Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia

T h o m a s Jefferso n’smlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Note s on the State of Virginia M ERRILL D. PETERSO N The Ame rican Revolution, which we commemorate in this bicen­ tennial year, was a moral and philosophical adventure as well as a political one. “Never,” as Herbert Schneider once observed, “was his­ tory made more consciously and conscientiously, and seldom since the days of classic Greece has philosophy enjoyed greater opportunity to exercise public responsibility.”1 Foremost among the “philosopher-statesmen” of the new republic was Thomas Jefferson, whose first title to fame was the Declaration of Independence and whose last was the creation of the University of Virginia. The minds of most great men— someone has said— contract, like the pupil of an eye, the more light that is shed upon them. But Jefferson’s mind dilates under the light of inquiry. As James Madison wrote after the death of his great friend, he was a man of wide learning and varied attainments who left “the philosophical impress” of his mind “on every subject which he touched.”2 Virtually nothing of human interest eluded his intelligence. From his youth he was “a hard student,” zealous in the pursuit of knowledge. He had an insatiable appetite for books, the ancient with the modem, in half-a-dozen lan­ guages. By 1773, at thirty years of age, he boasted a library of 1200 49 50 / WVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA M E R R I L L D , P E T E R S O N volumes; and it had multiplied five or six times when, in 1815, his collection became the nucleus of the Library of Congress. Learning from books— how to design a house, measure an eclipse, form a just government— Jefferson extended his experience beyond the narrow range of colonial objects and gained a vantage point above time and place from which to perceive, as through the eye of reason, things as they ought to be. The Revolution freed his mind from provincial restraints, from what Jefferson called “the dull monotony of colonial subservience,” and gave it generous scope for action. Perhaps he was always more at home in the world of ideas than in the world of affairs, but henceforth the effort of his life was to embody thought in conduct, theory in practice, vision in institutions. Ideas were meant to act on the world, to improve it, not to reflect it in some grand cosmic design. Caught up in the actions and passions of his time, he never enjoyed the luxury of cloistered philosophy; and, even supposing he felt the need, never found the occasion to reduce the totality of his thought to a system. Jefferson did, nevertheless, manage to write one book, N o tes o n the State o f V irginia, 3 Of all his voluminous writings it offers the best introduction to his mind. N o tes o n V irginia is a fascinating book, not alone for its information and opinions but also for what it reveals of the intellectual method and style of the author. A work of observa­ tion, it lays no claim to artistry or to philosophy, yet possesses both. It is, indeed, one of the rare literary monuments of the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment in America. W hat Jefferson did in the N o tes was to articulate a series of Enlightenment directives for the intelli­ gence of the new American republic. More than that, he substantially met the desideratum of Lockean philosophy for a systematic account of the relationship between man and his environment. It is in this light, primarily, that Jefferson’s book has significance for the emerging cul­ ture, society, and government in Revolutionary America. In a sense, the book was a cultural accident. It was a by-product of revolutionary events and cannot be viewed in any other context. It had no prototype, belonged to no established genre, and answered to no speculative school. The very act of its creation expressed the amor­ Jefferso n 'smlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Note s on the State of Virginia / 51 phous and unpre d ictab le characte rof Ame rican thought and imagina­ tion. Jefferson began the N o tes in 1780, not with...