the papers of thomas jefferson

THE PAPERS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON’

By means of the sort of arithmetical exercise in which Thomas Jefferson himself might have indulged had it been possible for him to possess the requisite data, I have calculated that he lived for 83 years and 83 days, and that therefore ‘the midway point in this our mortal life’ was for him a day around the middle of December in the year 1785. Soon after that date the seventh volume of Dr Julian P. Boyd’s definitive edition of The Jeferson Papers comes to an end. I t also marks a climacteric in the career of Thomas Jefferson, for he had recently achieved one of the great ambitions of his life by travelling to France (where he arrived as American minister- plenipotentiary on 3 August 1785) and taking up residence in Paris (where he established himself in a house in the cul-de-sac Taitbout on 17 October of the same year).

During that autumn and early winter of 1785 Jefferson, given to moralizing about himself as he was, and sensitive though he was to an extraordinary degree to the passage of time and to the downbeat of history, does not seem to have had any feeling that his life’s span had reached or perhaps passed its mid-point, with achievements and experiences ahead of him (despite a 17-year retirement at the end of his days) as full, and as useful to his fellow men, as he had already crammed into the 41 years that had already gone by, I t is true that two of the three things which he asked to have mentioned on his tombstone (his authorship of the Declaration of Independence and of the Virginia Statute guaranteeing Religious Freedom) had already been achieved, leaving merely the foundation of the University of Virginia to be recorded in connexion with the second half of his long life, but it was only his natural modesty that left out of account, when he came to compose his epitaph, such things as his ministry to France, his secretaryship of state under Washington, his authorship of the Kentucky Resolutions, his

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Edited by JULIAN P. BOYD, LYNAN n. BUTTERFIELD and HINA R . BRYAN. Princeton Univ. Press (London, Cumberlege) 1950-1954 (in progress). Vol. i, 1760-1776, lviii + 679 pp. (illus.); vol. ii, Jan. 1777-June 1779. xxiv + 665 pp. (illus.); vol. iii, June 1779-Sepf. 1780. xxxiii + 672 pp. (illus.) ; vol. iv, Ocf. 1780-Fcb. 1781, xxxviii + 702 pp. (illus.) ; vol. v, Feb. 1781-May 1781, xxxv + 705 pp. (illus.); vol. vi, 21 May 1781- 1 March 1784, xxxvi + 668 pp. (illus.); vol. vii, 2 March 1784-25 Feb. 1785, xxviii + 652 pp. (illus.), $10.00 (80s.) each vol.; Index, uols. z-vi, vii + 229pp.. b . P . ) .

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274 HISTORY [OCTOBER

term as vice-president and his two terms as president of the United States, his organization of the Lewis and Clark ex- pedition and his purchase of the great Louisiana Territory.

No wonder is it that Dr Boyd, after managing to kram the papers of the first half of Thomas Jefferson’s life into seven volumes, will be requiring nearly seven times as many more, bringing the total to over 50, for those of the second half. Already the seventh volume, running to over 650 pages of documents, comprehends only the period of just under one year stretching from 2 March 1784 to 25 February 1785, whereas volume i, with a comparable number of pages, stretches from his first survivingadolescent letter of 14 January 1760 right through to the end of December 1776. By that time the Declaration of Independence was already drafted, signed and adopted and the name of Thomas Jefferson was a household word, not only throughout the former Old Dominion of Virginia, but also the length and breadth of those thirteen rebellious colonies that now, thanks in no small measure to him, were already calling themselves ‘These United States’.

Looking forward and back from this climacteric or watershed of December 1785 we can seek to appraise both the greatness of Thomas Jefferson himself, and also the magnitude of the achievement, and of the task still before Dr Boyd and his associates at the ‘Jefferson Workshop’ in Princeton. Never before in history-and hardly ever since-has the life of one man been so copiously documented. The work of collecting, copying and collating the Jeferson Papers has been stupendous, but Dr Boyd would be the first to admit that his foremost and most useful collaborator has been Thomas Jefferson himself. But for Jefferson’s ultra-methodical letter-books, and his meticulous account-books, kept from early manhood, through all the days of his long life; but for his famous letter-copying machines (the first was brought into use in 1784) and, above all, his prodigious memory, permitting him in his later years to fill in many gaps in the documentation of his early career, Dr Boyd’s task would have been many times as hard, if not entirely impossible.

