![]() Marbois had prepared a list of twenty-two queries, which one historian characterized as a “jumble” due to their haphazard organization. ![]() It was merely the “starting point” for what would become the final work. The manuscript sent to Marbois was not the same as that which Jefferson would later submit to a French printer in 1785. During this three-to-four-week confinement at Poplar Forest, Jefferson produced much of his reply to Marbois, which he sent to the French legate in December. While there, he suffered a fall from a horse that curtailed his movement. Warned of the British approach, Jefferson escaped to his Bedford County retreat at Poplar Forest in southwest Virginia. ![]() General Cornwallis sent a detachment of dragoons under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton to chase down the legislators and, if possible, capture Governor Jefferson at Monticello. In the spring of 1781, he experienced the loss of his young daughter, Lucy Elizabeth.Īs Jefferson’s term as governor neared completion in the summer of 1781, the Virginia legislature fled west to Charlottesville in order to escape the invading British. However, in the ensuing months the war in Virginia took a turn for the worse, and Jefferson’s duties as governor took precedence. Īlthough the country was in the throes of revolution, Jefferson apparently began writing soon after receiving the list of queries, and in November reported he was busily occupied with the task. Jones believed the thirty-seven year-old Jefferson, then governor of Virginia, the person best suited to answer the queries. Jefferson received the request for information concerning Virginia indirectly, in late summer of 1780, from Joseph Jones, a member of the Virginia delegation to the Congress. The origin of Notes was a request for information about the various American states made to members of the Continental Congress by the secretary to the French legation in Philadelphia, François Marbois. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." These views were to be used against him in the heated presidential campaign of 1800 when, for example, William Linn, a leading Federalist clergyman, penned a campaign pamphlet attacking Jefferson's presumed atheism and warning voters that "let my neighbor once persuade himself that there is no God, and he will soon pick my pocket, and break not only my leg but my neck." In Query XVII: "Religion," he defended a separation of church and state, arguing that "it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. James Madison agreed that Jefferson’s “opinions will displease their respective abettors,” but on the whole the work was “too valuable not to be made known.” Įqually controversial were Jefferson's statements on religious freedom. It is possible that in my own country these strictures might produce an irritation which would indispose the people towards the two great objects I have in view, that is the emancipation of their slaves, and the settlement of their constitution on a firmer and more permanent basis. He worried “whether their publication would do most harm or good.” Of particular concern were his views on slavery and the Virginia state constitution: Jefferson was well aware that some of his ideas would not sit well with his readers. He attacks the assumptions and usurpation of power by the rich, the powerful, and the well born the tyranny of the church the dogmas of the schoolmen the bigotry of the man on horseback the enslavement of man by man the injustice of racial superiority. In the Notes on Virginia Jefferson at one time or another criticizes most of the vested interests of his time. Yet Jefferson’s work was not without controversy. It was, in a manner of speaking, a “cultural accident.” Still, this accidental creation has been called the “best single statement of Jefferson’s principles, the best reflection of his wide-ranging tastes and talents.” Yet, the Founding Father wrote only one full-length book, Notes on the State of Virginia, a book he neither originally intended to write, nor when completed, to publish widely or even under his own name. His meticulously kept memorandum books recorded financial dealings, weather, and miscellaneous events over a sixty-year period. ![]() The letters numbered in the tens of thousands. Thomas Jefferson spent part of nearly each day of his adult life penning notes, memoranda, and letters to correspondents in this country and abroad. 1787 Stockdale edition of Notes on the State of Virginia.
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