On the childhoods of William Clark and Meriwether Lewis. Though both in Virginia and close in age, the impact of the war with Britain hit each boy differently. Clark’s brothers fought and William absorbed their triumphs and tragedies. Lewis’s father served and his hometown was host to an open air prison for captured British commanders. While war may never change, both young men certainly did.

/ 38° 0.084′ N, 77° 35.034′ W

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On the Clark’s and the Rogers’s. The major difference, to me, from yesterday’s episode, is the cloudiness of the entire line of Rogers and Clarks. We talked a lot about sons and daughters, brothers and sisters of the Lewises and Meriwether’s, but, I hope I’ve been able to show this, the genealogy is quite cursed.

/ 37° 41′ 56″ N, 76° 44′ 30″ W

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These next two episodes are my attempt, off-the-cuff at times, to synthesize the genealogy that many, many others have done. Looking into the work that’s been done — and is being done — has inspired me in my own journey. That being said, I’m going to come down here on the side of the sleuths. There are prominent volumes of genealogy that, while not discarded, will be deemphasized for research that continues to this moment. The internet is often a harrowing and draining place, but it’s also a place for collaboration and, I feel being interested in Lewis and Clark’s wider journey, one must see the value in working together to achieve a goal. I’m sure I’ll get some things wrong in the Lewis, Meriwether, Clark and Rogers lines so consider this a teaser for future exploration on your own.

/ 37° 12.349′ N, 76° 45.451′ W

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Donald Jackson asks, “If the Spanish, French, and British knew of the plan, and if Congress had provided the money, and if the expedition were truly constitutional as described by Jefferson, then why all the secrecy?”

In August of 1801, Jefferson hosted botanist Benjamin Smith Barton. He’d been collecting plants — “botanizing” — through the Shenandoah Valley, through Warm Springs, Lexington, Stauton and, finally, to Charlottesville and Monticello. Did tales of his adventures in the mountains rekindle a desire? Did the two friends talk about André Michaux (as both were sponsors of his through the APS)? Did Jefferson remember that in choosing Michaux they’d let down another — a much younger — too young —Meriwether Lewis? Perhaps Jefferson sat on all of this that summer before offering, a some point, the job of a lifetime to an older, more experienced Meriwether Lewis.

After the Annual Address, did he walk home, his and Jefferson’s, the President’s House, alone, or with friends? When he did arrive, did Jefferson ask how it went, how the speech was received, how he’d done? What did they have for dinner? Was it quiet that night, “like two mice in a church”? Did Lewis sit on the edge of his bed in the future East Room of the White House and think about the future? Or did glance over at the comically large 1,200 pound cheese wheel that arrived nearly a year ago from well-wishers of Cheshire, Massachusetts, and wonder if he’d be here in a year from now, still carving away, or on the wide Missouri, rocking and rolling into the unknown.

/ 38° 53′ 39″ N, 77° 1′ 33″ W

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Jefferson’s tone in his First Inaugural was the repudiation of the years prior, setting the footing of American governance at the people’s feet instead of its supposed superiors. It began with civil liberties: “Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.”

I’m reminded of John Ledyard, who didn’t live to see Jefferson’s election but would’ve been an ardent supporter, who upon his deportation from Russia, wrote: “Though born in the freest of the civilized countries, yet, in the present state of privation, I have a more exquisite sense of the amiable, the immortal nature of liberty, than I ever had before. It would be excellently qualifying, if every man, who is called to preside over the liberties of a people, should once—it would be enough— actually be deprived of his liberty unjustly. He would be avaricious of it, more than of any other earthly possession… There are two kinds of people I could anathematize, with a better weapon than St Peter's; those who dare deprive others of their liberty, and those who suffer others to do it.”

/ 38° 53′ 10″ N, 77° 0′ 28″ W

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On “the most stable cabinet in US history”: Madison, Gallatin, Dearborn, Lincoln and Smith (and Jefferson’s secretary… and I guess Aaron Burr is somewhere around here as well…)

/ 38° 53′ 51″ N, 77° 2′ 12″ W

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“[H]uman degeneracy and misery” felt on trial as the “baneful effects of the spirit of party” and the “Principles of ‘98” took center stage for the first time: the Election of 1800!

In broad strokes, the legacy of the Revolution was in play, “between the advocates of republican, and those of kingly government.” Between a renunciation of foreign despotism and the Federalist wish to “let us no longer pray that America may become an asylum to all nations.” Between Jefferson’s desiring against “foreign entanglements” and Federalist beliefs that Republican’s wanted “to make this Country a province of France.” It all felt so much larger and defining than Jefferson telling Adams, “Were we both to die today, tomorrow two other names would be put in the place of ours, without any change in the motion of the machinery.”

/ 38° 53′ 23″ N, 77° 0′ 32″ W

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Reading the founding fathers of this era, this tension is expressed in the epithets of “monarchist” and “democrat.” Every move, by every person involved, seemingly took us in one of those two directions – if there was another pathway, it proved to be obscured for some time.

Adams to Rush: “My Country appears to me, I assure you in great danger of fatal Divisions, and especially because I Scarcely know of two Persons, who think, Speak and Act alike in matters of [Governmen]t.”

/ 42° 14′ 21″ N, 71° 0′ 12″ W

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Jefferson was an optimist when it came to the people: he wrote James Madison “our governments will remain virtuous as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America.” Of course, “vacant lands” are doing the heavy lifting here. Before we can discuss the lands, we must talk about who resides on them.

Instead of any meaningful counterweight, the government (to Jefferson, and beyond, let’s be honest) co-signed territorial sovereignty – and went to war to force them. In a weaker government, the losses of Harmar and St. Clair could’ve stalled this project and altered forever the trajectory into our time – but the desire for land, the idea that it was won by “conquest” in war for independence, transcended all preoccupations with standing armies or finances or the size of a republic.

/ 36° 39′ 14″ N, 83° 23′ 59″ W

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the failures of execution, of imagination, of inflexibility

All the European powers acted as if they had more time, that the musical chairs they’d played for centuries with one another (typically at the rest of the world’s expense) would continue indefinitely. We look at the “dangerous Enemies” and “valuable friends” to Jefferson: England, France, Russia and Spain.

/ 38° 0′ 43″ N, 78° 28′ 0″ W

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/ intro/outro music by aldous ichnite — “You'll Have a Plan Before You Try to Get Your Horse on the Trailer” and “Our Entire Bodies Have Always Been the Most Powerful Form of Visual Expression”

/ additional music by me! and kit wheston