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In 2005, the Massachusetts Historical Society will present an online version of Notes on the State of Virginia. The online version will feature images of the manuscript copy, and images of the additions Jefferson attached to the main pages of the manuscript.
The manuscript copy of Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia forms part of the Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts. In this work, his only full-length book, Jefferson describes many aspects of his state. The content of the book stemmed from Jefferson's informative responses to a series of queries originally posed by Francois de Marbois, the secretary of the French legation. (The questionnaire was distributed to people from several different states in 1780, and there is evidence that a few people responded. In December 1781, Jefferson sent his answers to Marbois, and over the next few years, Jefferson expanded and revised the information he compiled about Virginia. These revisions eventually were published as a book in 1785.)
Not only is the existence of this manuscript significant (since so few 18th-century drafts have been preserved) but its format is remarkable. It is comprised of fair copy pages, full-page additions, and partial-page additions. The fair copy pages consist of full-length manuscript pages Jefferson created when he copied a previous draft by hand. The full-length additional pages expanded the manuscript copy and prompted Jefferson to renumber many pages. The partial-page additions (tabs and paste-downs) contain Jefferson's insertions and corrections to the manuscript draft. A tab is a slip of paper with Jefferson's handwriting on both sides and was attached to the full page in such a way that it could be lifted up and the verso read. A paste-down has writing on one side and was fully affixed to the full page. Jefferson used sealing wax to attach the partial-page additions onto the full pages. Jefferson seems to have written this manuscript copy between 1783 and 1784, although part of the content is based on work he completed during 1781 and 1782. (It is interesting to note that Jefferson's handwritten title page states "written in the year 1781. somewhat corrected and enlarged in the winter of 1782.") The book was privately printed in France in 1785 and then published in England in 1787.
The manuscript consists of 204 component pieces: 142 full-size pages and 62 partial pages (which were attached to the full-size pages with sealing wax).
Conservators numbered each page and addition in pencil and cut them from the 20th-century, full leather binding. After the stitching and leather remnants were removed, the pages were cleaned, deacidified, repaired, and reinforced using wheat paste and Japanese tissue paper. The numbering scheme the conservators used assigned sequential numbers to each full page of the manuscript, and added a decimal place for each partial-page attachment. (For example, the first attachment on full page 9 is numbered 9.1, and the second attachment is numbered 9.2.)
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