Notes on the State of Virginia

Based on Wikipedia: Notes on the State of Virginia

In 1780, a French diplomat in Philadelphia sent a questionnaire to each of the thirteen American states, asking for basic information about their geography, resources, and laws. Most respondents probably dashed off perfunctory answers. Thomas Jefferson, then the wartime governor of Virginia, wrote a book.

That book—Notes on the State of Virginia—would become the only full-length work Jefferson ever published. It started as bureaucratic homework and transformed into something far stranger: part gazetteer, part philosophical treatise, part scientific polemic, and part tortured meditation on slavery that would haunt American politics for generations.

A Book Born from War and Curiosity

François Barbé-Marbois, secretary of the French delegation to the fledgling United States, was gathering intelligence. France had thrown its weight behind the American Revolution, and Paris wanted to know what exactly it was backing. What did Virginia produce? What rivers flowed through it? What laws governed its people?

Jefferson received these questions at one of the lowest points of his life. British forces under Benedict Arnold had just raided Richmond. Jefferson's own performance as governor was being questioned. He had narrowly escaped capture by British cavalry at Monticello, his mountaintop home. His infant daughter had recently died.

Into this chaos, Jefferson poured himself into answering Barbé-Marbois's queries. The project became an obsession. He revised and expanded his answers over three years, transforming dry administrative responses into something far more ambitious.

The book he produced was organized into twenty-three chapters, which Jefferson called "Queries"—a vestige of the original questionnaire format. But these "queries" ranged far beyond simple answers. A question about Virginia's rivers became an excuse to catalog every waterway in the state. A question about laws spawned a treatise on religious freedom and the separation of church and state.

Fighting a French Count with Fossils

One of Jefferson's most passionate battles in the Notes was against a man he never met: Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon.

Buffon was one of the most celebrated scientists in Europe. His massive Histoire Naturelle—eventually spanning forty-four volumes—attempted to catalog all of nature. It was a monumental achievement. It was also, in Jefferson's view, spectacularly wrong about America.

Buffon had proposed what became known as the "degeneracy theory." According to this idea, life in the New World was inherently inferior to life in the Old. American animals were smaller than their European counterparts. Native Americans were weak, hairless, and lacking in passion. Even European animals transported to America would shrink and decline over generations. The humid, marshy climate of the Americas, Buffon argued, simply could not support robust life.

Jefferson took this personally.

He assembled exhaustive tables comparing the weights of American and European animals. He cited the American moose, which dwarfed any deer in Europe. He pointed to the bones of mammoths—then believed to possibly still exist somewhere in the unexplored interior—as proof of American grandeur. Later, as ambassador to France, Jefferson would famously have the skeleton and skin of a moose shipped across the Atlantic to present to Buffon directly.

This was more than scientific vanity. Jefferson understood that the degeneracy theory had political implications. If America was a land of diminished life, how could its people be trusted to govern themselves? How could its institutions be taken seriously? By defending American nature, Jefferson was defending the American experiment itself.

Religious Freedom as Radical Idea

Query XVII, on religion, contains some of Jefferson's most quoted and controversial passages. His argument for religious freedom was startlingly absolute for its time.

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

This was not a popular sentiment in an era when many states still had established churches and religious tests for office. Jefferson was arguing for something close to complete religious pluralism—the idea that government had no business policing belief at all.

The passage would come back to haunt him. When Jefferson ran for president in 1800, Federalist newspapers seized on the Notes as proof of his godlessness. "No god" became a cudgel. Jefferson, they charged, was an atheist who would tear down churches and corrupt the nation's morals.

Jefferson never publicly responded to these attacks. He had expected the book to remain obscure—he'd published it anonymously in Paris, in a limited edition of just two hundred copies, never intending it for American audiences. But books have a way of escaping their authors' intentions. Copies circulated. A French translation appeared. An English publisher issued a public edition. By 1800, Jefferson's private philosophical musings had become campaign ammunition.

His opponent, John Adams, had responded to press criticism by pushing through the Alien and Sedition Acts, which criminalized criticism of the government. Jefferson took the opposite approach, at least in principle. He championed free speech even when that speech attacked him. Though his commitment wavered—at one point he privately encouraged the governor of Pennsylvania to prosecute Federalist editors for libel—he generally maintained that the remedy for bad speech was more speech, not prosecution.

He won the election anyway.

The Anguished Passages on Slavery

The most troubling sections of Notes on the State of Virginia concern slavery and race. Jefferson knew slavery was wrong. He said so explicitly. He also held hundreds of people in bondage and never freed more than a handful of them. The book captures this contradiction with painful clarity.

In Query XVIII, on manners, Jefferson issued what reads almost like a prophecy of divine judgment:

Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events.

He was imagining slave rebellion. He was imagining the enslaved rising up to claim the freedom Americans had just won for themselves. He was imagining, essentially, what would happen in Haiti just a few years later, when enslaved people overthrew their French masters in a revolution marked by extraordinary violence on all sides.

Jefferson's solution was not emancipation as we would understand it. He proposed what he called "colonization"—freeing enslaved people and then deporting them to Africa or the Caribbean. Whites and free Blacks, he believed, could never coexist peacefully. The history of slavery had created grievances too deep to bridge.

Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.

That phrase—"the real distinctions which nature has made"—reveals the deeper rot in Jefferson's thinking. He wasn't just worried about social conflict. He genuinely believed Black people were inferior to white people: less intelligent, less beautiful, less capable of artistic or intellectual achievement. He presented these views as scientific observations, the dispassionate conclusions of a natural philosopher.

