 | |  |
On March 29, 1764 the clerk in the bookshop connected with the Virginia Gazette office in Williamsburg recorded the purchase by Thomas Jefferson, for ten shillings, of a copy of "Stith's History of Virginia."[1] This is the earliest surviving record of the acquisition of an item of Virginiana by the young man who was later to gather in his library the most significant material pertaining to his native state ever assembled by an individual. "When young, I was passionately fond of reading books of history,"[2] he commented in 1787. In 1789 he added that "[I am] sensible that I labour grievously under the malady of Biblomanie."[3] Still later he agreed with a fellow Virginian "that it is the duty of every good citizen to use all the opportunities which occur to him, for preserving documents relating to the history of our country." That "our country" here is his native state is proved by his next sentence, for William Waller Hening's Statutes at Large pertains only to Virginia: "That I have not been remiss in this while I had youth, health, and opportunity, is proved otherwise, as well by the materials I furnished toward Mr. Hening's invaluable collection of the laws of our country."[4]
These statements afford a glimpse of the complex motivations behind this particular activity of Jefferson. He said several times that he was assembling a library which would be useful to him as a lawyer and as an American statesman. Since he was a Virginia lawyer and eventually a Virginian in national office, much of the material gathered to assist him in his profession was Virginian. And many items of Virginiana
But Jefferson the collector of Virginiana was first of all an eighteenth-century colonial gentleman building a library which would answer all his needs. Like his distinguished predecessor William Byrd, he planned and gathered a general collection representing all fields of knowledge. Like his kinsmen Sir John and Peyton Randolph, he brought together the law books, some of them two centuries old, which might be practically useful.
During his long life Jefferson gathered three libraries for himself and another for the University of Virginia. In his youth he inherited forty-odd books, useful ones, from his father Peter. He had added to these judiciously[5] until by 1770 his library was valued at £200. On February 21 of that year he lamented to his friend John Page the loss of his mother's house by fire, and his own loss, "of every pa[per I] had in the world, and almost every book" (Papers, I, 34). Thus ended his first gathering.
From this moment he began the steady accumulation of his greatest library in quality and quantity, that which he was to sell to Congress in 1814 to replace the national library destroyed by the British. The trouble, expense, and care which went into this collection is reflected in the wistfully proud letter of 1814 to Samuel H. Smith, who was negotiating the sale to Congress:
The last sentence was intended, of course, to emphasize the appropriateness of the library for the Congress of the United States. The penultimate sentence summarizes very modestly the enormous labor and care of his collecting between 1789 and 1814. Miss E. Millicent Sowerby's recent invaluable Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson (5 vols., Washington, D.C., 1952-1959) supplies detailed and interesting information from his correspondence and book orders covering these years.[6] Booksellers all over America and western Europe supplied his demands. Professional dealers and publishers like John Stockdale and James Lackington in London, Armand Koenig of 'Strassburg,' Dufour of Amsterdam, Mathew Carey of Philadelphia, and Samuel Pleasants of Richmond, among several dozen, sought books for him. But he also called upon friends, men like Joseph Hopkinson in Philadelphia, to secure copies of significant items.
According to the Catalogue published in 1815 after this collection became the Library of Congress, it contained approximately 3,200 items in about 6,500 volumes. Miss Sowerby, using both the 1815 Catalogue and an earlier manuscript rough-draft catalogue and counting in a somewhat different way, actually numbers 4,931 items, books and pamphlets, in her published list of those received by Congress.[7] Because so many of the items have disappeared, she was unable to check effectively the earlier count of number of volumes.
Even before the wagon loads of this library began their slow journey towards Washington, Jefferson had begun collecting his third library, intended "to amuse" him in his old age. Again he resorted to professional agents like Carey and Dufief in Philadelphia, and he accepted the offers of friends abroad like David B. Warden, Richard Rush, and George Ticknor to procure for him convenient editions of the classics. A favorite agent, George Milligan of Georgetown, D.C.,
The last Jefferson library, that assembled for the University of Virginia, contained over 3,000 items in more than 7,000 volumes. Jefferson drew up its catalogue, persuaded friends like Madison and Ticknor to assist him, and in 1824 sent abroad an agent, Francis Gilmer, who was to procure both professors and books.[10] Particularly rich in science, it is the least rich in Virginiana, though there are some twenty-eight items in seventy-odd volumes, principally history and law, almost all of which duplicate items in one of Jefferson's personal libraries, which might be designated Virginiana.
As some of the quotations from his letters given above indicate, Jefferson was at the same time an incidental and deliberate collector of Virginiana. Some items were thrust upon him. Others were simply constituent elements of his Americana assemblages. But he went to the trouble himself to secure many things about his "country" primarily for the sake of preserving them, as good collectors have often done.
Almost two dozen of the printed Virginiana were authors' presentation copies, ranging from medical treatises to law reports. In various ways scattered items came into his possession from fellow Virginians such as his brother-in-law Dabney Carr, the Tory William and Mary Professor Samuel Henley, several members of the Corbin family, his physician George Gilmer, Lunsford Lomax, Philip Ludwell, his friend John Page, his kinsmen Beverley and Edmund Randolph and John Randolph of Roanoke, his son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph, and Robert Beverley. Probably through his wife came seventeen books from the library of her father John Wayles and twenty-one from her first husband's brother Bathurst Skelton.[11] At various times and in various ways Jefferson obtained some ten volumes from the famous
Jefferson's famous cataloguing system, based upon the divisions of learning made by Francis Bacon, did not allow him to place all his Virginia materials together, though within subclasses they often do appear side by side. Jefferson sent his manuscript catalogue, with its three major divisions of History, Philosophy, and Fine Arts, to the Librarian of Congress, George Watterston, who used it with perhaps slight modification when he published the 1815 Catalogue of the Library of the United States (Washington, D.C.), a list of the books as they were received from Jefferson. Miss Sowerby in her five-volume Catalogue has followed the same system, listing in Volume One all of the History, in Volumes Two, Three, and part of Four the Philosophy, and in the remainder of Four and Five the Fine Arts and "[Polygraphical] Authors who have written on various branches."
In order to indicate clearly the nature, quality, range, and significance of the Virginiana items it is necessary to depart somewhat from this awkward system of classification and group the material primarily according to format, allowing it to fall into natural subdivisions. Therefore printed books and pamphlets with Virginia as subject, or with
| | |