Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition, by Robert Pierce Forbes
By Timothy Sandefur
Yale University Press, 2022
348 pp. $20 (paperback)
Thomas Jefferson was an insatiable writer, composing tens of thousands of letters, as well as pamphlets and essays, about everything from Plato’s influence on Christianity to the economics of whaling. But he published only one full-length book in his lifetime: Notes on the State of Virginia, which first appeared in Paris in 1785 and discussed everything from the state’s geology and animal life to its need for constitutional reforms and an improved education system. Yet, although Notes became a minor classic in American literature, it has never been given a thorough scholarly examination until now.
To produce his highly detailed Annotated Edition, Robert Pierce Forbes returned to the still-extant manuscript and traced the many changes the book underwent during its writing and publication; he also tracked down Jefferson’s citations and the differences between the French and English versions that appeared in the 1780s. No scholar has done this before—not even William Peden, who in 1955 published what is still advertised as the “definitive” edition of Notes, but who actually changed Jefferson’s original wording by adding passages that Jefferson wrote but never published. As a result, the version of the book Peden called “definitive” included material that none of Jefferson's 18th- and 19th-century readers ever saw.
Several mysteries surround Notes. For example, why did Jefferson write a new title page for the manuscript, after the book was published, in which he changed the publication date from 1785 to 1782? Why did he try to limit its circulation to a small list of friends, and then later suggest donating a copy to every college student in Virginia? And why did he use its pages to condemn slavery while also arguing that black people are inherently inferior to whites?
Some of the book’s puzzling features might be explained by the distressing circumstances under which it was written. The author began his work while serving as Virginia’s governor during the Revolutionary War. It was a traumatic period in his life, partly because the state was being invaded by the British army, who chased him from his Monticello home—leading to humiliating accusations of cowardice—and partly because his wife was suffering the aftereffects of a rough pregnancy. She died in 1782, leaving him almost suicidal with grief. When a French diplomat sent him a list of questions about Virginia, he understandably seized the opportunity to dive into a project that would divert his mind. The result was a heterogeneous book that examines the land, people, and ideas among which Jefferson lived.
Notes contains some of Jefferson’s most eloquent writing—as well as some of his most reprehensible. That’s because alongside his denunciation of slavery, he also advanced pseudoscientific racial theories to the effect that black people are inherently inferior to whites, making it impossible for the two races to coexist peaceably in America.
These passages are not just repellent but also enigmatic, because it’s hard to imagine that Jefferson—who justly prided himself on his scientific learning—could offer such obviously fallacious arguments. He said, for instance, that he could find no evidence of a black American ever “uttering a thought above the level of plain narration” (215). What then of contemporaneous poets such as Ignatius Sancho and Phillis Wheatley? He dismissed them out of hand, calling Sancho’s writing sentimental and overly imaginative (which contradicts his original assertion about plain narration) and labeling Wheatley’s “below the dignity of criticism,” which was a clumsy evasion (215).
Many of his contemporaries must have recognized how flimsy these arguments were, but Jefferson advanced them anyway, even while saying that he did so only with “great diffidence” (221–22). And when one respected scholar, after examining the manuscript, urged him to omit these passages because they “might seem to justify slavery,” Jefferson refused (298).
Forbes sets out to explain this, and to answer other questions, such as why Jefferson apparently tried to conceal the book’s publication date. His thorough textual analysis and myriad annotations reveal an admirable attention to detail, examining every alteration Jefferson made to Notes during its composition and afterward. Unfortunately, although that precision may be a treat for some scholars, it’s a deterrent to laymen, most of whom will find it impossible to actually read this book.
Consider, for example, how Forbes prints this sentence: “Besides these / ,/ a forge of Mr/ ./ Hunter’s, at Fredericksubrg/h,/ makes about 300 tons a year of bar iron/ ,/22 from pigs imported from Maryland / ;/23 and Taylor’s forge of Neapsco of Patowmac/ ,/ works in the same way, but to what extent I am not informed. 46” (54). The underscore and slashes indicate changes in punctuation, capitalization, and spelling, the bracketed numbers signify the pagination of different editions, and the footnotes explain that Jefferson deleted the word “from” and originally used a comma instead of a semicolon. After a few pages of such distractions, ordinary readers will probably return to Peden’s edition.
