VA, USA
British Troops at Monticello
June 4, 1781
A detachment of Tarleton's cavalry, led by Captain Kenneth McLeod, reached Monticello shortly after Jefferson's departure. The British troops spent approximately eighteen hours at the estate, consuming food and wine from Jefferson's stores but causing relatively little physical damage. Tarleton had reportedly ordered that the property be treated with respect.
The enslaved people at Monticello were left to manage the British occupation on their own. Isaac Jefferson, then a young boy, later recalled the soldiers' arrival in his memoirs. Some enslaved people at Monticello used the confusion of the British raid as an opportunity to escape. The episode reveals how military events disrupted the plantation system and created moments of both danger and possibility for enslaved communities.
People Involved
Narrowly escaped capture at Monticello on June 4, 1781, when Tarleton's cavalry raided Charlottesville. Jefferson left his mountaintop home minutes before British soldiers arrived. The incident, coming at the end of a difficult governorship, was used by his political enemies to question his courage and leadership.
Aggressive British cavalry officer whose raid on Charlottesville nearly captured Jefferson and the Virginia legislature. Tarleton was known for the speed and brutality of his operations, and his name was feared throughout Virginia and the Carolinas. His raid on Charlottesville was one of the most daring cavalry operations of the war.
An enslaved man at Monticello whose later memoirs, dictated in the 1840s, provide a rare firsthand account of life on Jefferson's plantation and the events of the Revolution as experienced by enslaved people. His recollections of Tarleton's raid and the wartime disruption at Monticello are among the few accounts from an enslaved perspective.
Jefferson's wife, who was in poor health during much of the Revolution and gave birth to a daughter just weeks before Tarleton's raid. She fled Monticello with her husband and children, enduring the physical hardship of wartime flight while already weakened. She died in September 1782, at age thirty-three.