Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson

First published: 1784-1785

Type of work: Essays on American culture

Critical Evaluation:

Thomas Jefferson’s universality is best evinced in his NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA, which he began writing in 1780 in answer to inquiries from the French government about conditions in Virginia. Then Governor of Virginia, Jefferson’s far-reaching interests ranged over all of what he called America’s empire of liberty. The NOTES are not restricted, therefore, to the boundaries of Virginia as they existed before 1781, including, in addition to the present commonwealth the territory now covered by the states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and part of Pennsylvania. The writing of the NOTES was made easier because Jefferson for some twenty years had collected colonial maps, legislative journals, newspapers, and explorers’ accounts. He had made and continued to make investigation of Virginia’s institutions, economy, flora, fauna, fossils, meteorological conditions, and Indian culture. No dry, statistical account, although containing plenty of facts, the NOTES deal with culture in its widest sense. They include so many of Jefferson’s comments about social phenomena that they comprise in capsule his political and social philosophy, his intellectual, scientific and ethnic beliefs.

The book, with 260 pages of text and appendices, is arranged arbitrarily by the queries of Francois Marbois, secretary of the French legation in Philadelphia. Jefferson’s essays in reply vary in length from one page each on Sea Ports and Marine Force to the forty-five pages accorded Virginia’s Productions, Mineral, Vegetable and Animal. Essays between ten and twenty pages consider her Aborigines, Constitution, Laws, and Jefferson’s Draught of a Fundamental Constitution.

Besides writing celebrated descriptions of Harper’s Ferry and Natural Bridge, Jefferson speculated on the physical characteristics of beasts and mankind as well as on the natural resources of his state. He convincingly refuted the contention of the French naturalist Buffon that there were fewer species of mammals in America than in Europe and that the American ones had degenerated as a result of the inferior climate. With spirit, he contradicted Buffon’s disparagement of the American Indian, hailing the noble red man as superior to the white in fortitude, as equal in physical conformation, and as potentially equal in sexual prowess and mental talent. The Indian’s limitations were, insisted Jefferson, only those which resulted from inadequate diet and a cultural lag which he compared with that of the Gauls before the Roman conquests north of the Alps. In response to the Abbe Raynal’s lament that America had produced no good poet, mathematician, or scientist, Jefferson asserted with pride his claims for Franklin in physics, for Rittenhouse in astronomy, for Catesby in ornithology, and for the Indian Logan in eloquence. As for other cultural achievements, Jefferson pleaded for time in which American liberty might achieve what he considered its certain promise.

Although Jefferson did not write a separate essay on the subject of education, he outlined fully his views in the NOTES. In doing so, he concealed with typical modesty the personal role he had played in the reform of the College of William and Mary and in proposing a system of primary and grammar school education. Preoccupation with religion at the college was transferred during the Revolution to emphasis on science; at the same time Latin and Greek gave ground to modern languages, but interest in mathematics and moral philosophy was continued. Jefferson’s schemes for pre-college education were not so extreme as is sometimes thought. He did urge free education of all children in the Three R’s and in mathematics, but only the best student of a school district six miles square would study at the state’s expense in an intermediate or grammar school, whose six-year curriculum afforded instruction in Greek, Latin, geography, and mathematics. By the end of the second year of grammar school, the unfit were to have been rigorously pruned. At the end of the sixth year the upper fifty percent would have been selected by examinations and given scholarships for college. At any stage in this educational pyramid, a prosperous parent could continue his child’s education at private expense if the child did not meet the high standards set for state scholars.

Similarly, Jefferson praised the disestablishment of the colonial Church, but he failed to mention his own part in that accomplishment. Reliant on reason, sure that a neighbor’s belief in plural gods or in none could hurt no other, he was happy at the increasing sectarian diversity of the Old Dominion, but he urged suspicion of zealots, whom he believed always responsible for persecutions in the name of uniformity. Jefferson’s eloquence in the cause of freedom of conscience was later on turned against him, and his enemies twisted his statements in the NOTES to condemn him as an anti-Christ.