The need for such a comprehensive new edition of Jefferson’s papers has long been felt, especially by those scholars who have been forced to make do with the excellent though incomplete

19551 THE PAPERS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 275

Writings of Thomas Jefferson edited by P. L. Ford (10 volumes, New York, 1892-9) or with the later, more comprehensive but less accurate or reliable, ‘Memorial’ edition (20 volumes, New York, 1903-4) of A. Lipscomb and A. E. Bligh.

The idea of a new and definitive edition, ‘to present the writings and recorded actions of Thomas Jefferson as accurately and as completely as possible’, originated with the Thomas Jefferson Bicentennial Commission established in the year 1940, and it is to the everlasting credit of the Congress of the United States, in that troubled year of global war 1943, that it found time to pass a special act authorizing the Bicentennial Com- mission

to prepare as a Congressional memorial to Thomas Jefferson a new edition of the Writings of Thomas Jefferson, including additional material and unpublished manuscripts preserved in the Library of Congress and elsewhere at a cost not to exceed $15,000 for the preparation of the manuscript.

The Commission then persuaded Princeton University (where Dr Boyd was then chief librarian) to sponsor the new edition of Jefferson’s papers, and the New York Times Newspaper Company offered the munificent subvention of an additional $200,000 to enable the task to be completed on an adequate scale and with the utmost degree of scholarly completeness. Seldom has an organ of the press been in a position so handsomely to repay a debt to one who did so much in his lifetime to establish and preserve the right of freedom of expression for Americans and for mankind, and who believed that the press ‘is the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man, and improving him as a rational, moral and social being’. This subvention of $200,000, say the editors in their acknowledge- ments] ‘was both generous and, quite literally, indispensable’.

Dr Boyd and his associates had to solve many problems and make many important decisions before they could even publish the first volume of The Jeflerson Papers. Among other things, for example, a method of transcribing, collating and annotat- ing their documents had to be devised that would avoid pedantry and yet maintain a high standard of scholarship. They have succeeded admirably in their task. Footnotes have been abandoned in favour of notes at the end of each important document, which follow a uniform scheme, giving the location


of the original and its variants, explaining briefly the circumstances in which it was written, and listing the alterations made in the manuscript and the most significant variations between different versions of it. Where a document is printed in a language other than English a summary translation of its contents into English is given. This seems to be a great improvement upon the more commonly-encountered system of ‘bottom-heavy’ pages, so weighed down with critical apparatus that only a few lines of the text of each document appears upon each. Easy differentiation between text and notes is maintained by employing different sizes of type, and the volumes are beautifully and clearly printed-using an adapt- ation of a fount admired and recommended by Jefferson himself. This indicates the loving care that the Princeton Press has lavished upon a task which it obviously regards as a public trust rather than an ordinary publishing venture. The best tribute one can pay to the printing and binding and general appearance of the series is to say that all would undoubtedly have delighted the eye and warmed the heart of that discerning and exacting bibliophile Thomas Jefferson himself. On 19 August 1771 he had sent to Robert Skipworth, in reply to the latter’s request, a ‘List of Books for a Private Library’. At the end of the list he wrotea

These books if bound quite plain will cost the prices affixed to this catalogue. If bound elegantly, gilt, lettered, and marbled on the leaves, they will cost 20 p.cent more. If bound by Bum- garden in fine Marbled bindings, they will cost 50 p.cent more. Every serious student of the Papers of Thomas Jeferson

should read carefully the explanation of the ‘Editorial Method’ on pages xxv-xxxviii of volume i. Not only is this explanation needed if the best scholarly use is to be made of the collection, but it serves as a valuable model and guide to those who, as editors, may be confronted with similar tasks, even if on a much more modest scale. The improvement upon the editorial method of P. L. Ford, good as that was in its day, is very striking if one compares the texts of almost any document appearing in both editions.

To begin with, photofacsimiles of ‘every known copy of every Jefferson document’ were made, and assembled at

The Papers of Thomas Jcflerson, i, 81.


