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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Notes on the State of Virginia," Thomas Jefferson presents a comprehensive examination of the natural resources, geography, and governance of Virginia, infused with Enlightenment ideals and American republicanism. Written in 1781, this seminal work employs a blend of empirical observation and philosophical discourse, articulating Jefferson's vision for the future of America. His methodical approach bridges the scientific and the political, exploring diverse topics from the state's geography to its moral and social structures, ultimately reflecting Jefferson's aspirations for a new nation founded on liberty and reason. Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of the United States, was profoundly influenced by Enlightenment thinkers, which shaped his philosophical outlook and his commitment to democracy. A farmer, architect, and statesman, Jefferson's diverse experiences and deep appreciation for Virginia's landscape enriched his observations. His role as the governor of Virginia and his extensive education fostered a sense of responsibility to document and advocate for the state's potential and the ideals of self-governance. "Notes on the State of Virginia" is not only an essential text for understanding American history but also serves as a reflection on the principles that underpin American democracy. Readers interested in political philosophy, environmental studies, or historical governance will find this work indispensable as it challenges us to consider the intersections of nature, society, and governance in shaping a nation. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Notes on the State of Virginia
Table of Contents
Introduction
A young republic takes inventory of itself while wrestling with the shadows cast by its ideals, as Thomas Jefferson measures rivers, mountains, laws, customs, and human possibilities across Virginia, setting Enlightenment instruments against the rawness of a new country and the enduring contradictions of slavery, expansion, and creed, so that lists of minerals and migratory birds share a tense page with conjectures about liberty and power, and the map of a single state swells into a provisional portrait of America—ambitious, curious, self-assured, and already divided against itself.
Notes on the State of Virginia is Thomas Jefferson’s most substantial book, begun as answers to a detailed questionnaire about Virginia circulated in 1781 by François Barbé-Marbois of the French legation. Jefferson, then a leading Virginian statesman, shaped his responses into a suite of topical “queries” that survey the commonwealth’s geography, natural history, laws, economy, institutions, and manners. The result is neither a mere report nor a simple travel sketch. It is a work where measurement serves meaning: tables, descriptions, and anecdotes combine to depict the resources and character of a state that was central to the nascent United States.
Composed during the revolutionary era and revised in the years immediately following, the book took final form while Jefferson was abroad. During his diplomatic service in France in the mid-1780s, he arranged a small private printing in English and later oversaw wider circulation. It remained the only full-length book he published in his lifetime. The circumstances of its making—provoked by foreign curiosity, polished amid transatlantic exchange—help explain its dual posture: at once an inward-looking portrait of Virginia and an outward-facing brief for American possibility addressed to European readers.
At its core, Notes is a systematic inquiry into a place. Jefferson inventories mountains and rivers, soils and minerals, plants and animals, weather and waters, while also examining laws, religious establishments, education, commerce, population, and defenses. He writes in the empirical spirit of the Enlightenment, testing claims and gathering specimens of fact. Yet the book moves beyond catalog to argument, considering how natural conditions shape civic arrangements and how civic choices, in turn, alter the land. The premise is simple but capacious: understand the particulars of a state to illuminate the fortunes of a nation.
Its classic status stems from this distinctive fusion of genres—scientific report, political reflection, local chronicle, and literary essay—held together by a lucid, measured prose. Jefferson’s pages often proceed from observation to inference, achieving a clarity that made the book a touchstone of early American letters. The architecture of discrete queries invites comparison and dissent, while the steady cadence of his reasoning models public deliberation. Many later readers have recognized in its method an early American art of nonfiction, where fact-gathering carries the charge of moral and civic inquiry.
Because it entwines land, law, and liberty, the book’s themes endure. Notes considers how geography constrains or encourages settlement, how institutions influence habits, and how resource use shapes prosperity. It probes religious toleration, legal reform, education, and the balance between local autonomy and collective security. The work also meditates on fragility: rivers can flood, economies can stagger, constitutions can falter. Jefferson’s eye for contingency—how choices make futures—gives the book a continuing urgency, reminding readers that political life is built from countless, concrete decisions about people and place.
The Notes converses not only with American readers but with European science and letters. Jefferson challenges Old World theories that belittled the natural vigor of the New, assembling measurements and testimony to counter claims of American “degeneracy.” His insistence on evidence, alongside his curiosity about indigenous knowledge and regional practice, placed the book in the transatlantic debate over nature and culture. In doing so, it furnished a model for later state surveys, gazetteers, travel narratives, and policy memoranda that blend description with analysis and helped shape a tradition of empirically minded American prose.
No introduction can ignore the tension at the heart of the work: its treatment of Indigenous nations and its extensive discussion of slavery. Jefferson records laws and customs, speculates on causes and consequences, and offers proposals that have been scrutinized and criticized for generations. The distance between the author’s rhetoric of rights and the reality of bondage is visible on the page. That frank exposure—at times analytic, at times deeply flawed—has made the Notes a vital, if disquieting, document for studying the paradoxes of the revolutionary era and the persistent legacies of hierarchy and exclusion.
As a writer, Jefferson balances compilation with voice. He cites correspondence, statutes, and observations; he rehearses experiments and tallies. Yet he also pauses for reflection, weighing prudence against innovation and precedent against reform. The style is formal but not inert: analogies clarify, examples ground abstractions, and transitions carry the reader from the alignment of mountains to the alignment of laws. The cumulative effect is architectural. Each query is a room with its own vista, and the house they form is both dwelling and lookout, sheltering detail while surveying the horizon.
