VA, USA
Virginia Legislature Flees to Staunton
June 4, 1781
After Jouett's warning, most members of the Virginia legislature fled Charlottesville and reconvened in Staunton, across the Blue Ridge Mountains. The flight was the third relocation of the legislature in six months — from Richmond to Charlottesville to Staunton — and it underscored the near-collapse of Virginia's state government during the spring of 1781.
In Staunton, the legislature elected Thomas Nelson Jr. to replace Jefferson as governor. Nelson's selection reflected a desire for more aggressive military leadership. Within months, Nelson would personally command Virginia militia at the siege of Yorktown, providing the kind of hands-on wartime leadership that Jefferson had been unable or unwilling to exercise.
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.
The Virginia equivalent of Paul Revere, Jouett spotted Tarleton's cavalry at Cuckoo Tavern and rode approximately forty miles through the night to warn Jefferson at Monticello and the legislature at Charlottesville. His ride, through rough terrain in darkness, gave the government barely enough time to escape.
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.