Editor. We are here to talk about jefferson and his correspondence. My moderator is laura alterson. I will turn it over to her. Thanks. Can you tell us, what is your role in working with Jeffersons Correspondence . Im in charge of a project to produce a total of 24 volumes to get jefferson from 1809 to 1826. I work with a team of ten people to do that. Our job is to take jeffersons letters and papers and produce an edition for those years that will enable future scholars to rely on that and not have to go back to the originals. What exactly do you do as a Documentary Editor . One of the most important things is to make it clear what we arent. You hear of a Documentary Editor and i think that you are creating film documentaries we have had people apply for jobs and were baffled because the application was all about how they could splice film. That wasnt what we were after. We are not editors in a newspaper who take an incoming letter to the editor and mark it through and make all sorts of corrections. Our job is to give as accurate a representation of the materials that we are editing as possible so as to convey what was on the handwritten page so that the reader doesnt have to go back and read it over again. Part of our job is to create an accurate transcription of the Letter Or Paper and the other part of the job is then to annotate it so our readers can understand what they are reading without telling too much so that it gets lost in our commentary. We try to steer in between. When and how did the papers of thomas Jefferson Project get started . It began in 1943 in honor of the bicentennial of his birth. There had been four earlier edition of jeffersons papers. None of them were very good. The Founding Editor in princeton, Julian Boyd, started this new project to create the authoritative edition of jeffersons papers. He did two things new to Documentary Editing and which became standby for how the work is now done. One was that we are including all of the letters to jefferson as well as letters from him. Up to that point, that hadnt been how it was done. There was a tendency this is obvious, because you cant understand the letters writing if you dont have the letters he is reading. At that point, there was a tendency not to include those. The other thing that boyd did was to look for all known copies of every letter to and from jefferson. Up to that point, there was a tendency to take a big collection of papers and work from that. He realized that to understand what you were to get the a full picture, you needed the copies that were retained as well as ones sent. In jeffersons case, we have letters kept for himself. If you dont have the letter that went out the door, you dont have a postscript he added. You might have a draft at the other end to tell you how it was composed. Thats how it got started in 1943. The goal was to do all of the important Jefferson Material from that period on. The original plan was to get everything done in about ten years and 40 volumes. Here we are much, much later, because it turned out to be a bigger job than anybody could have anticipated. We are still doing that work. Started in princeton. They are still working in princeton doing wonderful work up there. They are roughly halfway into his presidency. What brought us here to monticello was the realization in the 1990s that they had been doing it for almost 50 years and Jefferson Wasnt President yet. Monticello decided to figure out a way to get the job done sooner in peoples foreseeable lifetime. Monticello decided negotiated with princeton. We worked out a great deal where princeton would work in the period they were working on through the presidency. We would take on about half of the remaining documents, which was the retirement period. We are responsible for, as i said, 1809 to 1826, which we think is going to take about 24 volumes just for that period. Overall, its going to take something like 90 volumes to get from start to finish and include all the material we want to include. Next question. Can you tell us a little bit more about this Retirement Series that you are working on . Well, its a period that in some ways of course, we would think that. We think its the best period to work on of all because its a period when jefferson is finally released from what he calls the shackles of public office. He was able to settle down and work on everything that interested him. Write about everything that interested him. Everything does interest him. We are able to on any given day, we might work on a letter about agriculture or a letter about politics or a letter about science or a letter about greek and latin. The incoming material is fascinating for this period. Jefferson is known to be this kind of sage in retirement. People write him on all sorts of topics. Inventors write him with ideas they have that they want him to comment on. You get your occasional krafrpg crank or anonymous writer. You have people hoping he will give them money. The best thing is some of the exchanges he has with people like john adams, which is one of the great treasures of this correspondence ever where these two tough old statesmen are getting everything worked out before they die, but its also the period in which jefferson found the university of virginia, one of his great achievements, also the period in which jefferson sells his library to the nation after the library is burned and helped turn the library of congress from a legislative Reference Tool into a great cultural institution. So its a wonderful period and were very happy to be we are now about twothirds of the way through and every day its equally interesting for us. So thats a high volume of content with lots of different topics and natalia watching our live stream wants to know how do you catalog the letters . Do you do it by date, by person that he is correspondenting with . It is clearly a big task. It is a huge task. Our series is chronologically organized and thats the only way that you can keep track of something with so many possible ways to organize t but the only way that really you can maintain some kind of consistency is to work chronologically from start to finish, although there are some documents that dont really fit into a chronological context and they go into the jefferson papers second series