Reading the Notes is less like following a plot than traversing a terrain. One may enter through natural history and find oneself in a debate about education, or begin with legal reform and arrive at considerations of commerce. The structure allows browsing as well as study, and the rewards are different at each pace. The immediate pleasures are concrete—measurements, lists, observations—while the larger satisfactions arise from patterns that appear across topics, where a fact about a river becomes an insight about federalism, or a statistic about crops becomes a question about labor and justice.
For modern readers, context clarifies and complicates. Understanding eighteenth-century science, cartography, and political thought helps situate Jefferson’s claims; attending to whose voices are heard and whose are missing refines judgment. Scholars have long mined the book for data, but they have also interrogated its assumptions and its silences. Approached with both curiosity and critique, the Notes offers a capacious archive for historians, environmental writers, legal thinkers, and citizens seeking to understand how knowledge is marshaled to guide policy and how description can mask or reveal power.
In our own moment—concerned with data-driven governance, environmental stewardship, religious liberty, racial justice, and the roles of local and national authority—Notes on the State of Virginia remains arrestingly current. It invites readers to ask what evidence counts, who counts it, and to what ends. Its achievements in clarity and synthesis, and its failures of moral imagination, together make it indispensable: a classic not because it is unblemished, but because it keeps provoking inquiry. To read it is to revisit the promises and perils of American beginnings and to measure our present against them.
Synopsis
Notes on the State of Virginia is Thomas Jefferson’s extensive response to a questionnaire circulated by François Barbé-Marbois about the natural and civil condition of Virginia. Written in the early 1780s and first printed privately in 1785, the book assembles measurements, observations, and documentary excerpts into a systematic portrait of the state. Organized as numbered queries, it moves from physical geography to society, economy, government, and culture. Jefferson aims to ground political and philosophical claims in empirical description, while also advancing proposals for reform. The work’s method blends statistical tables, travel notes, and legal analysis, creating a hybrid of gazetteer, natural history, and political reflection.
Jefferson opens with Virginia’s bounds and landscape, guiding the reader from Tidewater marshes through the Fall Line into the Piedmont and across the Blue Ridge to the transmontane country. He catalogs the principal rivers and their navigability, noting shoals, falls, and portages that shape settlement and commerce. Mountain ranges, valleys, and passes are described with attention to elevation and orientation. He records notable natural formations, including extensive caverns and the Natural Bridge, observing both their scenic qualities and their usefulness as geographic markers. These sections establish the spatial framework on which later discussions of agriculture, transport, and political organization will depend.
He then surveys climate and resources, summarizing seasonal patterns, prevailing winds, and regional variations in temperature and health. Soils and vegetation are differentiated by belt, with attention to staple crops such as tobacco and grain, and to auxiliary productions like hemp, timber, and fisheries. Mineral springs and ores are noted wherever they influence settlement or industry. Jefferson’s emphasis falls on the relation between environment and livelihood, tracing how river bottoms, upland slopes, and coastal flats invite distinct forms of cultivation. He highlights the practical constraints imposed by distance to market, flooding, and drought, shaping his later economic recommendations.
From environment he turns to natural history, compiling observations of native fauna and flora and reporting specimen measurements sent by correspondents. He contests European theories that American climates weaken animals and people, citing the size and vigor of species and presenting evidence from fossils, including remains attributed to mammoth or mastodon. The discussion ranges from deer and bison to fish and birds, and incorporates brief notes on diseases and longevity. Jefferson augments narrative claims with meteorological records and tabular data, inviting readers to weigh assertions against collected facts. The scientific sections present Virginia as a site for inquiry rather than conjecture.
Having set the natural stage, Jefferson sketches population, settlement, and economic activity. He remarks on dispersed rural habitation, the scarcity of large towns, and the dependence of exports on navigable waterways leading to the Atlantic. He contrasts husbandry practiced on small freeholds with large plantations, tracing how geography, markets, and laws affect land use. In assessing industry, he gives precedence to agriculture and weighs the advantages and risks of domestic manufactures, mindful of public morals and political independence. Trade routes, customs districts, and the role of ports are presented as outgrowths of river systems, reinforcing the earlier geographic analysis.
The book then delineates Virginia’s constitution and institutions as formed after independence. Jefferson describes the bicameral legislature, an executive chosen by the assembly with limited powers, and a judiciary organized through county and superior courts. He reviews the militia system and the distribution of local authority, using statute extracts to illustrate practice. Legal reforms are recounted and proposed, including measures against entails and primogeniture and revisions to the penal code. Throughout, he emphasizes separation of powers and the need to curb arbitrary authority, presenting law as an instrument to cultivate civic responsibility while preserving individual rights within a federal union.
In discussing religion, Jefferson recounts the disestablishment of the former church and argues for broad protections of conscience. He presents legal texts to demonstrate how civil rights can be secured without religious tests or subsidies. The companion topic is education: a plan for public schooling that would diffuse knowledge, prepare citizens for jury service and office, and select talent for advanced study. He details the proposed ladder from elementary instruction to higher learning, linking literacy and republican government. These sections tie institutional design to public virtue, suggesting that constitutional safeguards require a populace trained to reason and to read the laws.
