Meriwether Lewis was born at the dawn of the American Revolution, on August 18th, 1774 in Albemarle County, Virginia. It was one of the epicenters of the revolution that would go onto to shake the world. Thirty one year old Thomas Jefferson, married and with a newborn baby of his own, lived eleven miles away at his mountain top home, Monticello.
Jefferson had just completed writing A Summary View of the Rights of British America, a radical attack on the British Parliament. It would serve as talking points for Virginia’s delegates attending the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in September. Jefferson became ill with dysentery while traveling to the meeting and missed attending the congress.
The United Colonies had called the congress in response to the British Parliament closing the ports of Boston in retaliation for the Boston Tea Party. An open rupture and civil war was threatening, but it was not yet a reality. Virginia’s delegates issued Jefferson’s Summary View as a pamphlet which was circulated throughout the colonies and Europe. Two years later Jefferson attended the Second Continental Congress at Philadelphia, where he was chosen to write the Declaration of Independence, issued on July 4th, 1776.
The First Continental Congress was presided over by Jefferson’s cousin, Peyton Randolph, Speaker of the Virginia House of Burgesses. The Randolphs, Jeffersons, Meriwethers and Lewises were among the leading families of Virginia’s western frontier, bound together by ties of kinship and intermarriage. They were of English and Welsh descent. For generations, their families had migrated west along the James River, seeking new lands for their tobacco plantations. By the 1770’s they had settled in the low rolling foothills on the east side of the Blue Ridge Mountains called the Virginia Piedmont.1
The Lewis family lived at Locust Hill, near Three Notched Road, the main east-west road of central Virginia. Marked by trees with three notches and mileage numbers cut in them, the road went from Richmond near the Atlantic Coast to Staunton in the Great Valley on the other side of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The road had been surveyed and laid out by Peter Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s father. Charlottesville, established in 1762 on the Rivanna River, served as the county seat.
Locust Hill sketch from “Lucy Meriwether Lewis Marks: Her Life and Her World” (www.monticello.org)
William Lewis, Meriwether’s father, inherited 1,900 acres of land from his father, Robert Lewis, and built a large log home called Locust Hill, a few miles northwest of Charlottesville. It was located on an elevated piece of ground near Ivy Creek with a grove of locust trees and a beautiful view of the surrounding mountains. The Meriwether and Lewis families were the first settlers in Albemarle County and its largest landholders.2 The Lewis’s were related to George Washington by marriage. Robert Lewis’s brother, Fielding, was married to Betty, George Washington’s sister.
Meriwether’s mother, Lucy Meriwether, who was born in 1752, was the eighth of eleven children. Her father, Thomas Meriwether, a man of great wealth, was known as a “healer”—someone who used medicinal plants to cure illnesses. Lucy would grow up to become a noted healer herself. After the death of Lucy’s father in 1756, her mother married Robert Lewis, and the family moved to Lewis’s nearby Belvoir plantation.
Lucy’s stepfather became her father-in-law, because when Lucy was 17 years old she married 37 year old William, his son by his first wife.3 Like many marriages in Virginia there was a great age discrepancy between husbands and wives, with men marrying girls in their teens. Marriage between cousins was also common in Virginia, as it kept the land in the family.4
The men of Virginia’s western frontier became the elite ranger corps of the American revolutionary army due to their skill with hunting rifles and tomahawks. They were called “shirtmen” because they wore fringed hunting shirts made from heavy cotton fabric over their clothes. At first their enemies called them the “damn’d shirtmen,” but it was soon adopted as a patriotic name. In June, 1775, members of the Virginia House of Burgesses wore hunting shirts with tomahawks strapped to their sides to honor the shirtmen.5 A year later the burgesses would declare themselves to be the Virginia General Assembly, independent of British rule.
Meriwether’s father, William Lewis, volunteered to serve without pay in the Virginia militia in 1775. But before we continue with the story of Lewis’s childhood, another native son of Albemarle County needs to be introduced—George Rogers Clark, the older brother of William Clark, who became one of the greatest heroes of the Revolutionary War and the most famous of all the Virginia shirtmen.
In 1778–1779, George Rogers Clark’s campaign against the British gained Northwest Territory for the United States.
The French towns of St. Louis, Ste. Genevieve and New Madrid were under Spanish rule on the west side of the Mississisppi. Kaskaskia, Prairie du Rocher, Cahokia and Vincennes were under British rule on the east side.