The Case of Meriwether Lewis

When History Is Rewritten Without Evidence

A few years ago, the name Meriwether Lewis was removed from the elementary school in Ivy, and shortly thereafter, the sculpture honoring Lewis and Clark was taken down as well. These actions were carried out in the name of “historical correction,” but the justification used at the time was not based on verifiable fact. It was based on assumption — and assumption has now stood in for history long enough.

In the public argument supporting the erasure of Lewis, it was claimed that he once owned more than 17,000 acres of land, that he “held more land than any plantation owner of his time,” and that therefore “it is fair to assume” his landholdings would have required enslaved labor, making him complicit in a profitable slave economy.

“In the 18th century Lewis was granted over 17,000 acres of property along the eastern ridge. While there is no smoking gun there is a correlation between the need to increase labor as these lands become cultivated. What is also true is that he held more land than any other plantation owner of his time. Under those circumstances it is fair to assume that his holdings would lead to the cultivation of a lucrative economy of chattel slavery that would result in Albemarle County being the 4th richest area in all of Virginia.”

The phrase “fair to assume” appeared in the very argument used to condemn him. That alone should have stopped the process. Instead, it became the basis for removing a name, removing a monument, and reshaping public memory.

Meriwether Lewis by Charles B.J.F. Saint-Mémin, 1807. From the collection of the New-York Historical.

But there is still no documented evidence that Meriwether Lewis ever owned enslaved people, operated a plantation, or profited from slavery. No deed books, no estate records, no probate inventories — nothing. Even the committee acknowledged there was “no smoking gun.” Yet the conclusion was treated as settled fact.

This is not how history works. It is how political narrative works. And when narrative replaces evidence, the public is not educated — it is manipulated.

The Case of Meriwether Lewis

The claim that Lewis was the largest landholder of his time is false. The great slaveholding estates of Virginia belonged to families such as the Carters, Randolphs, and Byrds, not the Lewises. Much of the land associated with Meriwether Lewis was untamed frontier acreage, not plantation farmland, and most of it was never personally worked, settled, or harvested in his lifetime.

Charlottesville has already paid a high price for decisions made in haste and justified by rhetoric. It is not too late to insist that the next decisions be guided by evidence instead of ideology.

Equally important: the economic boom in enslaved labor that enriched Albemarle County occurred after Lewis’s death in 1809. One cannot condemn a man for an economic system that expanded decades after he was buried.

Yet the school lost its name, the sculpture was removed, and a generation of students was taught to regard Lewis not as an explorer, statesman, or symbol of American curiosity, but as a villain — not because of evidence, but because of an assumption treated as fact.

Names change. Monuments disappear. But when they are removed on the basis of conjecture rather than documentation, what is being erased is not just a figure from the past — it is the integrity of the historical record itself.

This article is not an argument for restoring the former name or returning the monument. Reasonable people may still disagree about symbols in public space. But we should all agree that history must be based on what we can prove — not on what we “find fair to assume.”