderous turn on December 15, 1811. A 17-year-old slave named George accidentally broke a pitcher of water. Enraged, Lilburn called in all the slaves to watch and then, using a hatchet, killed George before their eyes. Then, he stuffed George’s body into the fireplace and attempted to burn it.

Although it was illegal to murder a slave, Lilburn might have gotten away with the crime if not for an incredible series of events by Mother Nature. 1811 was one of the most bizarre years in history for natural phenomena: floods, droughts, tornadoes, and hurricanes all assailed the country. A comet appeared in April and remained visible all year; an eclipse in September seemed to fortell the outbreak of war with the Indians at Tippecanoe. The already-fantastical passenger pigeon population exploded to record numbers, and mobs of squirrels ran into the Ohio River and drowned by the thousands.

Then, in the early morning hours of December 16, even as poor George’s body lay smoldering in the fireplace, a magnitude-8 earthquake centered around the town of New Madrid, Missouri, ripped through the Ohio valley. The quake was so violent that the Mississippi River actually flowed backward. In Kentucky, where the Lewises lived, the quake came with a deafening roar that threw settlers from their beds and caused major damage to fences, bridges, cabins, and brick homes.

Devastation from the New Madrid earthquake, 1811-12

Lilburn’s chimney collapsed. He ordered his slaves to rebuild it and brick up the body of George inside. The slaves had no choice. However, the New Madrid earthquakes had only begun, and they would expose Lilburn’s crime for the world to see. Two more magnitude-8 quakes were to follow, one on January 23, 1812, and the final and most devastating on February 7. Lilburn’s chimney tumbled to the ground, and a dog unearthed George’s remains and carried away his skull. When a neighbor saw the grisly find, he called the sheriff, and Lilburn and Isham were arrested for George’s murder.

Justice was never served, however. Out on bail, the Lewis brothers made a suicide pact and, on April 9, 1812, met in the family cemetery in Smithland with their rifles. Later, Isham claimed that Lilburn accidentally shot himself while showing Isham how to use the rifle. Shortly thereafter, Isham absconded from the scene and never contacted his family again; his final fate remains unknown.

Needless to say, the affair was a terrible embarrassment to the Lewis and Jefferson families, and it’s no surprise that Jefferson would find himself brooding over Meriwether’s fate as he penned the biography of his “beloved man,” and wondering about the internal forces that may have driven him to his death.

Want to know more? There is a good full-length book on the affair called Jefferson’s Nephews, by Boynton Merrill, Jr. (1976). On the literary side, the great American poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren explored this scandal in his epic poem about Lewis and Jefferson, Brother to Dragons (1953, revised 1979).

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