Congratulates him on accession to chair of Virginia government; future of University rests on disposition of governor; a friend from Philadelphia recommends Major S.H. Long for Civil Engineer to the Board of Public Works; does not know Major Long but trusts friend's judgment; supposes it is same person who conducted the exploring expedition to the Rocky Mountains.

The brutal axe murder and dismemberment of a Negro slave, committed in 1811 by two brothers, Lilburne and Isham Lewis, whose mother was Thomas Jefferson?s sister and whose father was his first cousin, form the core of this historical detective story and account of frontier life in western Kentucky in the first decades of the nineteenth century. On the night of December 15, 1811, drunk and enraged over the breaking of a pitcher, Lilburne bound his seventeen-year-old slave, George, and, in front of the assembled household?s other slaves, cut off his head. The brothers were indicted for murder, released on bail, and attempted suicide. Boynton Merrill Jr. explores the tragic combination of circumstances and social forces that culminated in this ghastly event: the lawlessness of the frontier settlements, the dehumanizing effects of chattel slavery, and the Lewis family?s history of mental instability and their ever-declining fortunes.

Monticello was the primary plantation of Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, who began designing Monticello after inheriting land from his father at age 26.