McDonald and Potts family tree » Lilburne Lewis (1776-1812)

Persönliche Daten Lilburne Lewis 

• Er wurde geboren im Jahr 1776 in Buck Island, Albemarle, Virginia, United States.
• Wohnhaft im Jahr 1810: Smithland, Livingston, Kentucky, United States, Smithland, Livingston, Kentucky, United States.
• Er ist verstorben am 9. April 1812 in Smithland, Livingston, Kentucky, er war 36 Jahre alt.
• Er wurde beerdigt in Salem, Livingston, Kentucky, United States.
• Ein Kind von Charles Lilburne Lewis und Lucy Jefferson

Familie von Lilburne Lewis

Notizen bei Lilburne Lewis

Jefferson’s sister Lucy was married to Charles Lewis, the brother of Meriwether Lewis’s grandfather. Lucy and Charles moved from Virginia to Smithland, Kentucky, in 1808, hoping to escape financial troubles and personal unhappiness. Unfortunately for the luckless Lucy, she died soon after, leaving three unmarried daughters. Apparently, Charles Lewis wasn’t much help, for leadership of the family seems to have passed to her oldest son, Randolph, himself the father of eight children. In another blow to the family, Randolph and his wife soon died.ags-visited="true">At that point, the responsibility fell on Lilburn Lewis, a widower with five children of his own. If he did in fact have a genetic predisposition to depression, it would be little wonder if Lilburn succumbed, burdened as he was with a staggering amount of debt and responsibility. Lilburn apparently took to drinking and spending most of his time with his younger brother Isham, who had come to live with the family in Smithland after bumming around St. Louis and Natchez, unable to find work despite his family connections.

frustrations took a murderous turn on December 15, 1811. A 17-year-old slave named George accidentally broke a pitcher of water. Enraged, Lilburn called in all the slaves to watch and then, using a hatchet, killed George before their eyes. Then, he stuffed George’s body into the fireplace and attempted to burn it.

ilburn might have gotten away with the crime if not for an incredible series of events by Mother Nature. 1811 was one of the most bizarre years in history for natural phenomena: floods, droughts, tornadoes, and hurricanes all assailed the country. A comet appeared in April and remained visible all year; an eclipse in September seemed to fortell the outbreak of war with the Indians at Tippecanoe. The already-fantastical passenger pigeon population exploded to record numbers, and mobs of squirrels ran into the Ohio River and drowned by the thousands.

e early morning hours of December 16, even as poor George’s body lay smoldering in the fireplace, a magnitude-8 earthquake centered around the town of New Madrid, Missouri, ripped through the Ohio valley. The quake was so violent that the Mississippi River actually flowed backward. In Kentucky, where the Lewises lived, the quake came with a deafening roar that threw settlers from their beds and caused major damage to fences, bridges, cabins, and brick homes.

-image-218" title="new_madrid" src="https://franceshunter.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/new_madrid.jpg?w=300&h=214" alt="Devastation from the New Madrid earthquake, 1811" width="300" height="214" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-218" data-attachment-id="218" data-permalink="https://franceshunter.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/murder-and-madness-in-the-lewis-family/new_madrid/" data-orig-file="https://franceshunter.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/new_madrid.jpg" data-orig-size="450,322" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":""}" data-image-title="new_madrid" data-image-description="" data-medium-file="https://franceshunter.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/new_madrid.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://franceshunter.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/new_madrid.jpg?w=450" /> Madrid earthquake, 1811-12

oice. However, the New Madrid earthquakes had only begun, and they would expose Lilburn’s crime for the world to see. Two more magnitude-8 quakes were to follow, one on January 23, 1812, and the final and most devastating on February 7. Lilburn’s chimney tumbled to the ground, and a dog unearthed George’s remains and carried away his skull. When a neighbor saw the grisly find, he called the sheriff, and Lilburn and Isham were arrested for George’s murder.

pact and, on April 9, 1812, met in the family cemetery in Smithland with their rifles. Later, Isham claimed that Lilburn accidentally shot himself while showing Isham how to use the rifle. Shortly thereafter, Isham absconded from the scene and never contacted his family again; his final fate remains unknown.

