Green Clay (1757–1828), surveyor and public official, was the brother of TJ’s friend and correspondent Charles Clay (1745–1820) and the father of the abolitionist Cassius Marcellus Clay. Born in what later became Powhatan County, in 1777 he accompanied a surveying party to Kentucky. Clay became deputy surveyor of Lincoln County in 1781 and through this profession acquired a great deal of Kentucky land. He settled at White Hall, his estate in Madison County, and represented that county in the Virginia House of Delegates for three sessions, 1787–89, and at the state convention of 1788, where he voted against ratifying the United States Constitution. After Kentucky achieved statehood in 1792, Clay represented Madison County in the Kentucky House of Representatives, 1793–94, and in its Senate, 1795–98 and 1802–08, serving as Speaker, 1807–08. He also helped draft the state’s constitution in 1799. Clay’s extensive landholdings and commercial and industrial investments brought him great wealth. As a major general in the Kentucky militia, during the War of 1812 he led volunteers in 1813 to relieve American forces besieged at Fort Meigs, Ohio. In his will Clay listed about 115 slaves, and ordered at least 10 emancipated. He suffered for several years from cancer and died at White Hall (ANB description begins John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 1999, 24 vols. description ends ; DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 1928–36, 20 vols. description ends ; DVB description begins John T. Kneebone, Sara B. Bearss, and others, eds., Dictionary of Virginia Biography, 1998– , 3 vols. description ends ; Leonard, General Assembly description begins Cynthia Miller Leonard, comp., The General Assembly of Virginia, July 30, 1619–January 11, 1978: A Bicentennial Register of Members, 1978 description ends ; Clay, To the People of Kentucky and of The United States [1825]; Lexington Kentucky Reporter, 19 Nov. 1828; gravestone inscription in Richmond Cemetery, Richmond, Ky.; Madison Co. Will Book, D:461–9).

The United States concluded a treaty on the 3d jany 1786 at Hopewell, South Carolina, with the Choctaw Indians, not the Cherokee. Its first treaty with the latter people, also negotiated at Hopewell, was signed on 28 Nov. 1785 (U.S. Statutes at Large description begins Richard Peters, ed., The Public Statutes at Large of the United States … 1789 to March 3, 1845, 1845–67, 8 vols. description ends , 7:18–23). A year after the decleration of independance, at the Long Island of the Holston River on 20 July 1777 the Overhill Cherokee ceded land to Virginia and North Carolina (Archibald Henderson, “The Treaty of Long Island of Holston, July, 1777,” North Carolina Historical Review 8 [1931]: 55–116).