Jack Jouett

Just sharing this with you as it caught my attention, although east-coasters closer to Monticello likely know if it already.

In 1779, Virginia Governor Thomas Jefferson's "career, and possibly his life, could have ended right there [in Richmond]... A resourceful Virginia cavalryman named Jack Jouett observed a fast-moving column heading toward Monticello under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton, and spurred his horse into a forty-mile overnight dash to warn the Virginians that the British were coming, and coming swiftly. Jefferson was barely able to over-see the evacuation of the state government to the town of Staunton before the invader was at his own doorstep."

This wouldn't be as interesting if Jefferson was just another tobacco farmer rather than an Enlightenment extraordinare, even in the colonial backwaters of the British Empire. And this was also a period, unheard of since, where the Yanks and Francs got along great.

Above excerpt taken from Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (Harper Collins, 2005), 41.