to the Lewis and Jefferson families, and it’s no surprise that Jefferson would find himself brooding over Meriwether’s fate as he penned the biography of his “beloved man,” and wondering about the internal forces that may have driven him to his death.

www.amazon.com/Jeffersons-Nephews-Boynton-Merrill-Jr/dp/0803282974/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214403431&sr=1-1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Jefferson’s Nephews, by Boynton Merrill, Jr. (1976). On the literary side, the great American poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren explored this scandal in his epic poem about Lewis and Jefferson, Brother to Dragons (1953, revised 1979).

/div>and settled himself not far from the frontier village of Smithland, in Livingston County, upriver from Paducah near the confluence of the Ohio and Cumberland rivers. This was, in fact, a family migration. The plan seems to have been developed by and dependent upon two of the Lewis sons, Randolph, who bought (for $9,100) 3,833 1/3 acres on the Ohio, and Lilburne, who bought (for $8,ooo) 1,500 acres, somewhat lower downriver, but still well above Paducah, both tracts largely undeveloped. Colonel Lewis and Lucy (he had married the sister of Thomas Jefferson), once rich but now on evil days, spent time sporadically on the new family holdings, as did Isham, a younger son, something of a feckless wanderer with no fixed occupation. And there were, of course, a number of slaves (though not enough for the task of adequately clearing land), among them a teen-age boy named George (John in my version), a sort of body-servant and handyman for Lilburne. On a bluff overlooking the Ohio, Lilburne built his house, “Rocky Hill,” presumably rather grand for time and place, with quarters and other outbuildings. After the death of Lucy, who was buried on Randolph's land, Colonel Lewis seems to have spent less and less time at “Rocky Hill.” About the same time Lilburne’s first wife died, but he married again, this time to Letitia, a daughter of one of the local families, Rutter by name. This wife was at “Rocky Hill,” pregnant in 1811 when George met his tragic end. I have stayed within the general outline of the available record, but have altered certain details. In my version Lilburne’s first wife does not appear, and I have disposed of a raft of young children as irrelevant to my theme. I omit the presence of Colonel Lewis** in Kentucky in May, 1812, before the trial of Isham. I have placed Lucy’s grave at “Rocky 

burne’s will at the May session of the County Court of that year.

rtain gaps in narrative, motivation, and theme. For instance, I have invented a story for Letitia and her husband, and have invented two characters: Aunt Cat, from whole cloth; and the brother of Letitia, who has only a shadowy existence in the record. My poem, in fact, had its earliest suggestion in bits of folk tale, garbled accounts heard in my boyhood. Then came a reference or two, years later, in print. Then, as the poem began to take shape in my head, I went to Smithland and sought out in the dim and dusty huggermugger of a sort of half-basement room (as I remember it) the little bundles of court records, suffering from damp and neglect, but sometimes tied up in faded red tape or string. My first version of Brother to Dragons, the poem, was published in 1953. Only in 1977 appeared a conscientious and scholarly account of the general subject, from Virginia days and genealogies forward, Jefferson’s Nephews, by Boynton Merrill, Jr. (now the owner of much of the Lewis estate). This book, fascinating and reliable as it is, does not change the basic thematic or dramatic outline of my tale. For instance, though Colonel Lewis takes refuge in Kentucky after his financial difficulties, this practical failure, though solving an old mystery, does not necessarily displace the sense of inner failure from which the Colonel suffers in the poem—and which might meld with the sense of more practical failure. It must have been hard to invite daily comparison for years with a brother-in-law of the stature of Jefferson, who, it would seem, had no great concern for him in the first place, and whom he, in the end, defrauded—this according to Merrill’s account. In regard to the role of Jefferson, nothing is changed. Although the tragedy in Kentucky was published in the press at the time, several eminent students of his life and work assured me, when I was working on the first version, that they could find no reference by him to the Kentucky story, and one scholar even went so far as to state in a letter his feeling that Jefferson could not bring himself to discuss—or perhaps even to face—the appalling episode. If this is true (though the chances of further research may make it untrue), it is convenient for my poem; but the role of Jefferson in the poem, or in history, does not stand or fall by the fact. If the moral shock to Jefferson administered by the discovery of what was possible in his blood should turn out to be somewhat literally short of what is here represented, subsequent events in the history of our nation, which he helped to found, might amply supply the defect.

