Meriwether Lewis’s Birthday

Part of my '250 Years Ago Today' Series

Meriwether Lewis (of Lewis and Clarke fame) was born 250 years ago this week, on August 18, 1774, at Locust Hill Plantation in Albemarle County, Virginia – about 10 miles from Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello.  Monticello was very much a work in progress when Meriwether was born; Jefferson had occupied the house only since 1770, when he moved into an outbuilding that later became the South Pavilion of the estate. 

In 1779, Meriwether’s father William died, and Meriwether moved with his mother (Lucy Meriwether) and stepfather Captain John Marks to Georgia.  In researching this topic, I discovered that Meriwether’s mother and father were fairly close cousins – first-cousin-once-removed.  Lucy’s great-grandfather Nicholas Meriwether was William’s grandfather.  In addition, William and Lucy were step-siblings; after Lucy’s father, Thomas Meriwether, passed away, her mother, Elizabeth Thornton Meriwether, married Robert Lewis, who was William Lewis’s father.  William was 16 years older than Lucy when their families merged.  Confusing.

William died of pneumonia in 1779, and the story goes that on his deathbed, William recommended his successor, a friend and fellow patriot Captain John Marks.  In any case, six months after his father’s death, Lucy married John Marks.  After the end of the Revolution, Lucy and John moved with other family members to a frontier settlement in Georgia.  In 1791, Captain Marks died, and Meriwether (who had been away at school in Virginia) came back to Georgia and helped his mother and younger siblings move back to Locust Hill. 

Meriwether’s schooling in Virginia put him in good company; one of his tutors was Parson Matthew Maury, the son of James Maury, who had tutored Thomas Jefferson a generation earlier.  While the Meriwether/Marks family had been in Georgia, Jefferson had continued to rise in status among the Virginia gentry.  Not contented with staying with his mother ‘down on the farm’ at Locust Hill, Meriwether joined the Virginia militia in 1794, and a year later he was commissioned as an ensign in the United States Army.  He rose to the rank of captain before ending his service in 1801.  Among his commanding officers was William Clark, who would later become his companion in the Corps of Discovery.  

In 1801, Meriwether was appointed as Secretary to President Jefferson.  This position carried out all of the tasks now spread throughout the modern White House Office.  The Secretary acted as a buffer between the president and the public, keeping the president's schedules and appointments, managing his correspondence, managing the staff, communicating with the press as well as being a close aide and advisor to the president in a manner that often required great skill and discretion. In terms of rank, it was a precursor to the modern White House Chief of Staff until the creation of that position in 1946.

When Jefferson began to plan for an expedition across the continent, he chose Meriwether to lead the expedition.  This was not based just on Meriwether’s competence as the President’s chief aide – while he was in Georgia, Meriwether (who did not attend school for the first few years his family lived in that frontier area) became a skilled woodsman and hunter and developed a passion for natural history.  He also learned how to deal with the Cherokee that he encountered while he was out in the wild, and this skill set him up well to be involved in what came to be known as the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Meriwether’s life after the expedition did not go very well.  Jefferson appointed him governor of the Louisiana Territory in 1807, but his tenure as governor was not easy.  He left St. Louis for Washington in 1809, in part to clear his name over allegations of fraud and financial mismanagement.  His original intent was to travel to Washington by ship from New Orleans, but he changed his mind and instead made an overland journey via the Natchez Trace to Nashville and then eastward.  On October 10,1809, he stopped at an inn about 70 miles southwest of Nashville.  In the predawn hours of the next morning, the innkeeper’s wife heard gunshots and found Meriwether badly injured from multiple gunshot wounds.  He died shortly after sunrise. 

Historians are not sure whether Meriwether died as a result of murder, suicide, or an accidental firearm discharge.  As historians are wont to do, they have argued about this for more than two centuries.  Four years after his untimely and unfortunate death at the age of 35, his mentor, employer, and friend Thomas Jefferson eulogized him with the following words:

"Of courage undaunted, possessing a firmness & perseverance of purpose which nothing but impossibilities could divert from its direction, careful as a father of those committed to his charge, yet steady in the maintenance of order & discipline, intimate with the Indian character, customs & principles, habituated to the hunting life, guarded by exact observation of the vegetables & animals of his own country, against losing time in the description of objects already possessed, honest, disinterested, liberal, of sound understanding and a fidelity to truth so scrupulous that whatever he should report would be as certain as if seen by ourselves, with all these qualifications as if selected and implanted by nature in one body, for this express purpose, I could have no hesitation in confiding the enterprise to him.”

Stephen Ambrose, whose 1997 book Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West spurred renewed interest in this expedition leading up the its bicentennial in 2003.  Ken Burns sealed the deal with his 1997 documentary Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery. Tim and I jumped on the bandwagon in 2000 when we undertook a three-week driving trip along the route taken by Lewis and Clark.  On our return, we traveled along the route of the Oregon Trail. Here’s the cover of the photo album I made about this trip.