The Private Jefferson: Perspectives from the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society by Henry Adams, Peter S. Onuf, Andrea Wulf (review)

The Private Jefferson: Perspectives from the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society stars an important collection of Jefferson documents, and they are given fine treatment here. The publication coordinated with the exhibition The Private Jefferson: From the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, which opened at the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) in 2016 and has been traveling since. Bolstered by supporting text and large images, this catalog is a worthy addition to the Jefferson bookshelf. It features a number of very important papers, including the Dunlap printing and a manuscript draft of the Declaration of Independence, as well as other documents that add depth to the vast pool of Jefferson writings. The documents are not quite reproduced at facsimile level, but the photographic quality is very good, enabling the book to serve as both visual reference and resource for reading featured papers.

This catalog is about three things. First is Thomas Jefferson’s private papers—the papers he decided were his personal records and not the state’s; second, MHS, the repository that contains the largest collection of these papers; and third, the role of the Coolidge family, descendants of Jefferson’s granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge and her husband, Joseph, whose steward-ship of the papers and thoughtful relationship of generations of Coolidges with MHS has ensured this collection’s survival for use by scholars and other interested readers today.

The meat of the catalog is fifty-four drawings, letters, and other documents in Jefferson’s hand. The curators have divided these materials into three broad categories anchored by essays that tell the reader how to think about both Jefferson at the moment he created them and also about how the items fit into broader stories about statehood, vegetables, or the Doric order. The authors of the essays should be familiar to readers of Jeffersonia. Their role here is to paint a backdrop that will let each part of the collection shine, which, for the most part, it does. In fact, the absences are no fault of MHS: they have done a wonderful job highlighting what the happenstance of history has placed in their archival vaults.

Peter S. Onuf, elder statesman of Jefferson studies, frames his essay, “The State of the World: Thomas Jefferson’s Political Vision,” around Jefferson’s method of drafting and finalizing his ideas. Onuf reminds readers just how much of what comes to us in the formal versions of Jefferson’s writings were concepts he grappled with in conversations and letters with John and Abigail Adams, drafts of the Declaration of Independence, and Jefferson’s extensively marked-up manuscript for Notes on the State of Virginia in the collections here. Onuf establishes the role of these drafts, kept as Jefferson’s “personal” copies, as an essential stage in the process of developing not only these important papers but also the truths held within them. Jefferson scholars have mined his draft manuscripts for book and journal articles; Onuf gives an effective summary of the importance of these texts in a five-page essay that features these documents. While slavery is not an organizing element of this catalog, it is intrinsic to all the documents here, as in any study of Jefferson. Onuf anchors the issue of slavery squarely within Jefferson’s quandaries about citizenship and his “republican faith” that future generations would grapple with the corrupt and exploitative institution (15).

In her essay, “Revolutionary Gardens: Jefferson, Politics, and Plants,” Andrea Wulf invites us to look closely at documents relating to Jefferson’s horticultural interests. She moves easily among hobby, science, labor and slavery, and ideas of self-government in exploring how Jefferson thought about agriculture and civil society. She has a fine hand, for instance, when she makes just enough observations about Jefferson’s 1809 garden book “Kalendar,” which lists the planting date and success of vegetables...