Thomas Jefferson: Notes on the State of Virginia

About the Author

Thomas Jefferson was born in Albemarle County, Virginia, on April 13, 1743, the son of Peter Jefferson, a largely self-made plantation owner, and Jane Randolph, daughter of one of Virginia’s most prosperous and powerful colonial families. Among Jefferson’s earliest memories was being carried on a pillow by one of his father’s slaves. Peter Jefferson died in 1757, when Thomas was only fourteen. Jefferson enrolled at Virginia’s College of William and Mary in 1760 and graduated just two years later. By the time Jefferson married a fellow Virginian, Martha Wayles Skelton, in 1772, he was an established attorney, a plantation owner, and a slaveholder, with two and a half years of experience as a member of Virginia’s colonial legislature, which at the time was called the House of Burgesses.

Jefferson’s reputation as a talented writer grew in part because of his authorship of A Summary View of the Rights of British America, which he drafted in 1774 for the House of Burgesses in Williamsburg. In it Jefferson spelled out for King George III specific grievances that colonists believed had been inflicted upon them by the British Parliament and both chastised the king and appealed to him for assistance. Among the complaints listed in A Summary View was that the colonies had no representative in Parliament, where taxation policies were made, and that Britain had introduced slavery into the colonies.

Jefferson was named to Virginia’s delegation to the Second Continental Congress in 1775. By the summer of 1776, Jefferson had established a reputation in Philadelphia as a better writer than a public speaker. Along with John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman, he was appointed to a committee that wrote the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson did the lion’s share of the writing.

During the Revolutionary War (1775–1783), Jefferson spent two years as governor of Virginia (1779–1781). In 1781 he wrote Notes on the State of Virginia, which he would revise and rewrite over the course of the next several years. In 1782, when his wife, Martha, died, Jefferson sank into a deep depression, from which he took months to recover. Between 1784 and 1789 Jefferson served the newly formed United States of America as ambassador, primarily in France. It was during this period that Notes on the State of Virginia was first offered to the public in France and in the United States.

Jefferson returned to the United States in 1790 and urged, along with his friend and political protégé James Madison, the addition of the Bill of Rights to the Constitution. He also served as the first secretary of state under President George Washington, which helped bring him into frequent and vehement conflict with Alexander Hamilton, then secretary of the Treasury, over the new nation’s economic and political course. Jefferson’s conflicts with Hamilton became so severe that Jefferson resigned from Washington’s cabinet at the end of 1793 and went home to Monticello. His retirement was short-lived, however, as he returned to the national stage just three years later when he was elected as John Adams’s vice president. His long-standing friendship with Adams was damaged during the Adams administration as the two clashed over a number of political issues. Jefferson led the attack on the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by the Adams administration, which he judged to be unconstitutional and dangerous to free expression.

In 1800, Jefferson himself was elected to the presidency. In 1803 he engineered the Louisiana Purchase (the acquisition from the French of land that today encompasses all or part of fourteen U.S. states) and dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their famous exploration of the American West. Jefferson was easily reelected in 1804, but his second term did not progress as smoothly as his first. Among the troubles Jefferson experienced was the death of his daughter Maria, one of only two legitimate Jefferson offspring to live to adulthood. Jefferson also began to struggle with health issues during his second term.

During his second term Jefferson was also plagued by a number of political problems. One was the continuing hostility between France and Great Britain. Jefferson, who never favored the presence of a large standing military force, had restricted the growth of the American naval forces. When the struggle for dominance between France and Britain grew to encompass the Atlantic Ocean, American trading vessels found themselves caught in the middle. Jefferson’s answer to this maritime trouble was the Embargo Act of 1807, intended to seal off American ports from foreign shipping. The unintended effect of the Embargo Act was severe stress for the American economy from the closing of U.S. ports to foreign trade. The domestic front proved similarly troublesome for Jefferson when his former vice president, Aaron Burr, was accused of treason. Jefferson wanted Burr found guilty, but he suffered yet another political loss when Burr was acquitted.

Jefferson retired to Monticello in 1809 and began plans for what would become the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. He persuaded many of his longtime political and personal allies to join in his efforts, including James Madison. In addition to promoting higher education in Virginia, Jefferson and John Adams renewed via correspondence their old friendship. They maintained their correspondence for the remainder of their lives, both of them passing away on July 4, 1826.