Princeton, and the entire file will eventually be deposited in the Library of Congress. This gave inestimable advantages to the editors, and will permit meticulous Jefferson scholars in future days to verify transcriptions or obtain full texts of summarised documents from one central repository, instead of having to travel through thirty-eight states of the Union and the District of Columbia and many foreign countries, including Australia, France, Great Britain, Holland, Switzerland and Italy.3 The close comparison this method has permitted has yielded spectacular results, for the slips made by Jefferson and his correspondents, the mistakes of clerks, the inefficiency of the ‘letterpress’ copying method he used until the year 1804, the faulty decoding of letters in cypher, the decay of paper and the fading of ink, had often left extremely corrupt texts to previous editors, Sometimes, of course, comparison was not possible and then the old type of brain-flogging editorial ingenuity had to be fallen back upon, as in the case of the extremely interesting long letter from Thomas Jefferson to Patrick Henry (then governor of Virginia) dated 27 March 1779,4 on the subject of the housing and provisioning of the ‘Convention Troops’ captured with Burgoyne at Saratoga who were at that time quartered in Albemarle County, Virginia, close to Monticello. This letter survives today only in the form of the original draft and a fragmentary fair copy in Jefferson’s handwriting and the draft ‘is one of the most difficult texts to decipher in the whole body of T. J.’s papers’.s The page of this draft reproduced in facsimile facing page 209 of volume ii gives some idea of the.difficulties involved. We should be extremely grateful for the text that Dr Boyd now gives us of one of Jefferson’s most eloquent and incisively written letters. Nobody would have cared to miss, on account of illegibility or interlining, such a gem as:

If the troops could be fed upon long letters I believe the gentleman at the head of that department in this country would be the best commissary upon earth.O The plan to be followed in publishing the successive volumes

of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson is carefully explained in the

* i, p. xxii. (In this and the subsequent references to the seven volumes

‘ii, 237 il. ii, 245. ii, 239. here reviewed, the title of the series is omitted.)


section of volume i entitled ‘General View of the Work’,’ and the Foreword to each additional volume gives further details of this plan. By contemplating the first seven volumes together one is able to judge to some extent how the master-plan is working out.

The intention was to publish the Pa+ers of Thomas Jefferson in two series, the first organized chronologically and the second topically. The first series was to consist of letters by and to Jefferson (in full, in summary, or in a record entry if no text survived) and was estimated to run to 19,000 letters written by Jefferson (of which one-third had previously been published in one form or another) and over 30,000 letters written to him by other persons (of which not one-fifteenth had appeared in print). Beside letters, this chronological series was to contain messages, speeches, reports, bills and other documents written by Jefferson or having a direct relationship with him, and would fill four-fifths, or some forty or more volumes, of the whole edition. The second series would constitute the remaining one-fifth of the volumes and would include longer compositions from the pen of Jefferson, such as the AutobiograPhy and the Notes on Virg in ia; his legal papers, his architectural and other drawings, maps, surveys, and land papers ; his account books; his F a r m Book and Garden Book; his literary and linguistic papers; and documents relating to the University of Virginia. The whole was to be topped off with a volume containing a bio- graphical register of Jefferson’s correspondents and a chron- ology and itinerary of Jefferson’s life and travels, and by an index volume or volumes.

This ‘grand design’ presents some noteworthy features, the most important of which is the decision to separate the shorter papers and documents composed by Thomas Jefferson from his more sustained compositions and from his journals and account books. In some cases this was the only practicable decision, but in others it has led to slightly awkward results. For instance, we presumably will have to wait until after volume xl for the full newly edited text of Notes on the State of V irg in ia , yet Jefferson started assembling these Notes in the year 1780, completed them in 1782, and first published them early in 1785, and a considerable correspondence concerning their production

7 i, pp. vii-xx.


has therefore already been printed in volumes iv-vii of the first series. It would have been extremely convenient to be able to consult Dr Boyd’s edition of the Notes while reading through the correspondence for these years. Similar, though lesser, inconveniences may arise from having to wait for the F a r m Book and the Garden Book, and one reader at least would have welcomed the publication early in the series of the unique letter books (or ‘Epistulatory Register’) and account books of Thomas Jefferson in their original form. Could not Dr Boyd and his associates have contemplated a simultaneous publication of the two series, so that the Notes on Virg in ia and the Letter Books, for instance, could have been available much sooner? Failing that, volumes of the two series might have appeared alternately until the shorter ‘topical series’ had been completed.

