In the middle of 1780, Francois Marbois, secretary of the French legation at Philadelphia, passed around a questionnaire among the Continental Congress requesting information on the various American states. The French government’s request came out of their greater involvement in the American Revolution and its outcome, in which they had become more politically and financially invested.Though the Virginia delegates were quite learned, they decided Thomas Jefferson, then governor of Virginia, was the best source of information for answers to Marbois’ questions. As author of the Declaration of Independence, amateur scientist, and expert on all things Virginia, Jefferson was indeed well suited to respond to Marbois. The answers that Jefferson formulated for Marbois would become the foundation for his only monograph, Notes on the State of Virginia.
Throughout 1780 and 1781, Jefferson invested a considerable amount of time and effort into his answers to Marbois. Despite the personal hardships that he had to face, including the death of one of his daughters, his wife’s declining health, and the war raging onto his own property, Jefferson always found moments to devote himself to the completion of his answers for the French delegate. At the end of 1781, Jefferson finally delivered his responses to Marbois.
“I now do myself the honour of inclosing you answers to the quaeries…I fear your patience has been exhausted in attending them…Even now you will find them very imperfect and not worth offering but as a proof of my respect for your wishes.” (Thomas Jefferson to Marbois, 20 December 1781)
Although Jefferson appears to criticize his own work, his willingness to circulate the manuscript among his friends and colleagues for “suggestions and corrections” contradict his expressed criticism of Notes. Fueled by his love affair with Virginia and his nearly unquenchable desire for knowledge, Jefferson devoted more effort still to the revision of the manuscript throughout the 1780s.2
Originally, Notes on the State of Virginia was to be for private use only. Jefferson sent out his personal copy to fellow learned men, only for the purposes of expanding and correcting the manuscript. As his manuscript made the rounds, more people became interested in its contents.
By spring 1784, Jefferson began to relax on the idea of circulating his manuscript and publishing his work, and he approached a bookseller in Philadelphia to meet this end. Unfortunately, the cost involved in printing the book was far too high for Jefferson. In the same year, however, Congress sent Jefferson to Paris to serve as Minister Plenipotentiary where he would negotiate treaties with other foreign nations, and he took his manuscript with him in hopes of finding a printer who could publish his work at a lower price.3
After his arrival in France, Jefferson met French printer Philippe-Denis Pierres. Pierres agreed to publish Notes on the State of Virginia in English for a quarter of what it would have cost to print in Philadelphia. After making one last set of revisions, Jefferson turned in his copy to Pierres, and by May 1785, Pierres’ presses printed two hundred copies. Although this edition had some errors, including the wrong publication year, Jefferson was pleased enough with the copies that he circulated them privately. Jefferson did not want his book printed for the public because he believed this work would jeopardize support for both slave emancipation in Virginia and an alteration of Virginia’s constitution. In a letter to one recipient of Notes, Jefferson explained:
"The strictures on slavery and on the constitution of Virginia…I do not wish to have made public, at least till I know whether their publication would do most harm or good. 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." (Thomas Jefferson to Chastellux, 7 June 1785)
As more people requested to know the contents of Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson increasingly begged the recipients of his book not to pass it around. Eventually, one of the two hundred copies found its way into the hands of a French bookseller by the name Barrois, who intended on publishing an unauthorized French translation of the book to the public.4
Vexed by this obvious infringement on his rights as an author, Jefferson happily agreed to work with a respected French intellectual and recipient of his book named Abbé Morellet. With Morellet’s help, Jefferson could actually supervise a proper French translation of his work, or so he thought. Jefferson and Morellet’s partnership did not pan out so well due to their contrasting beliefs regarding the purposes of translation, and Jefferson was far from pleased with the outcome of this printing. He considered the 1787 French edition published by Morellet to be a “bad French translation,” and the book itself contained numerous errors, misprints, bad translations, and had been printed on poor quality paper with unpleasant type.5
Jefferson’s cherished intellectual project, once private but now released to the public in this mangled form, had turned into a complete nightmare. Not only were his ideas and arguments misrepresented in French but also this embarrassing edition could have inflicted serious damage on his reputation, of which he was quite protective.
Seeking a new and competent printer, Jefferson found English publisher and book dealer John Stockdale. Jefferson requested that Stockdale print his queries “precisely as they are, without additions, alterations, preface, or any thing else but what is there.” Stockdale published an authorized English edition of Notes for Jefferson with such speed and skill that it only took him three weeks to print 1,000 copies.
By the summer of 1787, Jefferson had the pleasure of witnessing a suitable edition of his book for public consumption. Jefferson was so pleased with the outcome of the London edition that in September 1787 he planned to send it off to printers in the United States for public sale, and in 1788 the first American edition, which was a pirated copy of the Stockdale edition, was published in Philadelphia. The Stockdale edition of Notes is the copy that all subsequent editions of the book have been based upon.6
2. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), xi-xv.
3. John B. Boles, Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 167, 171; Jefferson, Notes, xv-xvi.
4. Jefferson, Notes, xvi-xviii; Boles, Jefferson, 171.
5. Jefferson, Notes, xviii; Boles, Jefferson, 171-172; “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, Thomas Jefferson Foundation.
6. Jefferson, Notes, xix-xx; Boles, Jefferson, 172; Thomas Jefferson to John Stockdale, 27 February 1787, Founders Online.