handsome lady: Elizabeth Moore Walker, the wife of John Walker. For the recent reappearance of the Walker affair in the press, see Isaac Story to TJ, 8 Feb., and TJ to Gallatin, 21 June.

person in that state: William A. Burwell had begun to collect testimony to refute allegations recently made by Thomas Turner in the Boston Repertory. A letter of 13 June from William Tatham to Burwell and a deposition by Christopher Hudson taken on 26 July are printed in Vol. 4:273-8. Additional testimonials gathered by Burwell included a letter of 28 June from John Beckley, who enclosed a second edition of his Address to the People of the United States, originally written during the election of 1800 to vindicate and extol TJ’s “Public Life and Character” (RC in DLC, addressed: “Mr. Burwell at the Presidents House”; Vol. 4:273n; Vol. 32:125n). In a deposition of 12 July, Richard O’Brien testified that in 1781, after the brig he served on was lost to the British, he went to Richmond and remained there until British forces entered the city. Upon his arrival, he saw TJ there and recalled that the governor “continued upon the Spot during the whole scene” (MS in DLC; endorsed: “Signed in my Presence Wm A. Burwell”). An undated letter to Burwell from John Minor of Fredericksburg, postmarked 30 June, included Minor’s recollection of a conversation with General Edward Stevens in 1796, in which Stevens called Charles Simms’s charge that TJ abandoned his office in the face of the enemy “a D—d lie.” Stevens claimed that he was in Richmond at the time as a member of the legislature. He asserted that TJ remained in the city “long after he thought it prudent that he should be gone” and did not leave “untill the Enemy entered the lower End of it” (RC in DLC; addressed: “William A Burwell Esqr. Washington Cty”; Vol. 29:193-6). Certificates by Robert Bradfute and James Steptoe, Sr., each dated 6 Aug., stated that both men lived near Poplar Forest in 1781 and that neither saw evidence that TJ had injured himself during his allegedly panicked retreat from Monticello. Burwell quoted liberally from these testimonials in his six-part “Vindication of Mr. Jefferson,” which appeared in the Richmond Enquirer from late August to late September and was reprinted widely. Burwell devoted most of the series to rebutting Turner’s assertions regarding TJ’s conduct as governor. In the final installment, he cursorily dismissed the other attacks Turner made regarding TJ’s support of James Callender, his payment to Gabriel Jones, his relationship with Sally Hemings, and his attempted seduction of Elizabeth Moore Walker. With regard to the last subject, Burwell challenged Turner to produce the “celebrated correspondence” between TJ and John Walker, which Turner claimed to have seen. Burwell asserted that without such evidence one must doubt the worst of the assertions, which could be easily disproven and about which “not even the slightest whisper” had circulated in Albemarle County (Richmond Enquirer, 23, 27, 30 Aug., 6, 13, 27 Sep.; Gerald W. Gawalt, “ ‘Strict Truth’: The Narrative of William Armistead Burwell,” VMHB description begins Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 1893- description ends , 101 [1993], 118-20; Burwell to TJ, 15 Sep.).