Cesario Bias (d. 1866), businessman and farmer, was born in Venice, Italy, and immigrated while young to the United States. He worked as a clerk for Bernard Peyton in Richmond, 1820–22, visited TJ at Monticello in the latter year, and then apparently moved to the Shenandoah Valley. By 1830 Bias had settled in Shelby County, Tennessee, where he was a successful merchant, insurance agent, and bank president, and an active parishioner in Memphis’s First Presbyterian Church. He returned to Virginia by the middle of the 1850s and purchased Red Sweet Springs in Alleghany County. Bias operated a hotel and bath there and served as the community’s postmaster. In 1860, shortly before he sold his business interests and retired to a farm in Charlotte County, he owned ten slaves, real estate worth $100,000, and personal property valued at $27,000. Late in 1865 Bias relocated to Richmond, where he died after a brief illness (Frances Beal Smith Hodges, The Genealogy of the Beale Family, 1399–1956 [1956], 104–5; Bias [for Peyton] to TJ, 9 Apr. 1822; Peyton to TJ, 29 Apr. 1822; Tennessee Genealogical Society, “Ansearchin’” News 16 [1969]: 121; DNA: RG 29, CS, Rockbridge Co., 1830, Tenn., Shelby Co., 1840, 1850, Va., Alleghany Co., 1860, 1860 slave schedules; Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval, in the Service of the United States [1855], 147; Richmond Daily Dispatch, 28 June 1866; gravestone inscription in Warm Springs Cemetery, Warm Springs).