Thomas Jefferson’s True Masterpiece

By Daniel J. Flynn

Friday, June 26, 2026

 

The primary author of the Declaration of Independence, whose 250th anniversary we celebrate next weekend, wrote one book. Like the Declaration, Notes on the State of Virginia remains a document worth reading. Unlike the Declaration, few read Thomas Jefferson’s masterpiece.

 

Perhaps the early chapters that extol the abundance of marble on the James River and present a chart that details an average August rainfall of 9.153 inches turn off readers before they reach the exhilarating parts. Alternatively, Thomas Jefferson accumulated about 10,000 books in his lifetime; not even a majority of Americans now report reading a book annually. A third possibility owes to the “milk-was-a-bad-choice,” bearded Ron Burgundy stretch endured as of late by Jefferson. Indeed, the early 2020s weren’t kind to our third president.

 

In 2020, Portland denizens, with much imported help, toppled a Thomas Jefferson statue. The following year, in a more orderly fashion befitting bureaucrats, New York removed a seven-foot statue of Thomas Jefferson from city hall. In Maplewood, N. J., Madison, Wis., and Waukegan, Ill., districts replaced Jefferson’s name on schools with the names of various African Americans. The implication, of course, relies on a growing popular prejudice that Jefferson stood not for liberation but oppression.

 

A read of Notes on the State of Virginia cures this prejudice popular among people ostensibly committed to curing prejudice. It’s true that he falls into small-mindedness here and there. But for the most part, the reader comes away from it marveling that a man who lived 250 years ago could be so educated, cosmopolitan, and, yes, wise — a word not always associated with Jefferson. His ideas, though not always his actions, transcended his age.

 

The chapter on manners morphs by the third sentence into one on slavery, whose “unhappy influence on the manners of our people” owes to the example of the master’s “unremitting despotism” and the slave’s “degrading submissions.”

 

He laments, “Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do.”

 

Jefferson worries of slavery unleashing God’s wrath. If liberty were a gift from God, as the Declaration had explained, then we flirt with the Lord’s vengeance by taking it away. He points to the revolution that then occurred around him as a catalyst for change.

 

He writes, “The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.”

 

In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson comes across, in so many ways, as pleasing to the progressives who vilify him. He presents a full-throated defense of Native Americans, whom he theorizes as descendants of Asia, against caricatures of them as subhuman. “It is civilization alone,” he informs, “which replaces women in their enjoyment of their natural equality.” One section even offers, for progressives with more interpretive elasticity, what reads practically as an ode to Al Gore in its discussion of the “change in our climate.”

 

In other pages, Jefferson dons a red MAGA hat. A country that offers freedom and rights undoubtedly will attract migrants from cultures different from our own. He warns that America may not so much assimilate foreigners as itself assimilate to their foreign ways. “Suppose 20 millions of republican Americans thrown all of a sudden into France, what would be the condition of that kingdom?” he asks. “If it would be more turbulent, less happy, less strong, we may believe that the addition of a half million of foreigners to our present numbers would produce a similar effect here.”

 

He calls “the maintenance of the poor” a mere “matter of charity” and not the purview of government. He supports a basic system of public education that, after three years, required tuition for all but “the best geniuses,” who “will be raked from the rubbish annually” for scholarship. “An elective despotism was not the government we fought for,” he writes in endorsement of checks, balances, and separation of powers.

 

Throughout, Jefferson shows a partiality toward freedom. He expresses this on no subject more memorably and eloquently than on the one subject toward which posterity casts him as indifferent: religion. “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others,” he wrote. “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

 

In a few lines, Jefferson anticipated Frédéric Bastiat, Rose Wilder Lane, and scores of other libertarian thinkers. The Jefferson of Notes on the State of Virginia believes not in an indifferent god but in an indifferent state.

 

There seems something in Notes on the State of Virginia for thinkers of nearly every political persuasion to admire. But Americans at the Semiquincentennial do not admire Jefferson — at least as unanimously as we once did. The Bureau of Engraving and Printing still produces nickels and $2 bills, and no sandblasters threaten Mount Rushmore. But even one of the third president’s descendants wrote in the New York Times in the aftermath of George Floyd’s 2020 death that the federal government should destroy the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.

 

A passage in Notes on the State of Virginia gives hope, albeit partial hope. “Ignorance is preferable to error,” Jefferson writes, “and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.” Presumably Jefferson’s descendent knows quite a bit about his ancestor, making cases like his beyond redemption. But, in an America in which most people read fewer than a book a year, one safely chalks up much of the anti-Jefferson clamor to ignorance rather than error. It can be undone, and America’s 250th anniversary seems a good time to start, and the shelf with Notes on the State of Virginia sitting on it is a good place for the antidote to default anti-Jefferson ignorance.