Jefferson surveys Indigenous nations connected to Virginia by geography or history, noting territories, languages, and diplomatic relations, and recording material remains where observed. He contrasts subsistence patterns and oratory with European practices, often through secondhand reports. He also addresses slavery, outlining its legal status, demographic weight, and economic entanglements. He warns of political and moral dangers while advancing proposals for gradual emancipation paired with colonization, and he offers conjectural claims about race that reflect the biases and scientific limits of his era. These chapters expose tensions between universal principles and entrenched institutions that the book neither erases nor resolves.
The closing queries consider internal improvements, including river clearances, canals, and overland routes that could knit the Atlantic slope to the western waters, thereby diversifying commerce and easing regional disparities. Jefferson balances hopes for economic growth with caution about concentrated manufacturing, reiterating an ideal of broadly distributed property and independent husbandry. Appendices and tables consolidate data on population, climate, and law, underscoring the work’s documentary character. As a whole, Notes on the State of Virginia offers a pragmatic, data-inflected vision of a republic under construction, whose enduring significance lies in its blend of description, advocacy, and the contradictions it records.
Historical Context
Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia emerged from a world defined by late colonial and early republican Virginia. From the 1760s to the mid-1780s, Tidewater plantations and expanding Piedmont farms dominated the landscape, and slavery underwrote wealth, politics, and social hierarchy. Anglican establishment shaped religious life until disestablishment took hold. Local power rested in county courts and the gentry who staffed them, while the House of Burgesses—and after 1776 the General Assembly—set policy. This institutional framework, together with an Atlantic economy tied to British markets, forms the setting in which Jefferson described Virginia’s geography, laws, natural resources, and people.
The book began as Jefferson’s answers to a questionnaire sent by François Barbé-Marbois, a French diplomat, around 1780–1781, seeking information on Virginia’s geography, economy, population, and government. Jefferson drafted responses in 1781–1782 and revised them through 1783. While serving in France in the mid-1780s, he privately printed the work in Paris in 1785 for limited circulation. A more public English edition appeared in London in 1787. Its transatlantic path reflects European curiosity about the new American states and Jefferson’s intent to present Virginia—its strengths, contradictions, and potential—to foreign readers and domestic reformers alike.
The American Revolution (circa 1775–1783) transformed Virginia from Britain’s largest mainland colony into a leading state of the new republic. In 1776, Virginians wrote a constitution and adopted a Declaration of Rights authored largely by George Mason, articulating natural rights and republican principles. Jefferson, principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence, shared these commitments. Notes on the State of Virginia, drafted during and after wartime, absorbs this revolutionary context: it measures militia strength, natural resources, and institutions, while scrutinizing how republican ideals might be sustained in a society still marked by inherited hierarchies and dependent on coerced labor.
The post-1776 reform wave in Virginia’s lawmaking frames much of Jefferson’s commentary. A campaign led by figures including Jefferson, George Wythe, and Edmund Pendleton sought to modernize property, criminal, and religious statutes. Entail was abolished in 1776, breaking up concentrated estates. Primogeniture ended in 1785, altering inheritance patterns. Jefferson drafted wide-ranging bills to revise legal codes and to rationalize governance. Although not all his proposals became law, the reform agenda provides crucial context for the book’s analysis of constitutions, courts, and civil liberties. Notes takes stock of what had been achieved and what remained incomplete in the legal transformation of the state.
Slavery, however, remained the central institution of Virginia’s economy and society. Enslaved Africans and African Americans formed a large share of the population, especially in the Tidewater and Piedmont. The General Assembly ended transatlantic importation into Virginia in 1778, and a 1782 law permitted private manumission, but the slave system persisted and expanded internally. Jefferson’s own dependence on enslaved labor shaped his perspective. In the book, he condemned the moral and political dangers of slavery yet advanced racist conjectures and proposed colonization for emancipated people. His national proposal in 1784 to bar slavery in future western territories narrowly failed, revealing the era’s contested antislavery politics.
The book also situates Virginia within ongoing frontier conflict and Indigenous dispossession. In the 1760s–1770s, rising settler migration over the Blue Ridge intensified violence in the Ohio Valley and Appalachian borderlands, seen in episodes like Dunmore’s War (1774). The 1783 Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War but ignored Native sovereignty, accelerating pressures on Indigenous nations. Jefferson cataloged rivers, mountains, and western counties while discussing Native peoples, trade, and warfare. Notes mirrors the early republic’s vision of expansion—celebrating land and resources—while documenting, often from a settler viewpoint, the cultural and political fractures on Virginia’s borders.
Economic realities anchor Jefferson’s assessments. Tobacco had driven Virginia’s colonial wealth but exhausted soils and tethered planters to British creditors. From the 1760s through the 1780s, many planters diversified into wheat and hemp, experimented with crop rotation, and reoriented trade through new channels opened by independence. Wartime disruptions, currency instability, and debt burdens complicated recovery. Jefferson’s book emphasizes agriculture as the foundation of republican virtue, weighing the merits of staple exports, mixed farming, and sustainable land use. His discussion reflects a society in transition, balancing old commercial patterns with hopes for more self-sufficient and scientifically informed cultivation.