These are perhaps counsels of perfection, and it may be that Dr Boyd and his staff encountered technical difficulties which precluded anything but the straightforward publication and completion of the chronological series before the second series could be started. There are, after all, other editions of Notes o n Vivgilzia and of most of the other longer compositions, though no doubt all of these will be supplanted by Dr Boyd’s, when eventually these. appear.

In fact, the strictly chronological scheme of the first series of volumes has already been departed from to a marked degree in some of those at present under consideration, and in my opinion this was for the best of reasons. For instance, in volume ii the correspondence of Thomas Jefferson between 2 January 1777 and 18 June 1779 (the period spanned by that particular volume) takes up only the first 301 out of its 665 pages. More than half of the volume (pp. 305-657) is occupied by a lengthy special treatment of ‘The Revisal of the Laws, 1776-1786’, which includes the drafts of no fewer than 126 bills drawn up either by Jefferson or by the committee of revisors of the state of Virginia, of which he was a leading member. As ‘no complete publication or reproduction of the Report of the Committee of Revisors has been made available heretofore’,8 the second half of volume ii is of the utmost significance to students of legal history, while it is well known that Jefferson himself

ii, 305.


regarded his part in the revision of the laws of Virginia as one of his most important achievements,

When volume iii is reached the chronological scheme along the pattern of volume i is reverted to, and the correspondence (covering from 18 June 1779 to 29 September 1780) continues to its very last page. The few documents in this volume which are not letters to or from Jefferson (such as the text of a ‘Bill for Establishing a Manufactory of Arms and Extending Navi- gation through the Falls of James River’ of 30 October 1779, occupying 16 pages) are embedded in the chronological scheme under the dates of their emission, as had been done in volume i, with several considerably longer ‘non-epistolatory’ documents or sets of related documents (such as the various drafts and stages of the Declaration of Independence, occupying, with an editorial note, 20 pagese and of the ‘Declaration of the Cause and Necessity for Taking up Arms’, occupying 32 pagesilo).

Volume iv (covering from 1 October 1780 to 24 February 1781, or less than five months for the 702 pages-observe how the scale is growing) also maintains the chronological scheme throughout, as does also volume v (25 February to 20 May 1781-705 pages for under three months) apart from a 35 page appendix ; but volume vi (21 May 1781 to 1 March 1784) requires only 570 pages for two and three quarter years of correspondence and devotes its last hundred pages to a series of longer documents concerned mainly with the government of the North- western Territory and with Virginia’s claims thereto. Jefferson had ceased to be governor of Virginia on 3 June 1781, after which date his correspondence becomes very much less volum- inous until his re-emergence into public life at the end of 1782. Volume vii again manages to keep up the chronological sequence until its very last page, requiring 652 pages for just on twelve months-2 March 1784 to 25 February 1785). Volume iii has therefore seen the only major deviation from the announced chronological plan out of the first seven volumes published.

* * * * * How far does the publication of the first seven volumes of

The Jeferson Paj5ers throw fresh light on the life and times of their subject during the years 1743 to 1785? The short answer

@ i, 413-33. lo i, 187-219.


must be that we learn much more that is new about his times than about his life. There are several reasons for this, arising in part from Jefferson’s own habits of mind, in part from the circumstances of his day, and in part from the zeal of previous Jefferson investigators. The present editors of The Jeferson Papers are in no way responsible for the relatively meagre additions that these seven volumes make to our knowledge of Jefferson the man, or of his domestic life and innermost thoughts. They have combed every likely and unlikely repository of new material and it is difficult to imagine that there is now much more to be found. They, like all previous collectors and editors of Jefersoniana, have been frustrated and thwarted by two limiting factors. The first of these is the disastrous fire at Jefferson’s birthplace and residence, Shadwell, in February 1770, which, in his twenty-eighth year, destroyed his library and nearly all his papers, including even the legal briefs he was currently working on. The second is his decision after his wife’s tragic early death in September 1782, to destroy every letter and document appertaining to their joint lives-which he did with such thoroughness that only one letter from Martha Wayles Jefferson (a purely formal one addressed to Mrs. James Madisonll) is printed in the Papers and only one other very short document in her handwriting (a passage copied out of Tristram Shandy12) appears in all the seven volumes. Nobody will ever be able to write a serious historical study of Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, or of her married life, comparable to the detail and thoroughness with which, for instance, Abigail Adams, Dolly Madison and Mary Todd Lincoln have been treated. Very little of a direct nature, indeed, is known about her, and nearly all of that has long since been published.