and that has things like his literally commonplace Book Or Ex trats from the gospel. But we work chronologically, however, we also devote a great deal of time to creating useful indexes for the work and that has subject entries and persons names. Now we are in a world where there is a digital edition as well and in the digital edition its particularly advantageous to have that because you can have internal reference that is just link to a different place. So when jefferson says im responding to your letter on the 7th we can have a live link that you can click and get taken to that letter. So those are the basic tools. Jefferson himself helped us in keeping this stuff organized because he had a journal in which he logged in and out all the letters he wrote and received. If you can imagine a man for 40 odd years including as president logging in and out all of his junk mail, thats what jefferson is doing, but thats immensely valuable for us because it lets us know what we have, what we dont have. And one final thing, jefferson also organized when he receives a letter he endorses it with the date he received it. So we are able and this is true for very few other people of this period we are able to know what he when he received it as well as when he when it was sent. So you can kind of turn that flip that around and see him recreate his mail pouch, see what hes got on the day and what hes responding to. That, again, is something which is made possible by his organizational methods. Great. So what are some of the steps in taking jeffersons letters and getting them ready for publication . Well, the first and most important step for me is to have the wonderful team that i work with. We have a team of total of ten people who do this Work And Weve found that to have not get in each Others Way we divide ourselves into two or three teams, two teams that work on the individual volumes and a team that provides all sorts of essential support. So if we think of the lifecycle of a document, we take the document, we verify the text, but first its transcribed for us by one of our people and checked that way, but the most important thing is it goes to one of our teams that creates a volume and that team will first verify the transcription and we will do that with at least three character for character, wordforword proofings against the original manuscript. There are two ways to do that, you can do it by one person holding the copy, the original and checking it, working their way down the page, or two people one reading aloud to the other holding the original. We have found that each has its advantages so we have decided to do it both ways. We have Twoperson Editing teams working on adjacent volumes so that the team that means that a team can have the two people on the team doing that oral proofing and dividing up and also verifying it individually. They also then provide the initial annotation of the document. The goal is not to overannotate. We call it a lean and mean method. To take an example, if there is a reference to the big flier in philadelphia last week, we will annotate that by finding a Newspaper Account and being able to say more about what happened in that fire, but we dont follow it up with long discussion of 1870 firefighting and sources. Thats the job of the reader. You can understand it but we dont want to write a lot of annotation using sources that will be superceded by the next generation. But we do explain obscure terms you cant understand and we account for missing documents this way. After that it comes to me as the editor to do my review and my main job is to sort of try to smell a rat if i can find one and places we left something out or things we could link at further but also to try to smooth out the language so its not really obvious that one team wrote one thing and one wrote the other, but to give it a consistent style. When im done with that we have editorial assistants who do very important work checking to make sure what weve said in our voice is accurate. So just as we dont trust our verification thats been checked several times, we dont trust our annotations until theyve been checked by another set of eyes. After all of that all the editors read the whole volume and try to see what weve left out or what one team has already said or worse what one team has said the opposite of so we can sort out nf discrepancies like that. When its smoothed out that way it goes to our press and then it goes through basically a whole another year of going through page proofs and they come to us, we read that character for character against the original again to make sure nothing got messed up in translation and also thats where we produce our index. The index is where we do basically that carries the weight for a lot of the annotation for the volume. So at the end of that ultimately it takes two years to get the volume from transcription to submission to the press and another year to get it all the way through. But because we have these teams were able to get a volume a year in press into print every Year And Weve been doing that since we got our first volume out. Were hoping to maintain that until were done in hopefully 2027. Next question. So ted wants to know if there is a relationship between this project and the adams letter team, and are there ever disagreements amongst Documentary Editing teams about how to interpret different letters . There are thats a really great question, ted, and the fact is that we are part of the movement thats been going on for decades now to create editions like this for all of the founding fathers basically and we are, in fact, part of a little consortium called founding fathers papers which is responsible for george washington, Thomas Jefferson, john adams, james Madison And Benjamin franklin. Also Alexander Hamilton was part of that originally. These and other editions like that are responsible for basically making all of early american history accessible to the reader without having to go and try to read the original document. We are in close contact with our friends at the adams papers and some of these other places and we use their volumes when they are out ahead of us and vice versa. We arent usually working on a document at the same time so most of our disagreements are in how we handle a