SOURCE: “Mysterious Obligation”: Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, in American Literature, Vol. 52, No. 3, November, 1980, pp. 381-406.

In the following essay, Ferguson discusses the origins and structure of Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. Ferguson dismisses the common claim that Notes is a disjointed, non-literary work, insisting that once the reader understands the influences and processes behind the formatting of the work, the text is much more cohesive and coherent than previously thought.

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Thomas Jefferson, by any standard, is a major writer of the early Republic, and his one book, Notes on the State of Virginia, has been accepted universally as both an American classic and a vital contribution to the political and scientific thought of the eighteenth century. Yet the same book has been virtually ignored as a literary text, and this is true even though Notes is a prototype for understanding literary involvement...