The Enlightenment’s scientific culture shapes the book’s methods and aims. European naturalists, including Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, had argued that American climates produced “degeneracy” in animals and humans. Jefferson marshaled measurements, species lists, and climate observations to rebut such claims. He recorded weather data and described Virginia’s fauna and flora, aligning with contemporary natural history practices. In the late 1780s he even arranged the shipment of a large North American moose to Paris to challenge European skeptics. Notes thus doubles as a scientific brief, using empirical description to vindicate American nature and counter metropolitan theories about New World inferiority.
Virginia’s cartographic and surveying traditions provided crucial tools. Mid-century projects such as the Fry-Jefferson map (produced by Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson in the 1750s) cataloged topography, rivers, and settlements, guiding later geographic inquiry. Thomas Jefferson inherited this spatial sensibility, attending to watersheds, mineral prospects, and transport routes. In the mid-1780s, Virginia leaders promoted canal and river-improvement schemes on the James and Potomac to link interior farms to Atlantic markets. Notes reflects these ambitions, describing falls, portages, and navigability, and connecting scientific description to the period’s practical engineering and commercialization projects.
Religious life was also in flux. The Church of England had long enjoyed legal privilege, including parish taxes. After independence, pluralism advanced as Baptists, Presbyterians, and other dissenters pressed for equal rights. Jefferson’s 1777 draft for disestablishment culminated in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, enacted in 1786 through James Madison’s leadership. Notes articulates the philosophical grounds for separating church and state, rejecting coercion in matters of conscience and documenting the changing legal landscape. The book thus mirrors a wider movement in the early United States to redefine religious authority under a framework of individual rights and civil equality.
The legal system’s daily workings—county courts, juries, and militia obligations—formed the fabric of governance that Jefferson cataloged and critiqued. Lay justices dominated local adjudication, blending administrative and judicial roles. Reformers sought clearer codification and a more rational court hierarchy. Notes examines criminal penalties, penal reform, and constitutional design, often advocating proportionality and education over brutality. The book also surveys taxation and representation, revealing tensions between eastern, slaveholding elites and less populated western counties—an imbalance that would echo in Virginia politics for decades and underwrite debates about constitutional revision and apportionment.
Education stood at the center of Jefferson’s republican program. In 1779 he introduced a Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, proposing a tiered system of public schooling to cultivate citizens capable of self-government; it did not pass at the time. Notes reiterates the belief that widespread education, scientific instruction, and access to books are essential to liberty. This emphasis reflects Enlightenment confidence in reason and the period’s early experiments with academies, libraries, and learned societies. Even as institutional realization lagged, Jefferson’s educational blueprint informed later public schooling debates in Virginia and beyond.
Debates over slavery’s future were not confined to Virginia. From the late 1770s through the 1780s, Quaker petitions, evangelical preaching, and northern state laws created a patchwork of gradual emancipation across the mid-Atlantic and New England. In federal policy, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery in territories north of the Ohio River, signaling a sectionalizing approach to expansion. Notes engages this contested terrain, rejecting immediate equality while conceding slavery’s injustices, and advancing colonization schemes. The book thereby records how moral unease, economic interests, racial ideology, and territorial policy tangled in the early republic’s politics.
Urban-rural dynamics further contextualize Jefferson’s preferences. Virginia’s population remained predominantly rural, with modest urban centers such as Williamsburg, Richmond, and Norfolk serving as administrative and commercial nodes. Small-scale manufactures existed—ironworks, mills, tanneries—but large, diversified industrial hubs were rare. Jefferson’s agrarian ideal, expressed in Notes, elevates independent farmers as custodians of civic virtue and warns against concentrations of wage labor and speculative finance. These views intersect with broader eighteenth-century debates on luxury, corruption, and the relationship between commerce and republican stability, debates that would intensify as the new nation built fiscal and commercial institutions.
Climate and disease shaped everyday life and policy. Seasonal fevers, including malaria in low-lying Tidewater regions, influenced settlement patterns and labor rhythms. Smallpox inoculation, increasingly practiced from the mid-eighteenth century, mitigated but did not eliminate epidemic threats. Jefferson kept meteorological records and included climate observations in Notes to support arguments about health, agriculture, and the character of the land. His reliance on environmental data reflects contemporary medical and natural-philosophical theories, in which air, water, and landscape were believed to affect human behavior—a framework that colored assessments of settlement suitability, public health measures, and the prospects for population growth.
The book’s international trajectory also mattered. Jefferson resided in France from 1784 to 1789 as an American diplomat, moving within Enlightenment circles and conversing with European savants and officials. Notes circulated among readers eager for reliable information about the United States. It served as both a reference and a defense of American conditions, countering stereotypes while offering candid critiques. European interest in trade, migration, and natural history gave the work an audience beyond Virginia. Its combination of data, philosophical reflection, and policy recommendations exemplified the period’s exchange between American state-builders and European intellectuals.
For all its empiricism, Notes is inseparable from its author’s contradictions. Jefferson chronicled Virginia’s scenery, resources, laws, and reforms with an Enlightenment zeal for measurement and classification. He argued for religious freedom, education, and legal modernization, yet rationalized racial hierarchy and remained deeply entangled in slavery. The book’s mix of scrutiny and apology mirrors the transitional decades in which it was written: a society striving to align revolutionary principles with inherited institutions. As a historical artifact, it is both critique and mirror of its era—revealing the ambitions, achievements, and moral limits of early republican Virginia.
