Thomas Law (1756–1834) was born in England and spent almost two decades in India as an employee of the East India Company, achieving some prominence there through his successful advocacy of a single, predictable land tax. He immigrated to the United States in 1794. In 1796 Law married Elizabeth Parke Custis, the eldest grandchild of Martha Dandridge Custis Washington, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1811. He became known for his support for a national currency, his poetry, and his extensive real-estate investments in his adopted city of Washington, D.C. Law corresponded with TJ throughout the latter’s retirement (DNB description begins Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, eds., Dictionary of National Biography, 1885–1901, 22 vols. description ends ; ODNB description begins H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, 60 vols. description ends ; Allen C. Clark, Greenleaf and Law in the Federal City [1901]; George Alfred Townsend, “Thomas Law, Washington’s First Rich Man,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 4 [1901]: 222–45; Washington, Diaries, 6:238–9; Sowerby, description begins E. Millicent Sowerby, comp., Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 1952–59, 5 vols. description ends no. 4453; Washington National Intelligencer, 1 Aug. 1834).

luce clarius: “clearer than daylight.”