James Madison Papers

To James Madison from William A. Burwell, 19 February 1813 (Abstract)

§ From William A. Burwell

19 February 1813. “I perceive it is the intention of the Govt to raise 1000 men of the 20,000 for the state of Virginia.

Without being authorised I will suggest Thomas M. Randolph1 for a Colonel. I think he would make a most Zealous, & valuable officer.”

RC (DLC). 1 p. Docketed by JM.

1Thomas Mann Randolph (1768–1828) was the son of Thomas Mann Randolph and Anne Cary Randolph and the son-in-law of Thomas Jefferson. Educated at the University of Edinburgh, he returned to Virginia in 1788 and helped run Monticello during Jefferson’s absences. He served as an Albemarle County justice of the peace, a captain in the Virginia militia, and, from 1803 to 1807, a member of Congress. On 3 Mar. 1813 the Senate confirmed JM’s nomination of Randolph to the Twentieth Regiment of Infantry as a colonel. He participated in the campaign against Montreal under Maj. Gen. James Wilkinson but returned to Virginia when the campaign was abandoned and resigned his commission in 1814. After the war, he continued his unsuccessful efforts to make his large farms profitable and resumed his political pursuits, serving as governor of Virginia, 1819–22, and as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, 1819–20 and 1823–25 (George Green Shackelford, ed., Collected Papers to Commemorate Fifty Years of the Monticello Association of the Descendants of Thomas Jefferson [2 vols.; Princeton, N.J., 1965–84], 1:45–66; Senate Exec. Proceedings description begins Journal of the Executive Proceedings of the Senate of the United States of America (3 vols.; Washington, 1828). description ends , 2:331, 333–34).

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