stood in a sort of filial relation, is, as far as my poem is concerned, drawn from the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Both Lilburne and Meriwether Lewis entered the wilderness as heralds of civilization, as “light-bringers,” and my story is about the difference with which they performed the role and their tragic ends, Meriwether’s apparently by suicide. Jefferson wrote a biography of poor Meriwether. There is some evidence, which does not strike me as necessarily convincing, that Meriwether was murdered. But certainly there was in the Lewis blood a strain of what Jefferson referred to as “hypochondriacal affection,” as is well evidenced by Lilburne. In any case, Jefferson believed that the death was by suicide committed in despair at the injustice of the charges brought against him as Governor of the Louisiana Territory. I know that any discussion of the relation of this poem to its historical materials is, in one perspective, irrelevant to its value; and it could be totally accurate as history and still not worth a dime as a poem. I am trying to write a poem, not a history, and therefore have no compunction about tampering with non-essential facts. But poetry is more than fantasy and is committed to the obligation of trying to say something, however obliquely, about the human condition. Therefore, a poem dealing with history is no more at liberty to violate what the writer takes to be the spirit of his history than it is at liberty to violate what he takes to be the nature of the human heart. What he takes those things to be is, of course, his ultimate gamble. This is another way of saying that I have tried in my poem to make, in a thematic way, historical sense along with whatever kind of sense it may otherwise be happy enough to make. Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake. As I have said, the first version of this poem appeared in 1953, and has run through a number of printings. It may, no doubt, seem odd that at this late date another and very different version should be issued. But this new version is the work, sometimes very sporadic, of some twenty years, and is, in some important senses, a new work. There had been, to begin with, some confusion about the text printed. But as I began to live with the text, sometimes in an off-and-on process of preparation for the stage,*** my dissatisfaction with several features grew. Now there are a number of cuts made from the original version, and some additions. Meriwether is given a more significant role. There is, in large measure, a significant change of rhythm. A number of dramatic effects are sharpened. Though the basic action and theme remain the same, there is, I trust, an important difference in the total “feel.” For the reworking was not merely a slow and patchwork job. It meant, before the end, a protracted and concentrated reliving of the whole process.

onths of work on text and casting, blew up on signing day. A later version was produced by the American Place Theater in New York, in 1964, and under the direction of Adrian Hall, at the Trinity Theater of Providence, several runs occurred, most recently a tour, with the text and production considerably revised, ending in the Wilbur Theater, in Boston.

ll;">I have spoken of stage versions drawn from this poem. But even if the present version is a dialogue spoken by characters, it is definitely not a play, and must not be taken as such. The main body of the action lies in the remote past--in the earthly past of characters long dead--and now they meet at an unspecified place and unspecified time and try to make sense of the action in which they were involved. We may take them to appear and disappear as their urgencies of argument swell and subside. The place of this meeting is, we may say, "no place," and the time is "any time." This is but a way of saying that the issues that the characters here discuss are, in my view at least, a human constant.

o Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices--A New Version, Random House, (1979)

style="font-size: small;">"Books of the Times"

Lingeman

li class="css-ccw2r3 epjyd6m1">kes an elaborate historical journey to reach the causes of a single event—the murder of a slave in Kentucky in 1811 by two nephews of Thomas Jefferson. The kinship between the murderers Lilburne and Isham Lewis, and the third President, a man who was the epitome of reason, science and democratic thought, made the murder noteworthy, but it was only sketchily reported at the time and has come down to us muffled in tendentious accounts and legends constructed well after the fact.

e human heart, rather than a historian sifting dry documents. Indeed, Robert Penn Warren wrote a verse drama about the crime called “Brother to Dragons,” which made a powerful statement about the evil in man's nature as well as in the institution of slavery.

n us a factual reconstruction of the crime that is as full in its way as was Mr. Warren's vision.

