SOURCE: “Subterraneous Virginia: The Ethical Poetics of Thomas Jefferson,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2, Winter, 2000, pp. 233-49.

In the following essay, Anderson discusses Notes on the State of Virginia as Jefferson's exploration of the intersections between the individual self and the collective self, between psychology and history.

Whatever turns the soul inward on itself, tends to concenter its forces, and to fit it for greater and stronger flights of science.

—Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry

In defending the vigor of colonial culture against the disparaging assessments of European critics, Thomas Jefferson asserted, in 1782, that America had already begun to show “hopeful proofs of genius,” both in the “nobler” and in the “subordinate” arts. The nobler arts, Jefferson believed, were directly or indirectly didactic. They tended to effect change or to promote virtue, to “arouse the best feelings of man,” to “call him into action” in defense of freedom...