These passages are among the most explicitly racist statements any Founding Father committed to print. Jefferson wasn't merely reflecting the prejudices of his time—he was articulating and systematizing them, lending them the authority of Enlightenment rationalism.

The Contradictions Laid Bare

What makes the Notes so excruciating to read on slavery is that Jefferson clearly understood the moral horror of the institution. In the same book where he detailed supposed Black inferiority, he also wrote that slavery corrupted everyone it touched:

The whole relationship between master and slave, he argued, was a school for tyranny. White children watched their parents exercise absolute power over other human beings and learned to be despots. The enslaved, denied any stake in their labor, had no incentive to work beyond avoiding punishment. The entire system degraded human character on both sides.

And yet Jefferson kept enslaving people. He kept fathering children with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who was also his late wife's half-sister. He kept writing about liberty while denying it to hundreds of people under his own roof.

The contradiction wasn't lost on his contemporaries. In the following decades, as the abolitionist movement grew, Jefferson's Notes became a battleground. Abolitionists cited his condemnations of slavery. Defenders of slavery cited his claims of Black inferiority.

David Walker's Response

In 1829, a free Black man named David Walker published one of the most incendiary documents in American history: his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Walker was a Boston-based abolitionist who had been born free in North Carolina. His Appeal called for the violent overthrow of slavery if peaceful means failed.

Walker devoted an entire article of his Appeal to responding to Jefferson's Notes. He had complicated feelings about the man. Jefferson was, Walker acknowledged, "one of as great characters as ever lived among the whites." But Jefferson's racist passages could not be allowed to stand unchallenged.

Do you believe that the assertions of such a man, will pass away into oblivion unobserved by this people and the world?... I say, that unless we try to refute Mr. Jefferson's arguments respecting us, we will only establish them.

Walker urged Black readers to buy copies of the Notes and give them to their children. Not to accept Jefferson's views, but to refute them. White abolitionists had already written against Jefferson's racism, Walker noted, but that wasn't enough. "We, and the world wish to see the charges of Mr. Jefferson refuted by the blacks themselves."

Walker was also scathing about colonization, the deportation scheme Jefferson had championed. Free Black Americans weren't fooled, Walker argued. They knew the real purpose of colonization was to remove free Blacks from the South so that enslaved people would have no one to teach them "that they are MEN, as well as other people, and certainly ought and must be FREE."

The Appeal terrified white Southerners. Several states made it illegal to circulate. Walker died mysteriously in 1830, possibly poisoned. His critique of Jefferson endured.

Climate Change in Colonial Virginia

Buried in Query VII, on climate, is a passage that reads remarkably contemporary. Jefferson had noticed that Virginia's weather was changing:

A change in our climate however is taking place very sensibly. Both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged. Snows are less frequent and less deep.

Jefferson's elderly neighbors told him that winters had once been far harsher. Snow used to cover the ground for three months each year. Rivers that once froze solid every winter now rarely froze at all. The warming had disrupted fruit cultivation—without a reliable blanket of snow to keep buds dormant, late frosts now killed them.

Modern climate scientists have debated what Jefferson was actually observing. Some have suggested it was the tail end of the Little Ice Age, a period of cooler temperatures that affected the Northern Hemisphere from roughly 1300 to 1850. Others have pointed to local deforestation changing regional weather patterns. Whatever the cause, Jefferson's careful recording of environmental change shows his scientific temperament—and provides a fascinating snapshot of pre-industrial climate.

The Navy Debate

One section of the Notes would resurface in an unexpected political context: the debate over whether America should build a navy.

Jefferson had written about Virginia's potential for shipbuilding, cataloging the state's timber resources and naval stores. In 1796, when Congress debated whether to continue constructing the first six frigates of the United States Navy, Federalist William Loughton Smith read long passages from the Notes to embarrass Jefferson's Republican allies, who opposed the naval buildup.

Look, Smith argued, even Jefferson acknowledged that America had the resources to support a substantial navy. The Republicans protested that Smith was taking Jefferson out of context, or that Jefferson had simply been wrong about naval matters. The exchange illustrated how the Notes—originally a semi-private work of natural philosophy—had become a political football, cited and contested long after its publication.

A Document of Its Moment

What are we to make of Notes on the State of Virginia today?

It is, first, a remarkable work of early American natural history. Jefferson's catalogs of plants, animals, and geographical features captured Virginia at a specific moment, before industrialization transformed the landscape. His battle against Buffon's degeneracy theory helped establish American scientific credibility.

It is also an invaluable window into Jefferson's mind—a mind that could hold together passionate commitments to liberty and equally passionate commitments to white supremacy. The Notes show that Jefferson understood exactly what was wrong with slavery. He just couldn't bring himself to give it up, and he constructed elaborate intellectual justifications for why he didn't have to.

The book shaped American debates for decades. Its arguments for religious freedom influenced the First Amendment. Its racist passages gave scientific cover to defenders of slavery. Its vision of an agrarian republic informed Jeffersonian politics. Its environmental observations provide data points for climate historians.

Perhaps most importantly, the Notes demonstrate that the contradictions of the American founding weren't accidents or oversights. They were built in from the start, articulated clearly by one of the most brilliant men of the age, who saw the problems and chose not to solve them. We are still living with the consequences.