Author Biography
Introduction
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was an American statesman, diplomat, architect, and prolific writer whose pen helped shape the founding era. Best known as the principal drafter of the Declaration of Independence, he also authored Notes on the State of Virginia and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, works that translated Enlightenment ideals into American practice. Jefferson served as the third president of the United States, but his literary stature rests on his public papers, legislation, and an immense correspondence. His prose joined philosophy, politics, and practical reform, helping define a republican vocabulary that influenced debates about liberty in the United States and beyond.
Jefferson’s reputation as a writer arose early from pamphlets and legislative drafts that combined clarity with measured cadence. His letters—thousands preserved—form a sustained intellectual autobiography, ranging across government, science, architecture, agriculture, and education. He wrote for both persuasion and posterity, organizing facts and principles into compact statements intended to guide policy. The power of his arguments was amplified by a style that favored balance and accessible diction. Yet his authorship sits within a contested legacy: he articulated universal rights while keeping people in bondage at Monticello, a contradiction that continues to shape the interpretation of his texts and public career.
Across a life spent in public service—delegate, governor of Virginia, diplomat in France, secretary of state, vice president, and president—Jefferson’s writing remained a primary instrument of leadership. Presidential messages, private memoranda, and cabinet instructions disseminated his views on neutrality, trade, and expansion, including the constitutional reasoning he offered after the Louisiana Purchase. At home in Virginia, he conceived an educational republic anchored by the University of Virginia, drafting plans and reports that linked civic virtue to secular learning. Even when political winds shifted, he tended to write first, framing disputes through reasoned argument before negotiating the necessary compromises of office.
Education and Literary Influences
Jefferson was born in Albemarle County, Virginia, and educated at the College of William and Mary, where he studied mathematics, natural philosophy, and law. He read law under George Wythe, whose tutelage emphasized reasoned argument and close attention to legal sources. Another early mentor, William Small, encouraged scientific curiosity and broadened Jefferson’s exposure to Enlightenment thought. By the time he was admitted to the Virginia bar, Jefferson had cultivated habits of systematic reading, note-taking, and translation from classical languages. These practices informed his lifelong method: assemble evidence, compare authorities, and then compress conclusions into precise, persuasive prose suited to public deliberation.
His intellectual formation blended classical republicanism with modern philosophy. Jefferson read widely in Locke and Montesquieu, drew on Roman histories and rhetoric, and followed developments in the Scottish and French Enlightenments. He admired empirical inquiry in science and public administration, treating observation and measurement as civic tools as well as scholarly ones. This orientation shaped both his information-rich essays and the statistical tables he favored in Notes on the State of Virginia. He maintained a large personal library that he constantly reorganized by subject and question. The result was a style that emphasized reason, utility, and the moral stakes of policy.
Literary Career
Jefferson’s published voice first reached a broad audience in the 1770s. A Summary View of the Rights of British America, written in 1774, presented the colonies as self-governing communities bound to the crown by allegiance rather than by parliamentary supremacy. Circulated as a pamphlet in America and London, it marked him as a forceful advocate of colonial rights. He entered the Continental Congress soon after, where colleagues turned to his pen for committee work. The essayist’s method—state principles, marshal grievances, outline remedies—became his habitual pattern, visible in committee reports, draft resolutions, and the legislative texts he prepared for Virginia.
In 1776, Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence for a committee of the Continental Congress. The document’s structure moved from philosophical premises to a bill of grievances and a formal assertion of nationhood. Congress revised his draft, but its core argument and rhythm remained his. The Declaration rapidly became the signature statement of American political ideals and a touchstone for later movements that appealed to its language. Its reception was immediate and enduring: celebrated by supporters of independence, contested by loyalists, and later adopted as a moral benchmark that advocates of abolition, suffrage, and civil rights would invoke across generations.
Notes on the State of Virginia, completed in the early 1780s and first published in France in 1785, is Jefferson’s most substantial book. Organized as responses to queries, it surveys the state’s geography, economy, natural history, laws, and religion. It includes arguments for religious liberty and public education, reflections on constitutional structure, and extensive empirical detail. It also contains claims about race and slavery that have been extensively criticized both historically and by modern scholars. The book circulated in English and French editions, influencing European and American readers who were curious about the new republic’s resources, institutions, and social conditions.
Jefferson’s later writings ranged across law, theology, and constitutional theory. He drafted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1777, enacted in 1786, establishing a key precedent for disestablishment. In 1798 he authored the Kentucky Resolutions, published anonymously, which argued that states could protest federal overreach under the Constitution. As president, he framed policy in written messages rather than spoken addresses, reinforcing a print-centered political culture. In private he compiled an anthology often called the Jefferson Bible, extracting the moral teachings of Jesus. He wrote architectural notes and institutional plans while founding the University of Virginia, integrating letters and design.
Beliefs and Advocacy
Jefferson’s public philosophy centered on natural rights, consent of the governed, religious liberty, and an educated citizenry. He saw knowledge as the safeguard of republican institutions and worked to broaden access to learning. He helped administer the nation’s early patent system and promoted practical science in agriculture and engineering. His legislative and executive writings prioritized limited central power, civil liberties, and fiscal restraint, though he accepted implied powers when he believed public benefit justified them. He opposed hereditary privilege and argued for a wide distribution of property. Throughout, he treated writing—laws, reports, and letters—as the principal means of reform.
