Thomas Jefferson's Early Notebooks

Abstract

JEFFERSON is an old, old subject, Merrill Peterson wrote in i960, the quest for the historical Jefferson, under the formal discipline of scholarly inquiry, is young.' Despite all that has been learned about Thomas Jefferson in the intervening years, important questions about the man and his work remain unresolved, particularly regarding his early life, for which the massive documentary record of the later years is lacking. most revealing documents that survive from his first thirty years are his early notebooks, which, along with his architectural drawings and a handful of letters, are virtually all that has come down to us in his own hand. These notebooks record a variety of information about his law practice, his accounts and daily expenditures, and his gardening ventures, but the most valuable key to the developing mind of the youngJefferson is the commonplace books in which he copied and occasionally commented on extracts from his reading. This article attempts to view these notebooks as a group of related documents and to focus on a problem that has important implications for what they tell us about Jefferson, namely, the dating of the manuscripts. Where the date is not given or clearly evident, as with the three commonplace books, most students of Jefferson have been cautious in making inferences from the material in the notebooks, and none has approached the problem more judiciously than Dumas Malone: The dates of the various entries in Uefferson's] notebooks cannot be determined with entire confidence; and, even if they could be, the works that he cited cannot be assumed to have been the source of his ideas.... It is a more important fact that he read widely and stored his mind with riches than that he abstracted particular writings. More important still was the spirit of fearless inquiry in which he pursued knowledge.2 Granting this, it is still virtually impossible to get away from the question of dating, as