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Marginalia

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• Barbé Marbois

The two manuscript additions are in pencil. A plus sign in the text follows "among us." In the bottom margin the name "Barbé Marbois" appears, referring to François Barbé-Marbois (1745-1837), the secretary of the French legation whose questionnaire prompted Jefferson to begin work on the earliest draft of the Notes.

Over 150 pencil marks appear throughout Jefferson's personal copy. These marks and others like them were not made by Jefferson but by one or more people involved in the publication of a posthumous edition of the Notes, printed in 1853 by Charles H. Wynne for Joseph Williamson Randolph in Richmond. The 1853 edition was the first to include the additions and revisions recorded in Jefferson's personal copy. The pencil marks guide the typesetting of the new edition by indicating how to incorporate Jefferson's manuscript additions. Jefferson's personal copy therefore records its author's revisions but also offers evidence of how a printer in nineteenth-century America might edit a text to accommodate author intent.

THE following Notes were written in Virginia in the year 1781, and somewhat corrected and enlarged in the winter of 1782, in answer to Queries proposed to the Author, by a Foreigner of Distinction, Jefferson is referring to François Barbé-Marbois (1745-1837), who was secretary to the French legation to the early United States. In 1780, Marbois gave a questionnaire to representatives of each of the thirteen states so that he could produce a report on the new nation. The questionnaire for Virginia was passed on to Jefferson, who took on the project of answering Marbois's queries; Notes on the State of Virginia is, ultimately, the product. In 1803, when Jefferson was President, Marbois negotiated the Louisiana Purchase with him. then residing among us. The subjects are all treated imperfectly; some scarcely touched on. To apologize for this by developing the circumstances of the time and place of their composition, would be to open wounds which have already bled enough. To these circumstances some of their imperfections may with truth be ascribed; the great mass to the want of information and want of talents in the writer. He had a few copies printed, In 1784, Jefferson had a private edition of 200 copies of Notes on the State of Virginia printed in Paris; one of the copies of that printing has been digitized for this edition. Another copy was obtained by a French bookseller, who issued a translation of the work into French; unhappy with errors that had crept into the text, and worried that the book would now be translated back into English (with, very likely, more errors produced in that process), Jefferson approached the London publisher John Stockdale to issue a new, English edition. Page images of Jefferson’s own copy of the 1787 London edition, which was extensively annotated and amended by him in later years, are also included in this edition. which he gave among his friends: and a translation of them has been lately published in France, but with such alterations as the laws of the press in that country rendered necessary. They are now offered to the public in their original form and language.