IV. The "Usefulness" of Jefferson's Collection
From the quotations given above it is clear that Jefferson had
posterity more in mind when he acquired Virginiana than he did when
gathering his more general materials. These manuscripts, newspapers,
pamphlets, and books would probably not, he felt, be preserved at all, and
certainly not together so that they might be used, unless he undertook the
task. He was almost surely right. There had been in past generations men
like William Byrd II and Sir John Randolph who might be numbered among
the careful or the curious, but even they seem to have been haphazard
collectors as far as matter pertaining to the Old Dominion was
concerned.
Jefferson had no illusions about the immortality of libraries in private
hands. He knew too much of the fine old collections of his Virginia
predecessors for that. And he sent documents of national
significance, when they came to him, as did certain Lewis and Clark
materials, to the American Philosophical Society library as a way of
ensuring their survival. Perhaps he took some satisfaction in the anticipation
that his things going to the Library of Congress would be carefully
preserved.
But the Virginia manuscript and printed laws and other records, as he
says in his correspondence several times, he never intended to go to
Washington. Though in 1814 the University of Virginia was not so near
physical realization as in 1823-24, it is probable that even in 1814 he had
it in mind as a repository for his Virginia materials. Certainly it was the
destination he planned for the volumes of the proceedings of the Virginia
Company of London and the other miscellaneous early records, for he
informed Hugh Taylor in 1823 that he "would deposit them in the library
of the University" (October 4, L&B, XV, 472). His
testamentary gift of the whole of his last library to the University was never
realized because of the financial conditions of his estate when he died. It
had to be sold at auction.
Even during his lifetime Jefferson put his Virginiana to good use.
Young neighbors or relatives like Francis Gilmer and Peter and Dabney
Carr came to browse or study in his library. One of the tasks he urged upon
them was the acquisition of an extensive knowledge of their own "country."
Their letters give evidence that they acquired something.
Dabney Carr became a judge and authority on Virginia law. Gilmer not
only was elected first professor of law in the infant University of Virginia
but was behind the first American printing of one of the books he probably
first saw in Jefferson's library, Captain John Smith's
Historie.
[29] Gilmer's
letters harp on the theme that Virginia must fulfill the promise of her past.
What remains one of the most significant items of pure Virginiana,
Jefferson's own
Notes on the State of Virginia, was composed
in part while he was surrounded by his beloved books at Monticello.
[30] The famous bibliography of
Virginia
history at the end of Query XXIII could hardly have been compiled without
his own volumes.
Still essential for any student of Virginia is John Daly Burk's
three-volume History of Virginia (1804, 1805). As already
noted, Jefferson lent Burk while the composition of the work was going on
an invaluable file of Virginia newspapers which the owner never recovered
but which the author used most effectively. Burk, in dedicating the
comprehensive study to the man who had supplied so much of its primary
material, said that "The History of Virginia, by a sort of national right,
claims you as its guardian and patron."[31]
Without the manuscript and printed laws described above William
Waller Hening could not have compiled his monumental The Statutes
at Large; being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia, from the First
Session of the Legislature, in the year 1619 (1809, 1810, 1812). In
the preface Hening traces the history of Jefferson's connection with the
publication, which began in 1795 when George Wythe approached his
former student as to the use of his materials for such a work. After much
correspondence Jefferson in June 1808 sent Hening eight units of
"Manuscripts of the laws," which the owner systematically listed.[32] These items included the Peyton
Randolph, the Bland, the John Page, and Charles City — derived
manuscripts described above. Later Jefferson lent him other laws,
manuscript and printed, which Hening collated with other surviving copies
when possible but often had to use as his only source.
In the twentieth century most of Jefferson's Virginia
manuscripts,
especially, have been reproduced with scholarly introductions or used as
bases for critical and historical studies of the periods they represent. H. R.
McIlwaine printed "The Virginia Court Book, 1622-1629" (Sowerby, II,
352-353) in his edition of
Minutes of the Council and General Court
of Virginia, 1616-1676 (Richmond, 1924). Susan Myra Kingsbury,
in the four volumes of
The Virginia Company of London
(Washington, D.C., 1906, 1933, 1935) describes the Jefferson manuscripts
and reproduces all the old records pertaining to the years she covers
(1606-1624) in a work used by students of the period everywhere in the
English-speaking world. Historians like Charles M. Andrews and Wesley
F. Craven, among others, have studied Jefferson's Virginiana, in the
original and/or in later printed form, in preparing their own distinguished
interpretations of colonial history. The scholars who have concentrated
especially on Virginia history (to whom manuscripts such as Mathew's
"Bacon's Rebellion" are of particular interest) and have employed
Jefferson's materials, from Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker to the most
modest of genealogists or local historians, run at least into the
scores.
Thomas Jefferson, one recalls, measured almost everything by the
degree of its usefulness to mankind. His definition of
usefulness was an inclusive one, embracing the production of
intellectual and aesthetic pleasure as well as of material comfort. If he could
come back and observe the ways in which his collections of materials
relating to Virginia have been put to use, there is every evidence that he
would be well satisfied.
