this last establishment will probably be within a mile of Charlottesville, and four from Monticello, if the system should be adopted at all by our legislature who meet within a week from this time. my hopes however are kept in check by the ordinary character of our state legislatures, the members...

I promised you a sample from my Commonplace book ... when I was a student of the law, now half a century ago, after getting thro Coke Littleton, whose matter cannot be abridged, I was in the habit of abridging and commonplacing what I read meriting it, and of sometimes mixing my own reflections...

May We be “a Barrier against the Returns of Ignorance and Barbarism”! “What a Colossus Shall We Be”! But will it not be of Brass Iron and Clay? Your Taste is judicious in likeing better the dreams of the Future, than the History of the Past. Upon this Principle I prophecy that you and I Shall...

From Jefferson’s First Draft no freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms. From Jefferson’s Second Draft No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms [within his own lands or tenements]. From Jefferson’s Third Draft No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms [within his own lands or...

but I see nothing in this renewal of the game of ‘Robin’s alive’ but a general demoralization of the nation, a filching from industry it’s honest earnings, wherewith to build up palaces, and raise gambling stock for swindlers and shavers, who are to close too their career of piracies by...

among the sayings & discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence: and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it...

A death-bed Adieu. Th:J. to MR....

The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. that body, like Gravity, ever acting, with noiseless foot, & unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step, and holding what it gains, is ingulphing insidiously the special governments into the jaws of that which feeds them. the recent...

but time produces also corruption of principles, and against this it is the duty of good citizens to be ever on the watch.

when I contemplate the immense advances in science, and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation; and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been, as we than...