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Midnight rides to save the Revolution make good stories. There’s Paul Revere, and, closer to home, Susanna Bolling, a Hopewell girl who may (or may not) have made a midnight ride to save Lafayette. Virginia’s best-known midnight rider was Jack Jouett, who rode through the night of June 3-4, 1781, to save Thomas Jefferson.
Historic events seem inevitable in hindsight, but in 1781 the outcome of the war was in doubt, with British generals Charles Cornwallis, Benedict Arnold and William Phillips rampaging through the incipient nation’s largest and most populous state. The General Assembly, meeting in the new capital of Richmond, adjourned on May 10, then fled west to Charlottesville. Gov. Thomas Jefferson decamped to his mountaintop mansion, Monticello.
Cornwallis smelled juicy prizes for his game bag — the author of the Declaration of Independence, not to mention the fiery orator of “liberty or death” and other troublemakers. Cornwallis ordered Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton to capture or scatter the rebels and destroy stores along the way.
The son of a Liverpool merchant, Tarleton had two fingers shot off at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, North Carolina, on March 15, 1781. Among the Patriots he had a reputation as a butcher. At the Battle of Waxhaws, in South Carolina, on May 29, 1780, his troops reportedly “massacred” Patriots who were trying to surrender.
Tarleton commanded the British Legion, an elite force of green-jacketed Loyalist horsemen. From Cornwallis’s camp in Hanover County, Tarleton rode west at the head of 180 legionnaires and 70 mounted infantry of the 23rd Regiment, the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Late on the evening of June 3, Tarleton’s horsemen passed an establishment in Louisa County, called the Cuckoo Tavern in most accounts — actually, the tavern at Cuckooville Plantation, according to Katelyn Coughlan, executive director of Louisa County Historical Society. Today, Cuckoo is the crossroads of U.S. Routes 522 and 33, southeast of the town of Louisa.
The Jouett family owned land in Louisa. John “Jack” Jouett, Jr., 26 and evidently not in military service, was in the vicinity when the column rode past. Numerous accounts put Jouett in the tavern, or asleep in the yard, but Jefferson, in his memoirs, says Jack Jouett saw them pass his (Jouett’s) father’s house, and makes no mention of the tavern.
Wherever he was, Jouett correctly guessed the enemy’s intentions and saddled up a “very fleet horse,” a bay mare named Sallie or Sally in some accounts.
If Hollywood was telling the story, they’d have Tarleton’s redcoats galloping after Jouett, who arrives at Monticello, gasping for breath, barely ahead of the mustache-twirling Tarleton. In fact, Jouett, under cover of darkness, took an alternate route and the British never saw him. Jouett’s 40-mile route included, according to Coughlan, parts of Old Mountain Road; the current Jack Jouett Road; East Green Springs Road; and West Green Springs Road.
At 11 p.m. Tarleton stopped to regroup at Louisa Court House. He resumed three hours later. Nearing Charlottesville, he sent a detachment of horsemen under Capt. M’Cleod (or McLeod) to Monticello. Tarleton’s main body crossed the Rivanna at Moore’s Ford, today the heavily trafficked U.S. 250 bridge at Pantops.
Jouett arrived at Monticello before dawn on June 4, then proceeded to Charlottesville to alert the legislators. Jefferson ordered a carriage for his family. Still, the future president took his time, gathering papers and eating breakfast with a few legislators who were staying at Monticello. A second warning came from Christopher Hudson, an Albemarle County neighbor and militiaman, who rode up to report that “a troop of horse was then ascending the hill to the house,” in Jefferson’s account. Jefferson escaped through the woods on a horse, or, as Tarleton phrased it, “provided for his personal liberty by a precipitate retreat.” M’Cleod arrived minutes later.
In nearby Charlottesville, the assemblymen hastily dispersed, but not hastily enough. Seven were captured, including Daniel Boone, a delegate from Kentucky, then part of Virginia. Gen. Edward Stevens, wounded at Battle of Guilford Courthouse, and a state senator, escaped when the British chased a horseman in a scarlet coat, military hat and plume. “The showy gentleman in front was no officer, but the same Mr. Jouitte…who had an eccentric custom of wearing such habiliments,” according to the “Life of Thomas Jefferson” by Henry S. Randall (1858). “After he had coquetted with his pursuers long enough, he gave his fleet horse the spur, and speedily was out of sight.” Others who got away included Patrick Henry and two signers of the Declaration, Benjamin Harrison and Richard Henry Lee.
The assemblymen scurried behind the Blue Ridge to Staunton. Jefferson was not among them. His term had expired on June 2. Amidst the turmoil, the assembly did not elect a successor until June 12. Jefferson accompanied his family to Poplar Forest, his second home in Bedford County.
The victors today may be the vanquished tomorrow. Less than five months after scattering the rebel ringleaders, the British hoisted the white flag at Yorktown. After the arms were stacked, the American and French officers invited their British colleagues to a conciliatory dinner. But the hosts, still angry about the “massacre” at Waxhaws, pointedly excluded “Bloody Ban” Tarleton.
Tarleton returned to England, where he represented Liverpool in the House of Commons. Notably, he defended the slave trade, which remained legal in Britain until 1807. His portrait was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Tarleton died in 1833.
On June 12, 1781, the General Assembly, meeting in Staunton, voted to award Jack Jouett an “elegant sword and pair of pistols” in gratitude for his timely warning. But, as scholar Brent Tarter has pointed out, the assembly did not proceed with an alacrity equaling the horseman’s. Jouett evidently received the pistols in 1783 but by 1804 was still waiting for the sword. After the war, Jouett moved to Virginia’s far western District of Kentucky. He served in Virginia’s General Assembly as a representative from Lincoln County and Mercer County, and then, after Kentucky’s admission to the Union in 1792, in the new state’s House of Representatives. He died in 1822.
According to a few online sources, Jouett’s mare, Sallie, became the progenitor of a long line of Kentucky thoroughbreds, a claim that escaped verification by Cardinal News, much as the fox-like Jefferson escaped the British hounds.
Jouett is less famous than a certain silversmith from Boston, at least partly because no Longfellow immortalized him in verse, though some tried. Jouett is the Paul Revere of Virginia, but Revere is not the Jouett of Massachusetts. Still, generations of Virginia schoolchildren remember the galloping horseman from their history texts. The Charlottesville chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution is named for Jack Jouett.
In 1940, the General Assembly declared June 4 to be Jack Jouett Day. In 2001, “perhaps forgetting its early action,” as Tarter dryly noted, the assembly declared Jack Jouett Day to be June 3.
Christopher Hudson, who also warned Jefferson, is almost completely forgotten.
The tavern no longer stands, but at the rustic crossroads of Cuckoo in Louisa County, a sign marks the spot from which Jack Jouett launched his ride into history.
SOURCES/ADDITIONAL READING:
“Jack Jouett’s Ride,” Brent Tarter, Encyclopedia Virginia
“The Life of Thomas Jefferson,” Henry S. Randall, 1858, vol. 1
“The History of Virginia,” by John Burk, Skelton Jones, Louis Hue Girardin, 1816, vol. IV