-wrapper" class="css-2ninbb">Continue reading the main story

"css-158dogj evys1bk0">Lilburne and Isham Lewis belonged to a family that for several generations had lived the privileged life of Virginia aristocrats — indolent, hot‐tempered, lording over thousands of acres of land and scores of slaves. The Lewises were not in the league of, say, the almighty Randolphs of Virginia, but they were close, and indeed there was some intermarriage between them and the Randolphs. They also formed ties of kinship with the Jeffersons of Albemarble County over the generations, in distant‐cousin alliances. The wife of Charles Lewis, Lilburne and Isham's father, was Jefferson's sister Lucy.

h of the time but also, one speculates, because of an aversion. When Meriwether Lewis, the explorer and distant kin of the Charles Lewis branch, committed suicide in fit of depression, Jefferson wrote tribute to Meriwether but also noted that Meriwether was prone to “hypochrondriacal affections” that, he implied, ran in the family. Jefferson was sensitive to questions of heredity; his own family tree was tangled by consanguine intermarriages. Several of his brothers and sisters were subnormal mentally and only one sister even approached his singular brilliance.

"css-ccw2r3 epjyd6m1">ility in the blood. By Charles's time, the custom of dividing land up among the sons had broken up the large family holdings, and exploitive farming methods had ruined the land, so that the red soil eroded away in the rains like “a torrent of blood,” as one chronicler described it. Like many others, the straitened Lewises looked West to the Kentucky frontier for reprieve from the consequences of their profligacy. Lilburne and his brother Randolph took what money they could get from the sale of their remaining patrimony and bought up thousands of acres in Kentucky.

-158dogj evys1bk0">But frontier society was far from Virginia society and inherited status did not count for as much. The corruption had already evinced itself in Virginia when Charles and Randolph cheated Charles's wealthy, devoted son‐ in‐law on a land deal. Kentucky became the country of final ruin, rather than opportunity. Randolph died young, while Lilburne gradually sank under the weight of debts he could not hope to pay. He began drinking and mistreating the slaves the family had brought with them—ironically, their most valuable asset, because slaves could be rented out at one‐tenth their value a year.

roke a pitcher in which he was fetching water, Lilburne, aided by his pliant youngest brother, Isham, tied him up in the kitchen house, called in the other slaves, took an ax and severed George's neck. He then ordered the other slaves to cut up the body and burn it on the kitchen fire.

enomena

the culmination of a year of bizarre and portentous natural phenomena, a severe earthquake struck, toppling the chimney and putting out the fire. In the morning Lilburne had the slaves conceal the charred remains in the masonry of the rebuilt chimney, but a later tremor wrenched the guilty secret from the earth: “Murder! Horrid Murder!” a local paper later headlined the crime, in the style of the day.

ances. Mr. Merrill can only speculate about the deepest causes of the murder, but his rich portrait of the family and the times, of the onerous burden of history, makes his deductions ring convincingly. Despite its leisurely flow, its prosey digressions into local customs and institutions, “Jefferson's Nephews” reaches to the dark passions concealed in the hearts of two men.

ss="css-158dogj evys1bk0"> 

css-ecpe9w e16638kd0" datetime="1976-12-12T00:00:00-05:00">Dec. 12, 1976ass="css-158dogj evys1bk0">On Dec. 15, 1811, in Livingston County, Ky., two nephews of Thomas Jefferson committed one of the most grisly murders in the annals of Ameri‐can crime. Angered because an “ill‐grown, ill — thrived” slave named George had broken a pitcher, Lilburne and Isham Lewis decided to teach all their servants a lesson in obedience. Herding them into the kitchen cabin, which stood apart from the main plan‐tation house, and bolting the door so that none could escape, Lilburne Lewis seized an axe and sank it deep into George's neck. The brothers then com‐pelled one of the other slaves to com‐plete the dismemberment of George's body, and as the pieces were whacked off, they tossed them onto the roaring fire so as to destroy all evidence of the crime. During the several hours re‐quired for this cremation, Lilburne lec‐tured his horror‐striken slaves on their duties to their master and warned that if any one of them so much as whis‐pered about George's murder he would receive the same punishment.