The ideal of a simple, frugal, agrarian republic is nowhere better stated than in Jefferson’s essays on Manufactures. His conviction that “those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God” was accompanied by the corollary that “the great mobs of great cities” corrupted both humans and governments. To preserve Virginia’s arcady, therefore, he discouraged construction of “satanic” mills and factories, saying “let our work-shops remain in Europe.” As a scientific farmer, he gleefully asserted that on the eve of the Revolution Virginia had so diversified her economy that wheat almost equaled tobacco as her staple, and he was by no means loath to see her primacy in tobacco pass to more southernly states.

On grounds of republicanism, incentive, and efficiency Jefferson admonished his fellow citizens that slavery was injurious to both master and slave, and he hoped for a voluntary increase in Negro emancipation and deportation to Africa, whither he would also have consigned Negro criminals at the expense of the state. More than six pages were devoted to consideration of Negroes in his essay on Manufactures, in the course of which Jefferson concluded that they were inferior to the white race when judged on their accomplishments, unlike the white slaves of Greek or Roman times, who had surpassed their masters in that respect. He lamented the lack of study of Negroes as “subjects of natural history,” and he advanced the “suspicion only” that the Negro was indeed “inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and of mind.” Friendly to the plight of the Negro, anxious for his emancipation, this future president of that American Colonization Society which founded Liberia was adamant on one point: “When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.”

Jefferson’s policies as President of the United States were also foreshadowed in the NOTES. Desiring to “cultivate the peace and friendship of every nation,” he wished “to throw open the door of commerce to all.” With conviction in peaceful progress, he advocated minimum military or naval forces on two grounds: American financial resources could not maintain a force to stand against that of a European power without bankrupting the country; and the expenditure of such funds would be more beneficially applied to the improving of the arts and handicrafts of America.

In his essay on Virginia’s Constitution, Jefferson provided a brief historical account of the Old Dominion, for which he also compiled a bibliography of charters and legislative acts. Stressing the continuum of Virginian history, he praised such historians as Captain John Smith and Robert Beverley. Doubtless he considered that he was more factual than a propagandist in insistence on his theme of royal and parliamentary subversion of legislative assemblies and those rights of freeborn Englishmen guaranteed by the ancient charters which he cited. He laid heavy emphasis on the injustice of James I’s revocation of the Virginia Company charter, of the diminution of the colony’s extent by proprietary grants made by the king out of her domain, and of Parliament’s illegal assumption of control over colonial foreign trade during the 1650’s. Indeed, contended Jefferson, the colonists had every right to believe that their capitulation to the Cromwellian military forces in 1651 had secured reaffirmation of ancient boundaries, upon which Maryland impinged, and of freedom in foreign trade. In view of contemporary disputation over Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, it is interesting to observe that Jefferson makes no reference to that event in this formal historical essay. As might be supposed, Jefferson, in bringing the history of the Old Dominion down to his own time, placed the heaviest blame for the wrongs she suffered on George III and his parliaments. Revolution in 1776 is presented as inevitable, as honorable resistance instead of unconditional submission to tyranny.

Jefferson has been in our history an ideologue claimed by almost all political parties. Unlike much of his profuse personal and official correspondence, his NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA was a formal, considered work, more important to knowledge of the man, his ideas, and his America than momentary effusions from his pen, such as private letters.

Jefferson’s only other book published during his lifetime was his parliamentary Manual. The NOTES were first published in English at Paris in 1785. During his lifetime he made corrections, emendations and addenda to that text with an eye to authorizing the new, corrected, and enlarged edition which was finally published at Richmond in 1853 and which will remain standard until the editors of the Princeton edition of THE PAPERS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON publish their version of the NOTES as one of the last of its fifty-odd volumes.

With good reason twentieth-century scholars have looked with renewed interest on the NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA as one of the first masterpieces of American literature and possibly the most important scientific and political book written by an American before 1785.