This is less troubling, however, than Forbes’s theory about Jefferson’s discussion of race. The most likely explanation for the Virginian’s cockeyed thoughts on black inferiority is that he grew up in a slave society, soaked in propaganda and prejudice. Mark Twain said of his childhood in the 1850s that
in my schoolboy days . . . I was not aware that there was anything wrong about [slavery]. No one arraigned it in my hearing: the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind. . . . If the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery, they were wise and said nothing.1
Attitudes toward blacks were somewhat better in Jefferson’s day than in Twain’s, but they were bad enough. In 1658, Edward Topsell, author of Historie of Foure-Footed Beasts, likened blacks to “libidinous . . . apes” who “have no use of reason,” and such attitudes were still prevalent in Virginia in the 1780s, when slaves made up 40 percent of the state’s population, and examples of black achievement were treated as anomalies.2 Moreover, no society before the 18th century had ever abolished slavery for reasons of principle; history instead seemed to demonstrate that slavery was a ubiquitous feature of civilization, and that freeing slaves risked civil war.
There’s also the fact that Jefferson, however brilliant, was gullible, too, and often embraced oddball ideas. Doubting the possibility of biological extinction, he thought mammoths might still live in the American West. He thought Indians might be descended from the lost tribes of Israel. He clung to his belief in the authenticity of the supposedly ancient Anglo-Saxon poet Ossian long after it was revealed that Ossian’s poems were a hoax perpetrated by his alleged translator. John Quincy Adams often remarked in his diary on Jefferson’s gullibility and his “itch for telling prodigies,” such as the time he told dinner guests that during one of his winters in France, the temperature remained below zero for six weeks straight.3 This naivete and carelessness with details doubtless rendered him receptive to the arguments of those who insisted black people were inferior and claimed to prove it “scientifically.”
These circumstances together suggest how Jefferson might find it hard to imagine applying the principle that “all men are created equal” to those he had been taught all his life to view as inherently inferior—and why he might embrace quack notions of biological inferiority as a rationalization to ease his sense of guilt. This doesn’t mean that he did not sincerely believe blacks were entitled to liberty; it’s not rare for people, including geniuses, to genuinely believe in moral or political ideals in the abstract while lacking the courage or imagination to apply those principles in practice. Nor is it excusing slavery, or exonerating Jefferson of charges of racism or hypocrisy, to acknowledge that when he composed Notes, the idea that slavery could be ended, and that blacks and whites could cohabit on a basis of equal freedom, struck all but a tiny minority of whites as not just radical but “visionary”—a pejorative word in Jefferson’s day.
Forbes, however, is not content with saying that Jefferson’s ideas on race reflected majority attitudes. He claims Jefferson created those attitudes. In his eyes, the Sage of Monticello used Notes as “an opportunity” to “decouple” black people from the equality principle and to establish “a rhetoric of authority that explicitly rejects appeals to reason, logic, or law” (xliv–xlvii). In other words, Jefferson was consciously fashioning a “subtly brillian[t]” stratagem for depriving black people of their claim to liberty (lviii).
This is an extraordinary assertion, and Forbes does not prove it. Instead of dispassionately seeking to understand Jefferson as he understood himself, Forbes’s argument rests largely on his own characterizations of Jefferson’s wording based on 21st-century attitudes. For example, he claims in one footnote that Jefferson’s repeated misspelling of Phillis Wheatley’s name was “an intentional slight, not a slip” (215, n. 89). He offers no proof of this, and the reality is that Jefferson had idiosyncratic spelling habits, as did many of his contemporaries; he persisted in some errors his entire life (he never did figure out the difference between “its” and “it’s,” for example). Even if Jefferson had intended this as an insult, variant spelling of names was so common that his readers would not have recognized it.
Forbes relies on dubious literary inferences, too, such as similarities between Jefferson’s word choices and those of other writers, when these are probably just coincidences. For example, Jefferson referred in one passage to the “eternal monotony” of black complexions—a phrase also used by British loyalist John Shebbeare while criticizing pro-American writer Richard Price for repeatedly characterizing King George III’s treatment of colonists as “slavery.” Shebbeare complained of Price’s “eternal monotony” in using this word, likening it to “the drone of a Scotch bagpipe” (212, n. 53). In 1784, while Jefferson was writing Notes, Price published a second pamphlet, which again praised the American Revolution but condemned the enslavement of blacks. “It is hard not to conjecture,” Forbes concludes, “that reading Price’s pointed critique of American slavery in his second pamphlet triggered in Jefferson thoughts of Price’s first pamphlet and the ‘eternal monotony’ of its metaphors of slavery” (212, n. 53).
But this is surely reading too much into Jefferson’s use of these two words. Shebbeare made no reference to black slavery when using the phrase “eternal monotony,” and Price’s commentary on slavery in his second pamphlet was only one paragraph long. It’s more probable that Jefferson adapted the phrase “eternal monotony” from Alexander Pope’s translation of The Odyssey—which referred to the “unhappy race” of dead souls in Hades, “whom endless night invades”—or from Thomas Gray—who used the line “closed his eyes in endless night” in a 1768 poem.4 Jefferson was a fan of both poets but appears never to have mentioned Shebbeare.
