Life of Thomas Jefferson

16. "Notes on Virginia"

We are now hurried from the scenes of war and confusion to a delightful interval in Mr. Jefferson's life in which he recurred with eagerness to the pursuits of science.

During the early part of the turbulent year of 1781, while disabled from active employment by the fall from his horse, he found sufficient leisure to compose his celebrated "Notes on Virginia." This was the only original publication in which he ever embarked; nor was the work prepared with the most distant intention of committing it to the press. Its history is a little curious.

M. de Marbois of the French legation in Philadelphia, having been instructed by his government to obtain such statistical accounts of the different States of the Union as might be useful for their information, addressed a letter to Mr. Jefferson containing a number of queries relative to the State of Virginia. These queries embraced an extensive range of objects and were designed to elicit a general view of the geography, natural productions, government, history, and laws of the commonwealth. Mr. Jefferson had always made it a practice when traveling to commit his observations to writing and to improve every opportunity, by conversations with the inhabitants and by personal examination, to enlarge his stock of information on the physical and moral condition of the country.

These memoranda were on loose pieces of paper, promiscuously intermixed, and difficult of arrangement when occasion required the use of any particular one. He used the present opportunity, therefore, to digest and embody the substance of them in the order of M. de Marbois' queries so as to gratify the wishes of the French government and arrange them for his own convenience. Some friends to whom they were occasionally communicated in manuscript requested copies, but their volume rendering the business of transcribing too laborious, he proposed to get a few printed for their private gratification. He was asked such a price, however, as exceeded in his opinion the importance of the object and abandoned the idea. Subsequently, on his arrival in Paris in 1784, he found the printing could be obtained for one-fourth part of what had been required in America. He thereupon revised and corrected the work and had two hundred copies printed under the modest title which it bears. He gave out a very few copies to his particular friends in Europe, writing in each one a restraint against its publication, and the remainder he transmitted to his friends in America. A European copy having fallen into the hands of a Paris bookseller on the death of its owner, the bookseller engaged a hireling translation and sent it into the world in the worst form possible. "I never had seen," says the author, "so wretched an attempt at translation. Interverted, abridged, mutilated, and often reversing the sense of the original, I found it a blotch of errors from beginning to end." (Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:91) Under these circumstances, he was urged in self-defense to comply with the request of a London bookseller to publish the English original, which he accordingly did. By this means, it soon became the property of the public and advanced to a high degree of popularity. The work has since been translated into all the principal tongues of Europe and ran through a large number of editions in England, in France (where the celebrated Abbe Morellet published a translation of the Notes in 1786), and in America.

Under the query relative to the several charters of the State and its present form of government, Mr. Jefferson presents a compact statistical view of the colony from the first settlement under the grant of Queen Elizabeth in 1584 down to the time at which he writes, gives an outline of the existing constitution, and enumerates what he considers its capital defects.

A brief notice of these defects and the remedies which he proposed will explain more fully, as was promised, the opinions of Mr. Jefferson on the constitution of Virginia, being the first republican charter ever known. In the appendix to the volume under notice is inserted a new constitution prepared by himself in 1783, when it was expected the Assembly of Virginia would call a convention for remodeling the old one -- an event which he long and vainly desired to see. This draught corresponds in all its main features with the one prepared by him while in Congress in 1776 and transmitted to the convention in Virginia then sitting for that purpose, though received too late to be adopted.

Among the palpable defects of the existing establishment he enumerates:

 
Under the enquiry concerning the administration of justice, etc., the author presents a view of the judicial system of Virginia, framed, indeed, by himself in 1776, with a description of the laws. He alludes to the Revised Code as a work which had been "executed by three gentlemen," glances at the most important reformations which it introduced, but carefully conceals every circumstance which might indicate his participation in that structure of republican jurisprudence. In commenting upon the provisions recommended in this code for the future disposition of the blacks, the genius of the author appears again in its favorite element. He insists upon colonization to a distant country as the only safe and practicable mode of ultimate redemption, and urges strong reasons of policy as well as necessity against their being retained in the State and incorporated among the race of whites. "Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race." (Notes on Virginia, 1782 ME 2:192) To these distinctions, which are political, he adds many others, which are physical and moral. But space is not allowed us to pursue the subject or to follow the author through his investigation of the question, Whether the blacks and the Indians are inferior races of beings to the whites? Making all due allowances for the difference of condition, education, etc., between the blacks and whites, still the evidences were too strong, in his opinion, not to admit doubts of the intellectual equality of the two species. Of the former, many have been so situated that they might have availed themselves of the conversation of their masters; many have been brought up to the handicraft arts and from that circumstance have always been associated with the whites. Some have been liberally educated, have lived in countries where the arts and sciences are cultivated to a high degree, and have had before their eyes samples of the best workmanship and of the noblest intelligence. "But never yet," he adds, "could I find a black that had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration, nor seen even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture." Still, it was not against experience to suppose that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, might possess different qualifications. The Indians, on the other hand, with none of the advantages above named, will often carve figures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit so as to prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation. They will astonish you with strokes on the most sublime oratory such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated. [comment]

On the whole, therefore, he advanced it as his opinion that the Indians are equal to the whites in body and mind, and as a problem only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race or made so by time and circumstances, are inferior to them. To justify a conclusion in the latter case required observations which eluded the research of all the senses; it should therefore be hazarded with extreme caution, especially when such conclusion would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings which their Creator may, perhaps, have assigned them. The difference of color, feature, inclination, etc., is sufficient to warrant the presumption that they were designed for a separate existence; but it furnishes no evidence of the right to enslave and torment them as mere brutes. "Will not a lover of natural history then," he concludes, "one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy excuse an effort to keep these in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them?"

The unhappy influence of slavery upon the manners and morals of the people is forcibly portrayed in a succeeding chapter.

The freedom with which Mr. Jefferson expressed his strictures on slavery and the constitution of Virginia was the reason, it appears, for his confining the work originally to his confidential friends. In his letters to them accompanying the gift of a copy, he uniformly explains the motives by which he was actuated in restraining its circulation. In presenting a copy of the work to General Chastellux, he thus writes:

In transmitting copies to his friends in America, he expressed the same lofty reasons, of which the following in a letter to Mr. Monroe is a sample.

 
The remainder of this justly celebrated treatise is occupied with useful details and learned dissertations under the following heads of enquiry:

Perhaps the most celebrated portion of the whole work is that which contains the opinions of the author on the subject of FREE INQUIRY in matters of religion. The interest which all mankind feel on a point so vitally connected with the policy of our government and the freedom and happiness of its subjects will justify a liberal quotation here in concluding our remarks upon these invaluable "Notes." The sentiments of the writer, although generally esteemed heretical and well nigh impious at the time, are now as generally reputed orthodox and unquestionable.


The complete text of "Notes on Virginia" is available on the Internet at:

Notes on the State of Virginia
(Approx. 400 Kbytes)

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© 1997 by Eyler Robert Coates, Sr.