Slavery posed the defining tension in Jefferson’s thought and life. He enslaved people at Monticello and other properties while writing about natural equality, and he did not emancipate most of those he held. In public he condemned the transatlantic trade and supported its federal prohibition, yet he proposed only gradual remedies and colonization schemes that preserved racial hierarchy. Modern scholarship, supported by DNA evidence, has concluded that Jefferson was the father of children born to Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman at Monticello. This history has reshaped interpretations of his texts, prompting close scrutiny of how principle, prejudice, and power intersected in his work.
Final Years & Legacy
In retirement, Jefferson devoted himself to the University of Virginia, founded in 1819, overseeing its curriculum, architecture, and governance as a model of secular public education. After the burning of the U.S. Capitol in 1814, he sold his extensive library to Congress, forming the core of the revived national collection. He corresponded widely, including with John Adams, while managing chronic debt and the demands of Monticello. Jefferson died at Monticello on July 4, 1826. He asked to be remembered as author of the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia—an enduring, debated legacy.
Notes on the State of Virginia
QUERY I.
An exact description of the limits and boundaries of the State of Virginia?
Virginia is bounded on the east by the Atlantic; on the north by a line of latitude crossing the eastern shore through Watkin's Point, being about 37° 57' north latitude; from thence by a straight line to Cinquac, near the mouth of Potomac; thence by the Potomac, which is common to Virginia and Maryland, to the first fountain of its northern branch; thence by a meridian line, passing through that fountain till it intersects a line running east and west, in latitude 39° 43' 42.4" which divides Maryland from Pennsylvania, and which was marked by Messrs. Mason and Dixon; thence by that line, and a continuation of it westwardly to the completion of five degrees of longitude from the eastern boundary of Pennsylvania, in the same latitude, and thence by a meridian line to the Ohio; on the west by the Ohio and Mississippi, to latitude 36° 30' north, and on the south by the line of latitude last mentioned. By admeasurements through nearly the whole of this last line, and supplying the unmeasured parts from good data, the Atlantic and Mississippi are found in this latitude to be seven hundred and fifty-eight miles distant, equal to 30° 38' of longitude, reckoning fifty-five miles and three thousand one hundred and forty-four feet to the degree. This being our comprehension of longitude, that of our latitude, taken between this and Mason and Dixon's line, is 3° 13' 42.4" equal to two hundred and twenty-three and one-third miles, supposing a degree of a great circle to be sixty-nine miles, eight hundred and sixty-four feet, as computed by Cassini. These boundaries include an area somewhat triangular of one hundred and twenty-one thousand five hundred and twenty-five square miles, whereof seventy-nine thousand six hundred and fifty lie westward of the Alleghany mountains, and fifty-seven thousand and thirty-four westward of the meridian of the mouth of the Great Kanhaway. This State is therefore one-third larger than the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, which are reckoned at eighty-eight thousand three hundred and fifty-seven square miles.
These limits result from, 1. The ancient charters from the crown of England. 2. The grant of Maryland to the Lord Baltimore, and the subsequent determinations of the British court as to the extent of that grant. 3. The grant of Pennsylvania to William Penn, and a compact between the general assemblies of the commonwealths of Virginia and Pennsylvania as to the extent of that grant. 4. The grant of Carolina, and actual location of its northern boundary, by consent of both parties. 5. The treaty of Paris of 1763. 6. The confirmation of the charters of the neighboring States by the convention of Virginia at the time of constituting their commonwealth. 7. The cession made by Virginia to Congress of all the lands to which they had title on the north side of the Ohio.
QUERY II.
A notice of its rivers, rivulets, and how far they are navigable?
An inspection of a map of Virginia, will give a better idea of the geography of its rivers, than any description in writing. Their navigation may be imperfectly noted.
Roanoke, so far as it lies within the State, is nowhere navigable but for canoes, or light batteaux[1]; and even for these in such detached parcels as to have prevented the inhabitants from availing themselves of it at all.
James River, and its waters, afford navigation as follows:
The whole of Elizabeth River, the lowest of those which run into James River, is a harbor, and would contain upwards of three hundred ships. The channel is from one hundred and fifty to two hundred fathoms wide, and at common flood tide affords eighteen feet water to Norfolk. The Stafford, a sixty gun ship, went there, lightening herself to cross the bar at Sowel's Point. The Fier Rodrigue, pierced for sixty-four guns, and carrying fifty, went there without lightening. Craney Island, at the mouth of this river, commands its channel tolerably well.
Nansemond River is navigable to Sleepy Hole for vessels of two hundred and fifty tons; to Suffolk for those of one hundred tons; and to Milner's for those of twenty-five.
Pagan Creek affords eight or ten feet water to Smithfield, which admits vessels of twenty tons.
Chickahominy has at its mouth a bar, on which is only twelve feet water at common flood tide. Vessels passing that, may go eight miles up the river; those of ten feet draught may go four miles further, and those of six tons burden twenty miles further.
Appomattox may be navigated as far as Broadways, by any vessel which has crossed Harrison's bar in James River; it keeps eight or ten feet water a mile or two higher up to Fisher's bar, and four feet on that and upwards to Petersburg, where all navigation ceases.