The correspondence with his wife is the only set of papers, public or private, that Thomas Jefferson is known ever deliber- ately to have destroyed. Indeed, he took extraordinary pains to preserve everything else. This makes the gap all the more apparent and poignant, for a very large number of letters must have passed between them during the ten years of their married life, ten years which included almost the whole of the War of Independence, Jefferson’s membership of the Continental Congress, and his two years as governor of Virginia, with

11 iii, 332. vi, 196.


frequent and prolonged absences from home. His marriage may be seen to have affected the bulk of Jefferson’s Papers in another important way, for the only periods during which he appears, throughout his adult life, not to have kept up his enormous and continuous flow of letter writing (involving at least a letter a day and sometimes quite a number each day) were the first few months of his marriage, spent in utter seclusion with his bride in their unfinished house on the hilltop at Monticello in 1772, and those of her last and fatal illness in 1782. Jefferson was married on 1 January 1772; the Papers contain no letters written by him between 6 December 1771 and 11 June 1772. Mrs Jefferson died on 6 September 1782; Randall, his first serious biographer, found no letters written by Jefferson for six months after 20 May 1782, and even Dr Dumas Malone, his latest, could discover none written during the four months ending 22 September of that year; Dr Boyd prints one to Benjamin Harrison, dated 7 August 1782. Only Jefferson’s indefatigable Account Books bridge these un- documented gaps in his life. Their publication in full is more eagerly awaited by at least one Jefferson aficionado than anything else Dr Boyd has promised for the future.

The fire at Shadwell in 1770 may have deprived us of many intimate glimpses of Thomas Jefferson’s childhood, youth and early manhood, and while no doubt this is of considerable embarrassment to the more conscientious of those who may aspire to produce ‘psychological interpretations’ of that great man, it is of far less significance to serious historians and biographers than the two long silences of his maturity and his act of marital piety of 1782. Jefferson himself took the effects of the fire at Shadwell almost in his stride, for his Account Books and his Commonplace Book13 and Garden Bookl4 were apparently preserved at the hilltop chalet at Monticello on the site of his projected new home. Though the fire at Shadwell helped Dr Boyd to get all the surviving papers of the first thirty-three years of Jefferson’s life into his first volume, probably less than one percent of the total bulk of his lifetime’s Papers were UG. Chinard has edited and ublished important sections of these in

The Commonplace Book of Thomas &ferson (Baltimore, 1926) and The Literary Bible of Thomas Jefferson (Baltimore, 1928).

“See Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Book. 1767-1824, annotated by E. M. Beth (American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1944).


destroyed that February night in 1770, for he had only really entered public life (outside purely local affairs) less than a year earlier, to serve his first term as a member of the Virginia house of burgesses.

Jefferson’s extreme reticence where matters concerning his private life were involved is of course in striking contrast to his transatlantic contemporary James Boswell, the editing of whose unpublished papers by Professor Pottle and his associates at Yale is an enterprise comparable in scale and intricacy with Dr Boyd’s task at Princeton. But how different the two men, as well as the problems involved! Boswell wore his heart upon his sleeve, chatted to himself and his friends on paper in the most self-revealing way and seemed not to mind at all publicly acting the braggart and the popinjay, trying to wheedle a medal (in return for nothing at all) out of a German princeling or wangling interviews with Rousseau and Voltaire by methods of the most barefaced effrontery. He knew, too, that he was no hero to his valet and went out of his way to prove it,16 and he retailed with breath-taking candour all the details of his amours, successful and unsuccessful, wherever he went. Jeffer- son, a modest, prudent and slightly prudish man, allowed himself a certain amount of skittishness in a few early letters written to his college intimates, but that was all, and his pursuit of Elizabeth Moore Walker, wife of his friend Jack Walker, receives no mention whatsoever in these volumes, despite the fact that it was alleged (by Walker) to have per- sisted for eleven years, from 1768 to 1779, and was the subject of the embarrassed admission by Jefferson himself (many years later, while president of the United States, in reply to public accusations concerning the affair) that ‘When young and single I offered love to a handsome lady. I acknowledge its incorrect- ness, . . ,’I6 Jefferson’s biographers appear to have been, on the whole, even more embarrassed by this skeleton in his cupboard than he was by its disclosure by Callendar in 1802, but Dr Boyd has been able to unearth no additional information that would help either to bury it or to clothe its bare bones. Dr Malone’s Appendix1’ still remains the last word, though in it he is

