Jefferson in Retirement

While doing some research for my dissertation at the Huntington Library twenty years ago, I cut my work short one day to spend a lazy afternoon exploring the secondhand bookshops in nearby Pasadena. That day I purchased a copy of the first volume of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (1950)—Douglass Adair’s old copy no less. Containing A Summary View of the Rights of British America, Declaration of the Causes and Necessity for Taking up Arms, The Declaration of Independence, and much more, this volume fueled my fascination with the literary history of Revolutionary America. I started reading it that night and could scarcely put it down.

The next day I took my usual seat in the reading room all set to hunker down and get some work done. But I had Jefferson on the brain and could not resist calling down one item not directly pertinent to my dissertation. Having written a seminar paper on Chief Logan’s famous speech the year before, I requested Jefferson’s interleaved copy of the 1775 Virginia Almanack, which contains his first transcription of the speech. Given their importance to both Jefferson biography and the study of early American literature, it seemed strange to me that his handwritten notes had never been edited or published. Manuscript curator John Rhodehamel assured me that a collected edition of Jefferson’s memorandum books was in the offing. Over the next few years, I checked Books in Print occasionally but never saw the edition listed. “I cannot understand what could be taking the editors so long,” I said to myself. Once the two-volume Memorandum Books finally appeared in 1997, I saw why it had taken so long. Editors James Bear and Lucia Stanton put a phenomenal amount of work into transcribing and annotating the detailed memoranda Jefferson kept for a lifetime. Memorandum Books is a masterpiece of documentary editing.

The first volume of Papers and the Memorandum Books represent two different aspects of the multi-faceted Jefferson Papers, which Princeton University Press has been publishing for sixty years now. Memorandum Books forms part of the second series of Papers. Consisting of individual book-length works, the second series includes other titles such as Jefferson’s Extracts from the Gospels (1983) and Jefferson’s Parliamentary Writings (1988). The first series, which now fills thirty-four volumes, has only just started covering Jefferson’s years as president. Editing the letters from his eight years in office is a monumental task in itself, given that, as president, Jefferson sometimes wrote ten or twelve letters a day. Instead of waiting to complete the edition of papers chronicling his presidential years, Jefferson’s editors have decided to split the workload and begin a new series starting with his retirement from the presidency. This latter series, under the editorship of J. Jefferson Looney, is sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., rather than Princeton University, and based near Monticello. With its first five volumes now complete, it is time to take a closer look at the Retirement Series.

Though the edition contains several different types of documents, Jefferson’s correspondence fills most of the five volumes. He averaged fewer letters per day in retirement than he had as president but remained a prolific letter writer nonetheless. Many of his letters from the period covered by the first five volumes in this series, March 1809 to March 1813, have been published before in general collections of his writings and in such specialized editions as Lester Cappon’s still popular and ever-insightful Adams-Jefferson Letters (1959) and The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson (1966), the delightful collection of letters Jefferson wrote his children and grandchildren...