Forbes also contends that Jefferson borrowed his famous prophecy of slavery’s reckoning from Price; “Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever,” Jefferson wrote, adding that “a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events” (250). Price, too, used the phrase “I tremble for my country” in his second pamphlet. But this proves nothing; the phrase was common in the 18th century and is drawn from the biblical book of Jeremiah.
In this same passage, Jefferson wrote that “supernatural interference” might someday cause whites and blacks to “exchange their situation” (xlii), and Forbes considers this “virtually conclusive” evidence that he had Price in mind while writing Notes, because Price was celebrated for another publication in which he used probability theory to defend the possibility of supernatural miracles. But this is certainly inferring too much; Jefferson also used the phrase “wheel of fortune,” an astrological notion dating back to ancient Babylon. Would one conclude from this that Jefferson was contemplating The Epic of Gilgamesh when composing these sentences?
True, Jefferson did read Price’s 1784 pamphlet; the two even corresponded. Jefferson wrote Price to applaud his condemnation of slavery, expressing the hope that the cause of emancipation was “gaining daily recruits” among young Americans, and Price answered by praising Notes in a letter that particularly commended the “wisdom and liberality” of its attacks on slavery.5 But this hardly proves that Price was particularly significant to Jefferson’s thinking. Jefferson read widely and was inspired by many authors—notably Francis Bacon, the 17th-century thinker whose writing Jefferson clearly imitates throughout the book, although Forbes hardly mentions it—and nothing but Forbes’s questionable inferences supports the idea that Price was especially important.
That error leads Forbes into another dubious assertion: that the reason Jefferson changed the date on the manuscript from 1785 to 1782 was to “create the impression that the book had been completed before” Price’s 1784 pamphlet (xxv). But that can hardly have been his purpose, because he only added that date to the manuscript that remained in his possession after the book was published. Every version ever printed had 1785 or later displayed prominently on the title page, making it impossible for Jefferson to deceive people—and there is no reason to believe that was his goal. The more likely reason for Jefferson’s use of 1782 was, as scholar Kevin Hayes explains, because he thought “the date of composition was more important than the date of publication,” and the bulk of the writing was done that year.6
Not only is Forbes’s allegation of Jefferson’s duplicity unsubstantiated, but it also contradicts his larger thesis that Jefferson designed his arguments about black inferiority as part of an “adroit and devious” plan to “write Americans of African origin out of the great narrative of American liberty” (xlviii, lix). But if Jefferson was aiming to evade the mandate for emancipation, he would hardly have called slavery “unremitting despotism” and a “great political and moral evil,” let alone congratulated Price for his antislavery arguments (249, 145). Pseudoscientific racism certainly had the effect of denying black Americans the freedom to which they were entitled, but Forbes fails to prove that this was Jefferson’s aim, let alone that this motive explains the backdating of Notes.
The truly remarkable thing about Notes—as Price and other readers recognized at the time—is the degree to which Jefferson assailed the “peculiar institution.” In the 1780s, many whites called blacks inferior; few added, as Jefferson did, that “laws, to be just, must give a reciprocation of right,” and that because slavery violated this principle, slaves were justified in stealing from masters “who have taken all from [them],” and even in “slaying those who would slay [them]” (221). John Adams, who was no pushover on the subject, wrote that the book’s “passages upon slavery are worth diamonds” and would “have more effect” in promoting emancipation “than volumes written by mere philosophers.”7 As it turned out, Notes became a liability to Jefferson’s career; opponents cited it as proof that he was, among other things, too receptive to the idea of black liberation.
The simplest explanation of the book’s ambiguity on race is that Jefferson was ambivalent, in part due to the dangers he foresaw in the politics of emancipation, and in part because of prejudices he shared with most of his countrymen. His detestation of slavery was real, but as a young man he lacked the ability to envision ending it, and as an old man he lacked the fortitude to act against it. That is blameworthy, but the blame is equally borne by practically all of his contemporaries, most of whom lacked his willingness to call slavery evil or to take the steps against it that Jefferson did. As a young lawyer in 1769, he caused an uproar by denouncing slavery in a prominent court hearing. Two decades later, he wrote legislation banning slavery from the Northwest Territories (it failed by a single vote). Twenty years after that, he urged then-governor James Monroe to show leniency toward the leaders of a Virginia slave uprising on the grounds that they were justified in fighting for liberty. In 1808, he signed legislation abolishing the international slave trade. These efforts may seem meager to us, in light of the Civil War, but they were extraordinary in their time. As biographer Alf Mapp put it, Jefferson’s “attitude toward blacks was liberal enough to excite anger in his own day though conservative enough to cause dismay in ours.”8
Forbes’s painstaking research into the writing and revision of Notes is impressive and valuable. But his conjectures about Jefferson’s goals in writing those portions of the book that still stain the great man’s reputation only perpetuate the mysteries.