l6 Boswell in Holland, 1763-1764, edit. Frederick A. Pottle (New Haven

la See Appendix iii (p. 448) to Dumas Malone’s Jefferson the Virginian and London, 1952) pp. 282-4.

(New York and London, 1948). l7 Ibid.


(unconsciously no doubt) rather less gallant to the memory of the lady involved than was Jefferson himself. After mention- ing the virtual certainty that Jefferson ‘gave to Walker a statement wholly exculpating the lady from blame’, Dr Malone adds, with apparent ingenuousness: ‘As a gentleman he could do no less’, and thus leaves the matter very much in the air.

Indeed, these first seven volumes of T h e Papers of Thomas Jefferson modify only to the very slightest degree the picture drawn of him, and his private life, up to 1785 by his best and most recent biographers, such as Dumas Malone,le Claude Bowers,lQ and Marie KirnbalLao Fresh details serve to round out even further and to add polish to an already well-rounded picture, but they do not materially alter its shape. One would not, for instance, willingly be without Jefferson’s appeal to James MacPhearson, through an intermediary, for copies of the Gaelic originals of the Ossianic poems, and for the latter’s polite but delightfully evasive reply;21 or his 16-point question- naire concerning the North American Moose, and (in particular) John McDuffie’s replies thereto;aa or his essay (illustrated) on balloons and b a l l ~ o n i n g . ~ ~ Nevertheless, these are hardly world-shaking as contributions to the corpus of Jeffersoniana.

When one turns, finally, to the contribution of these seven volumes to our understanding of Jefferson’s public and official life, and of the times that stirred men’s souls in which he lived, the tally is very different. Here Dr Boyd’s great work enor- mously deepens and broadens our knowledge, and scholars for a long time to come will use it as an indispensable quarry. The two troubled and unhappy years of Jefferson’s governor- ship of Virginia are documented here as never before-one whole volumea4 being devoted to the three critical months of March, April and May 1781; the magnitude of his work as a drafter of laws for Virginia has never before been so completely clarified - Dr Boyd rightly characterises Jefferson as ‘a veritable legislative drafting bureau’ the details of the negotiation of

* * * * *

Dumas Malone, ofi. cit . Claude G. Bowers, The Young Jefferson, 1743-1789 (Boston, 1945).

lo Marie Kimball, Jefferson: The Road to Glory, 1743-1776 (New York,

I1 i, 96-101. as In a letter to Philip Turpin, first printed in vii, 134-7. 8‘ v, passim.

1943) and Jefferson: War and Peace, 1776-1784 (New York, 1947). 88 vii, 23-4.


treaties of amity and commerce between the United States and various countries in Europe up to 25 February 1785 (at which date volume vii comes to its end) have never been so meticul- ously recorded, nor Jefferson's leading part in these negotiations so well brought out.2'

These are only three of many topics of major importance upon which the first seven volumes of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson throw much additional light. The remaining volumes will undoubtedly continue to shed more and more light on his life and times, and historians can anticipate the pleasure, for a number of years to come, of opening each new volume that is published with a thrill of anticipation, and of turning its handsomely designed and beautifully printed pages (enhanced by extremely well-chosen and splendidly reproduced illustra- tions from contemporary documents and prints) with the certainty that they will find among them something that is new, much that is better collated than ever before, and nothing that is not checked, double-checked and re-checked with the most admirable thoroughness. This is truly an impressive and a monumental work.

JOHN A. HAWG0ODa7

ii, 305 ff. Several of his bills and drafts are therein printed for the first

A Hawgood, M.A., Ph.D., D.Lit., is professor of modern history

time.

and government in the University of Birmingham.

:: g: r . m .

the papers of thomas jefferson

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