Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson

About This Book

First published in 1829, Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies, from the Papers of Thomas Jefferson is the first collected edition of the writings of the third President of the United States. Issued in four volumes just three years after Jefferson's death, the collection was edited by his eldest grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who served as executor of the estate.

The work opens with an autobiographical memoir that Jefferson composed at the age of seventy-seven, followed by a journal he kept during his tenure as Secretary of State. The bulk of the collection consists of a vast correspondence spanning more than fifty years — from 1775, when blood had already been shed in Boston, to June 1826, only ten days before Jefferson's death on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The letters address the founding of the republic, relations with France and Britain, religious freedom, education, slavery, and the daily business of governing.

Randolph prepared the edition with the help of his mother and sisters, partly to shape Jefferson's public legacy and partly to relieve the family debts he had inherited. The original edition included an engraved portrait and a folding facsimile of Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence. It remained the only published collection of Jefferson's papers until Henry A. Washington's edition appeared in 1853. The work is in the public domain and freely available through Project Gutenberg.

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