VA, USA
Virginia Legislature Meets in Charlottesville (May 1781)
May 24, 1781
After Benedict Arnold's raid burned much of Richmond in January 1781 and Phillips's subsequent raid threatened the capital again in April–May, the Virginia General Assembly relocated to Charlottesville in late May 1781 to continue operating at a safer distance from British operations in the Tidewater. Governor Jefferson and the legislature met in the relative security of the Piedmont foothills.
The relocation demonstrated both the severity of the British threat to the Virginia government and the determination to keep the revolutionary administration functioning despite repeated disruption. The legislature had been meeting in Charlottesville for less than two weeks when Tarleton's raid on June 4, 1781 scattered both the legislators and the governor. Several members were captured; most fled west toward the Shenandoah Valley. The episode was the lowest point of Virginia's Revolutionary War experience.
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.