James River itself affords a harbor for vessels of any size in Hampton Road, but not in safety through the whole winter; and there is navigable water for them as far as Mulberry Island. A forty gun ship goes to Jamestown, and, lightening herself, may pass Harrison's bar; on which there is only fifteen feet water. Vessels of two hundred and fifty tons may go to Warwick; those of one hundred and twenty-five go to Rocket's, a mile below Richmond; from thence is about seven feet water to Richmond; and about the centre of the town, four feet and a half, where the navigation is interrupted by falls, which in a course of six miles, descend about eighty-eight feet perpendicular; above these it is resumed in canoes and batteaux, and is prosecuted safely and advantageously to within ten miles of the Blue Ridge; and even through the Blue Ridge a ton weight has been brought; and the expense would not be great, when compared with its object, to open a tolerable navigation up Jackson's river and Carpenter's creek, to within twenty-five miles of Howard's creek of Green Briar, both of which have then water enough to float vessels into the Great Kanhaway. In some future state of population I think it possible that its navigation may also be made to interlock with that of the Potomac, and through that to communicate by a short portage with the Ohio. It is to be noted that this river is called in the maps James River, only to its confluence with the Rivanna; thence to the Blue Ridge it is called the Fluvanna; and thence to its source Jackson's river. But in common speech, it is called James River to its source.
The Rivanna, a branch of James River, is navigable for canoes and batteaux to its intersection with the South-West mountains, which is about twenty-two miles; and may easily be opened to navigation through these mountains to its fork above Charlottesville.
York River, at Yorktown, affords the best harbor in the State for vessels of the largest size. The river there narrows to the width of a mile, and is contained within very high banks, close under which vessels may ride. It holds four fathom water at high tide for twenty-five miles above York to the mouth of Poropotank, where the river is a mile and a half wide, and the channel only seventy-five fathom, and passing under a high bank. At the confluence of Pamunkey and Mattapony, it is reduced to three fathom depth, which continues up Pamunkey to Cumberland, where the width is one hundred yards, and up Mattapony to within two miles of Frazier's ferry, where it becomes two and a half fathom deep, and holds that about five miles. Pamunkey is then capable of navigation for loaded flats to Brockman's bridge, fifty miles above Hanover town, and Mattapony to Downer's bridge, seventy miles above its mouth.
Piankatank, the little rivers making out of Mobjack Bay and those of the eastern shore, receive only very small vessels, and these can but enter them.
Rappahannock affords four fathom water to Hobb's hole, and two fathom from thence to Fredericksburg.
Potomac is seven and a half miles wide at the mouth; four and a half at Nomony bay; three at Aquia; one and a half at Hallowing point; one and a quarter at Alexandria. Its soundings are seven fathom at the mouth; five at St. George's island; four and a half at Lower Matchodic; three at Swan's point, and thence up to Alexandria; thence ten feet water to the falls, which are thirteen miles above Alexandria. These falls are fifteen miles in length, and of very great descent, and the navigation above them for batteaux and canoes is so much interrupted as to be little used. It is, however, used in a small degree up the Cohongoronta branch as far as fort Cumberland, which was at the mouth of Willis's creek; and is capable, at no great expense, of being rendered very practicable. The Shenandoah branch interlocks with James river about the Blue Ridge, and may perhaps in future be opened.
The Mississippi will be one of the principal channels of future commerce for the country westward of the Alleghany[1q]. From the mouth of this river to where it receives the Ohio, is one thousand miles by water, but only five hundred by land, passing through the Chickasaw country. From the mouth of the Ohio to that of the Missouri, is two hundred and thirty miles by water, and one hundred and forty by land, from thence to the mouth of the Illinois river, is about twenty-five miles. The Mississippi, below the mouth of the Missouri, is always muddy, and abounding with sand bars, which frequently change their places. However, it carries fifteen feet water to the mouth of the Ohio, to which place it is from one and a half to two miles wide, and thence to Kaskaskia from one mile to a mile and a quarter wide. Its current is so rapid, that it never can be stemmed by the force of the wind alone, acting on sails. Any vessel, however, navigated with oars, may come up at any time, and receive much aid from the wind. A batteau passes from the mouth of Ohio to the mouth of Mississippi in three weeks, and is from two to three months getting up again. During its floods, which are periodical as those of the Nile, the largest vessels may pass down it, if their steerage can be insured. These floods begin in April, and the river returns into its banks early in August. The inundation extends further on the western than eastern side, covering the lands in some places for fifty miles from its banks. Above the mouth of the Missouri it becomes much such a river as the Ohio, like it clear and gentle in its current, not quite so wide, the period of its floods nearly the same, but not rising to so great a height. The streets of the village at Cohoes[2] are not more than ten feet above the ordinary level of the water, and yet were never overflowed. Its bed deepens every year. Cohoes, in the memory of many people now living, was insulated by every flood of the river. What was the eastern channel has now become a lake, nine miles in length and one in width, into which the river at this day never flows. This river yields turtle of a peculiar kind, perch, trout, gar, pike, mullets, herrings, carp, spatula-fish of fifty pounds weight, cat-fish of one hundred pounds weight, buffalo fish, and sturgeon. Aligators or crocodiles have been seen as high up as the Acansas. It also abounds in herons, cranes, ducks, brant, geese, and swans. Its passage is commanded by a fort established by this State, five miles below the mouth of the Ohio, and ten miles above the Carolina boundary.