y incinerated, an earthquake, one in a series of severe shocks that had been rocking the Mississippi Valley, brought down the Lewises’ kitchen chimney. While the earth was still heaving, Lil‐burne and Isham made the slaves re‐build the structure, hiding most of the unburned pieces of George's bones and flesh in the masonry. One vital portion, however, escaped their attention. Shortly afterward a neighbor spied a dog gnawing away at the skull of what had obviously been a man. When in‐vestigation led law officers to the Lewis plantation, the brothers tried to escape trial by entering into a suicide pact. Again accident thwarted their plan, for in demonstrating the tech‐nique to his brother Lilburne shot and killed himself. Isham was jailed but escaped before his trial and was never seen again. Lives of the former, and still living, President of the United States. Subsequently it became the subject of folklore in western Ken‐tucky. In 1953 Robert Penn Warren wrote a troubled, moving account of the crime in his dramatic poem “Broth‐er to Dragons” in which the actions of the Lewis brothers served to test Jefferson's faith in the perfectibility of. mankind. But until now there has never been a careful, scholarly investi‐gation of the crime, its consequences, and, especially, of the conditions that led up to its commission. “Jefferson's Nephews,” by Boynton Merrill Jr.,

away too much of his story in a review, for his book has the suspense of a great detec‐tive story. With the persistence of Poirot and the subtlety of a Maigret, Mr. Merrill has investigated the murder and the subsequent suicide, authenti‐cating and labeling each piece of evi‐dence extracted from the tedious local histories, the dog‐eared news‐papers and the dusty court records in Virginia and Kentucky. That Lilburne and Isham were guilty of killing George and mutilating his body is not in question. What Mr. Merrill has done is to explain how such an atrocity came to be committed.

rcise of the most bois‐terous passions. But slavery, as Mr. Merrill shows, cannot alone account for the Lewis brothers’ actions. Most slaves in this region of northern Ken‐tucky were fairly well‐treated; indeed, they had to be, since escape across the Ohio River to the free territories of the Old Northwest was easy. Fron‐tier violence was another background condition for the murder, and Mr. Mer‐rill is at his best in depicting the rough, brawling society of this recent‐ly settled region of Kentucky, where most of the inhabitants were “barbar‐ians in the Garden of Eden, a brutal‐ized class of people who were anti‐in‐tellectual, materialistic, prejudiced, and narrowly sectarian.” Yet the Lewis brothers were hardly typical frontiersmen. They belonged to the Vir‐ginia aristocracy and were relatives of the Randolphs and other first fami‐lies in the Old Dominion. Although financial reserves forced them to mi‐grate to Kentucky, they moved in style, accompanied by numerous slaves, to take possession of extensive plantations.

Virginia aristocrats helps explain the drunken, murderous rage of Lilburne and Isham Lewis. They shared with their Randolph cousins a streak of wild eccentricity that some‐times verged on mental aberration. When their cousin Meriwether Lewis, the explorer, committed suicide in 1809, Jefferson observed that “hypo‐chondriacal affections” were “a consti‐tutional disposition in all the nearer branches of the family of his name.” As the family fortunes continued to decline in Kentucky, Mr. Merrill specu‐lates, the public loss of status must have inflicted upon these passionate men “grievous, deep, and secret pain.”

urne Lewis's life, a ca‐reer marked by economic disaster, public humiliation, sexual frustration and alcoholism. As a careful historian he does not try to enter Lilburne's mind to plumb his motives; for that insight we have to rely upon Robert Penn Warren's brooding speculation: But as a reconstruction of the crime and as a re‐creation of the circum‐stances that conspired to make this kind of atrocity, by men like these, possible at this particular time and this special place, “Jefferson's Nephews” is superb. Mr. Merrill's book is horridly fascinating, as absorbing, as gruesome and as intelligent as Truman Capote's “In Cold Blood.”