Notes on the State of Virginia

xxv, [1], 315, [1] pages. Footnotes. Tabular data. Appendices. Notes. Index. Name of previous owner inside front cover. This was published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia. DJ worn, scuffed, torn, soiled and chipped. Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 - July 4, 1826) was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He was previously the nation's second vice president under John Adams and the first United States secretary of state under George Washington. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was a proponent of democracy, republicanism, and individual rights, motivating American colonists to break from the Kingdom of Great Britain and form a new nation. He produced formative documents and decisions at state, national, and international levels. During the American Revolution, Jefferson represented Virginia in the Continental Congress that adopted the Declaration of Independence. As a Virginia legislator, he drafted a state law for religious freedom. He served as the second Governor of Virginia from 1779 to 1781, during the Revolutionary War. In 1785, Jefferson was appointed the United States Minister to France, and subsequently, the nation's first secretary of state under President George Washington from 1790 to 1793. Jefferson and James Madison organized the Democratic-Republican Party to oppose the Federalist Party during the formation of the First Party System. Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) is a book written by the American statesman, philosopher, and planter Thomas Jefferson. He completed the first version in 1781 and updated and enlarged the book in 1782 and 1783. It originated in Jefferson's responses to questions about Virginia posed to each of the thirteen states in 1780 by François Barbé-Marbois, the Secretary of the French delegation in Philadelphia, the temporary capital of the Continental Congress. Notes on the State of Virginia is both a compilation of data by Jefferson about the state's natural resources and economy and his vigorous argument about the nature of the good society, which he believed to be incarnated by Virginia. He expressed his beliefs in the separation of church and state, constitutional government, checks and balances, and individual liberty. He also wrote extensively about slavery, his dislike of miscegenation, justifications of white supremacy, and his belief that Whites and Black Americans could not co-exist in a society in which Blacks were free. It was the only full-length book that Jefferson published during his lifetime. He first had it published anonymously in Paris by Philippe Denis Pierres in 1785 while Jefferson serving the U.S. government as a trade representative. A French translation by Abbé Morellet appeared in 1787. In London, John Stockdale published it in 1787 after Jefferson had come to terms for a limited print run and other arrangements. Notes includes some of Jefferson's most memorable statements of belief in political, legal, and constitutional principles like the separation of church and state, constitutional government, checks and balances, and individual liberty. Jefferson meticulously documented, to his abilities, the natural resources of Virginia and fiercely opposed the proposition of the French naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, whose authoritative Histoire Naturelle stated that nature, plant life, animal life, and human life degenerate in the New World in contrast with their state in the Old World. Notes on the State of Virginia contained Jefferson's firm belief in citizens' rights to express themselves freely without fear of government or church reprisal and that government's role is only secular and should not have anything to do with religion.[5] That led later to charges of atheism leveled at him by his opponents in Federalist newspapers before the nasty.…