Notes on the State of Virginia

Jefferson’s only full-length book, written in 1781 as answers to a French diplomat’s questionnaire and expanded into something far stranger: a survey of rivers, minerals, animals and constitutions that doubles as a portrait of its author’s mind. He defends American nature against Buffon, sketches a plan for public education, and writes on slavery in passages that condemn the institution while his own contradictions sit unresolved on the page.