Jefferson's Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767-1826

After several decades of preeminence as a biographical subject and test case, Thomas Jefferson has begun one of his infrequent cyclical descents into historiographical disfavor. Exhausted in their efforts to explain what the late twentieth century regards as the enigmatic and paradoxical qualities of the man—to reconcile his head and his heart, his rhetoric and his actions—political and social historians have joined to give Jefferson a hard push from his lofty pedestal in the American pantheon. In a review of Joseph J. Ellis’s depreciating study of Jefferson’s “character,” American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Knopf, 1997), Robert Middlekauff summed up the third president as a “strange romantic of a man, whose mind played tricks on itself.” Recalling Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Henry Holt, 1948), Middlekauff pronounced: “today, the reputation [of Jefferson] has also been lost” (William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 55 [July 1998]: 435–38, quote 438).

If this scholarly trend continues, if Jefferson loses some of his premium as defining hero and symbol, it will not be without benefits. The frequency with which he has been invoked for the purposes of explaining the present has so bloated him with interpretive meanings that the outlines of the historical figure have become increasingly difficult to distinguish. Yet however they spin the Jefferson image in the next century, it is certain that the great range of Jefferson’s interests and extent and richness of his surviving papers will insure his continuing importance to investigative scholarship in many fields.

The study of the world Jefferson inhabited has been advanced significantly by the first comprehensive edition of his memorandum books. This well-designed publication reunites fourteen original booklets, now held by six different libraries; the texts have been prepared and annotated by Jefferson scholars long and intimately acquainted with their many-sided subject. As a result, scattered manuscripts previously consulted only by the most diligent researchers have been transformed into an accessible, intelligible, and broadly useful reference work.

That we have the particulars of Jefferson’s life—itemized purchases and receipts, returns from his farms and other businesses, itineraries and notices of sites visited, of amusements and of experiments witnessed, records of debts owed and paid and of charity—seems an extraordinary thing. Few of the great thinkers and shapers of history have been so thoughtful (or careless) as to leave behind the residue of their daily lives. Moreover, few children of the Enlightenment, however much in thrall of their Newtonian world, possessed Jefferson’s eye for and appreciation of detail. Because he relished opportunities to expand his knowledge of people and the physical world and took thoughtful measure of what he saw, at home and abroad, his memoranda form an invaluable compendium of the material culture of his age.

The earliest surviving entries relate to Jefferson’s law practice, but those that followed reflect the full scope of his nonpolitical activities and his great passion for improvement. Comments, explanatory phrases, occasionally small drawings—notably for the siting, design, and construction of Monticello—early intruded on the bare facts. Jefferson’s principal purpose in recordkeeping remained practical (and moral): it provided him an accurate accounting of financial obligations. Yet the care he took in it—recopying rough notations (often made on small slatelike ivory leaves or books) into a finished record, later indexing the entries—suggests that he valued the recollection as much as the sense of orderliness he gained from the process (however illusory for his finances). Lacking the finish and purpose of his public letters and speeches and the intimacy of his personal correspondence, the memoranda nevertheless accurately convey the rhythms of Jefferson’s life and the connectivity in it, to family, friends, servants, clients, agents, animals, weather, seasons, landscape.

James A. Bear and Lucia C. Stanton...