Founding Father Fact-Checked

Thomas Jefferson crossed out the letter ​“I” from a manuscript. And he almost got away with it. Robert Pierce Forbes discovered that cross-out more than three centuries later — and embarked on a quest to discover why.

Forbes eventually concluded that Jefferson appeared to have crossed out the letter, a Roman numeral in a publication date, to seek to rewrite history, and burnish his own place in it.

The manuscript in question was Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson published the book in 1785. The American founding father began writing the manuscript in response to a request from French statesman Francois Marbois for factual information about the state of Virginia. Jefferson ended up spending years revising it, finally having it printed in 1785.

Historian Forbes, who lives in Westville, was the founding associate director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He taught history at University of Connecticut. He spent the last decade examining and researching and fact-checking Notes; Yale University Press has now released his edited and annotated version, an edition that has sparked nationwide interest among Jefferson scholars and students of American history.

It’s a fascinating read — and an unconventional read. It is a book version of a conversation across centuries, much like the internet or the Talmud: an original manuscript surrounded by commentary through the ages, with scholars from different centuries building on each other’s work.

It turns out that the crossed-out Roman numeral I, and many other changes Forbes examined in the original printer’s manuscript and related documents, bring new material to our evolving understanding of the complicated American founding father, revered as a champion of egalitarian grassroots democracy and exposed as a slaveholder who helped perpetuate a system he claimed to oppose.

Notes became Jefferson’s bid for his place in history, for how we would understand him centuries later.

At the time Jefferson wrote it, he was governor of Virginia. ​“His governorship was a disaster. He escaped essentially from Monticello to his smaller plantation, Poplar Forest, near Lynchburg. There were two invasions by the British of Virginia while he was governor. While the other founding fathers were making their place in history through the revolution, that was not happening to him,” Forbes observed in an interview about his book on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program.

Plus, ​“his wife died without leaving him a male heir. He had no one to carry forward his family name. At that point, he had no accomplishments in the revolution that would make his name last forever. The founding fathers talk about this all the time: They are desirous of fame and a permanent place in history.”

Jefferson succeeded in influencing his legacy with Notes. ​“This is universally regarded as one of the most important early American books. It’s in the top 300 college-assigned texts. It’s cited all over the place. But nobody has actually studied it in any kind of detail. Nobody has studied the manuscript. This is one of the few books from the 18th century where we actually have the printer’s copy of the manuscript,” Forbes said.

Over the past decade, it became easier to examine that manuscript: The Massachusetts Historical Society, which owns it, put a high-resolution scan of it online.

So Forbes spent countless hours in his home office examining the manuscript on a large monitor screen.

He discovered that Jefferson made extensive changes to tailor his ​“facts,” or simply wrote it with obvious misstatements.

For instance, he doubles the actual size of a cascade, Falling Spring, in Augusta, Virginia, while downsizing Niagara Falls, to make it appear his home-state waterfall is larger. That may have been an innocent mistake; but over and over again, Forbes found, Jefferson laid specious claims to lands in order to make Virginia appear a more important state or to claim territories to such an extent that Virginia would have rights to extend all the way to the Pacific Ocean. He mischaracterized the size and propensities of wildlife and flora to inflate the new nation’s prowess in comparison to that of the Old World.

Questionable motives for changes and errors abound: Forbes discovers that Jefferson crossed an acknowledgement that ​“purchases” of Native American land were made with a ​“sword” in one hand. He deliberately misidentified the Massawomecks with the Iroquois in order to justify one such land grab.

The latter prevarication points to a more disturbing apparent aim of Jefferson’s editing process: To excuse subjugation of Native Americans and slavery of the Black population. Jefferson cited purported ​“scientific” measurements and observations to depict both groups as inferior races. He sought to finesse his public denunciation of slavery — despite his continued ownership of slaves — by advancing a ​“wildly” impractical emancipation plan, citing state law to ​“normalize” the practice, and argue that alleged Black inferiority made coexistence impractical.

It turns out that that larger apparent strategy helps explain the crossed-out Roman numeral I. The erasure changed a date on the title page about when the manuscript had been revised. Jefferson wanted to backdate in order to put his work as preceding influential texts others had written, most of all by an English Unitarian minister named Richard Price.

Price ​“was the United States’ greatest defender during the Revolution. In 1784, he was one of the most significant Europeans who looked at the United States and was disappointed in what was going on there. One of the things that disappointed him was the appetite for riches from Europe. This was a terrible sign of degeneracy. The other was that they’d done nothing about slavery. So Jefferson needed to … show that he was absolutely on top of both of these issues.” 

Overall, Forbes writes in his notes to Notes, ​“Jefferson presents us with a model of misdirection: a carefully constructed exemplar of how to look past the seemingly self-evident flaws of a society as if they did not exist. Notes instructs us to look at ourselves and see exactly what we want to see, adjusting our perception to screen out what we wish to ignore, no matter how great the enormity. It is a habit of political thought we have ardently embraced.”

“Fortunately Jefferson has also left us the blueprint of how this sleight-of-hand was accomplished. A close analysis of the actual text of Notes, and in particular of the additions and deletions that he made to it, conclusively demonstrates the painstaking effort that went into the creation of a document that was as successful at dividing the American nation as the as the Declaration of Independence had been at creating it. Perhaps, with an understanding of how and why Jefferson used Notes to revise the Declaration’s great truth that ​‘all men are created equal,’ we can begin the task of restoring its original luster.”

Click on the video above to watch the full conversation with Robert Forbes on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven.”

Click here to subscribe to ​“Dateline New Haven” and here to subscribe to other WNHH FM podcasts.