The Missouri, since the treaty of Paris, the Illinois and northern branches of the Ohio, since the cession to Congress, are no longer within our limits. Yet having been so heretofore, and still opening to us channels of extensive communication with the western and north-western country, they shall be noted in their order.
The Missouri is, in fact, the principal river, contributing more to the common stream than does the Mississippi, even after its junction with the Illinois. It is remarkably cold, muddy, and rapid. Its overflowings are considerable. They happen during the months of June and July. Their commencement being so much later than those of the Mississippi, would induce a belief that the sources of the Missouri are northward of those of the Mississippi, unless we suppose that the cold increases again with the ascent of the land from the Mississippi westwardly. That this ascent is great, is proved by the rapidity of the river. Six miles above the mouth, it is brought within the compass of a quarter of a mile's width; yet the Spanish merchants at Pancore, or St. Louis, say they go two thousand miles up it. It heads far westward of the Rio Norte, or North River. There is, in the villages of Kaskaskia, Cohoes, and St. Vincennes, no inconsiderable quantity of plate, said to have been plundered during the last war by the Indians from the churches and private houses of Santa Fé, on the North river, and brought to the villages for sale. From the mouth of the Ohio to Santa Fé are forty days journey, or about one thousand miles. What is the shortest distance between the navigable waters of the Missouri, and those of the North river, or how far this is navigable above Santa Fé, I could never learn. From Santa Fé to its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico is about twelve hundred miles. The road from New Orleans to Mexico crosses this river at the post of Rio Norte, eight hundred miles below Santa Fé, and from this post to New Orleans is about twelve hundred miles; thus making two thousand miles between Santa Fé and New Orleans, passing down the North river, Red river, and Mississippi; whereas it is two thousand two hundred and thirty through the Missouri and Mississippi. From the same post of Rio Norte, passing near the mines of La Sierra and Laiguana, which are between the North river, and the river Salina to Sartilla, is three hundred and seventy-five miles, and from thence, passing the mines of Charcas, Zaccatecas, and Potosi, to the city of Mexico, is three hundred and seventy-five miles; in all, one thousand five hundred and fifty miles from Santa Fé to the city of Mexico. From New Orleans to the city of Mexico is about one thousand nine hundred and fifty miles; the roads after setting out from the Red river, near Natchitoches, keeping generally parallel with the coast, and about two hundred miles from it, till it enters the city of Mexico.
The Illinois is a fine river, clear, gentle, and without rapids; insomuch that it is navigable for batteaux to its source. From thence is a portage of two miles only to the Chicago, which affords a batteau navigation of sixteen miles to its entrance into lake Michigan. The Illinois, about ten miles above its mouth, is three hundred yards wide.
The Kaskaskia is one hundred yards wide at its entrance into the Mississippi, and preserves that breadth to the Buffalo plains, seventy miles above. So far, also, it is navigable for loaded batteaux, and perhaps much further. It is not rapid.
The Ohio is the most beautiful river on earth. Its current gentle, waters clear, and bosom smooth and unbroken by rocks and rapids, a single instance only excepted.
It is one-quarter of a mile wide at Fort Pitt, five hundred yards at the mouth of the Great Kanhaway, one mile and twenty-five poles at Louisville, one-quarter of a mile on the rapids three or four miles below Louisville, half a mile where the low country begins, which is twenty miles above Green river, a mile and a quarter at the receipt of the Tennessee, and a mile wide at the mouth.
Its length, as measured according to its meanders by Captain Hutchins, is as follows:—
From Fort Pitt
To Log's Town
18½
Big Beaver Creek
10¾
Little Beaver Creek
13½
Yellow Creek
11¾
Two Creeks
21¾
Long Reach
53¾
End Long Reach
16½
Muskingum
25½
Little Kanhaway
12¼
Hockhocking
16
Great Kanhaway
82½
Guiandot
43¾
Sandy Creek
14½
Sioto
48¼
Little Miami
126¼
Licking Creek
8
Great Miami
26¾
Big Bones
32½
Kentucky
44¼
Rapids
77¼
Low Country
155¾
Buffalo River
64½
Wabash
97¼
Big Cave
42¾
Shawanee River
52½
Cherokee River
13
Massac
11
Mississippi
46
1188
In common winter and spring tides it affords fifteen feet water to Louisville, ten feet to Le Tarte's rapids, forty miles above the mouth of the great Kanhaway, and a sufficiency at all times for light batteaux and canoes to Fort Pitt. The rapids are in latitude 38° 8'. The inundations of this river begin about the last of March, and subside in July. During these, a first-rate man-of-war may be carried from Louisville to New Orleans, if the sudden turns of the river and the strength of its current will admit a safe steerage. The rapids at Louisville descend about thirty feet in a length of a mile and a half. The bed of the river there is a solid rock, and is divided by an island into two branches, the southern of which is about two hundred yards wide, and is dry four months in the year. The bed of the northern branch is worn into channels by the constant course of the water, and attrition of the pebble stones carried on with that, so as to be passable for batteaux through the greater part of the year. Yet it is thought that the southern arm may be the most easily opened for constant navigation. The rise of the waters in these rapids does not exceed ten or twelve feet. A part of this island is so high as to have been never overflowed, and to command the settlement at Louisville, which is opposite to it. The fort, however, is situated at the head of the falls. The ground on the south side rises very gradually.
