Notes on the State of VirginiaThomas Jefferson
About Notes on the State of Virginia
Jefferson wrote in 1781 in answer to queries from the French diplomat François Marbois, enlarged it in the winter of 1782, and saw the first edition printed in Paris in 1785. The book is arranged as twenty-three Queries, moving from the natural order of the state (boundaries, rivers, mountains, climate, productions) to population, laws, manners, manufactures, and religion. It is Jefferson's only full-length book, and it is at once a natural history, a political analysis of Virginia, and a brief for the American experiment addressed to a European audience.
Query VI answers the Comte de Buffon's claim that New World animals and peoples degenerate under an inferior climate. Jefferson counters with tables of weights and measures, catalogues of species, and a defense of American nature and genius. Queries XIII and XIV examine Virginia's constitution and laws, including a plan for public education and a proposal for gradual emancipation. Query XIV also contains Jefferson's most notorious pages on race, where he asserts a suspicion of natural inferiority in Blacks even as he condemns slavery. Query XVIII returns to manners and the moral damage slavery inflicts on masters and slaves alike.
The Notes place republican politics inside a thick account of land, climate, and custom. They answer European natural history on its own ground and force later readers to confront the contradiction at the heart of Jefferson's thought: a doctrine of natural rights written by a man who both attacked slavery and theorized racial hierarchy. The book remains the fullest statement of his political and scientific mind outside the Declaration.