document, with he come to it after somebody else has. Occasionally we will find what we think is a Mistake And Vice versa, they will tell us. We dont do gotcha in the volumes that we print, but we will do it our way and then we will tell them and they might put into theirs and certainly the opposite has happened for us. Its important that we communicate that way, but most of our differences arent so much in our dis agreeing about how a word was transcribed, we are pretty good about that, but we can have differences in how to present it because we have a body of documents that goes in a certain direction and theirs will go in a different direction and they may have annotated something somewhere else. They may not look the same but the basic feel is going to be pretty similar. Next question . How do you decide which letters to print and can you give an example of a time that you had to make a decision about whether or not to print a specific letter . Sure. The original plan for the edition set out by Julian Boyd back in the 1940s was that we were to include everything legitimately jeffersonian by authorship or association, while excluding what he called a great mass of kind of material thats sort of routine and formulaic but not actually sort of pertinent to jefferson himself. So that that exclusion comes into play mostly for our friends at princeton because while Hes President hes getting lots and lots of ships passports and land grants and things like that, officers commissions that hes just going to sign but they dont really teach us anything about jefferson. So the solution there would be to print a single example of one but not to try to track them all down because theyre not really important for us. For our period that rule of everything legitimately jeffersonian means that we tend to either print or in a few cases note somewhere else all of the Jefferson Material, letters that come in that he writes and most of the letters that he receives. Occasionally weve left one weve noted, rather than printed one because it was really a very routine like a letter of transmittal. I have received your letter and i am passing it on. But the rule is definitely not that it can be very long material were still printing and also very short material. Our favorite example is something we agonized about and finally printed was a series of very short notes that jefferson sends off to a merchant in town named Leach And Jefferson will sometimes take a very small scrap of paper, just write a few words on it saying something he wants and send it off to this merchant. We debated about whether we should actually accord these the full dignity of a letter and print them. We decided we needed to because it teaches so much about jefr on and the culture and what hes Ordering And Furnishing monticello with. Some can be quite significant. One of my favorite is a letter he writes to leach that suggests the whole letter reads, closed for burrell such as he shall choose. Thats really significant because the letter is saying that Burrell Colbert jeffersons enslaved butler can go into the store and he will be given whatever he needs for his clothing and he doesnt have to spell it out beforehand. Thats different for others where he will say i want a Hat Or Keg of sugar for this person. A short letter like that can be revealing about Jeffersons Relationship with the enslaved at monticello. Next question. Sort of along those same lines as you just were talking b is it more difficult to find letters between jefferson and enslaved people and when you do find them how do they fit into his larger correspondence . Well, sadly, there are very, very few letters between jefferson and the enslaved at Monticello Or Anything else. Anything we find we will print. We are only aware for our period of two correspondence to jefferson, one is John Hemmings the enslaved Carpenter And Jefferson has quite a robust correspondence with him at one point because jefferson is at monticello and hemmings is at popular forest, jeffersons other home in bedford and so jefferson is receiving and writing lots of letters to hemmings basically specifying what he wants done in terms of the construction of poplar forest. These are important and interesting letters. One of the more interesting things about it is that jefferson routinely begins his Letters Sir or dear sir, and its actually there is a kind of a code there where dear sir seems to be somebody who he knows personally in some Way And Sir is not. Some editions would leave that out as formulaic, we think thats important. In fact, jefferson sometimes does not sometimes you can be demoted. There was a man he was calling dear sir and then he made a Business Proposal Jefferson didnt like and the next letter was addressed, again, to just sir. I bring it up here because jefferson was in a bit of a bind in terms of his letters to hemmings because jefferson has very unfortunately different views about the status of the enslaved and he didnt, i sure, want to call him either sir or dear sir and his solution was to use a different formula and his letters to him are just t. H. jefferson to John Hemmings. The other letters we have to an enslaved person is a single letter to hannah at poplar forest who wrote him a nice letter once expressing her concern about his health. Those are great letters. We dont know if there were other because they arent recorded, but this is what we have. We know that very few were literal, but enough more were literal that Theres Reason to think that he may have gotten some short notes that we just dont have. So speaking of correspondence that we dont have, right, we have thousands and thousands of letters that jefferson wrote but we know that its not all. So can you talk to us a little bit about jefferson letters that are missing and how they are sought after and what happens when you find those letters. Thats a great question. As i mentioned that jefferson has the journal of letters and in his journal of letters he records all of his incoming and outgoing correspondence or rather most, there are some exceptions and i could get into that another time, but we know that for this period thanks to that journal of letters we know what were missing in most cases and were missing, im happy to say were only missing about 10 . So we have 90 of the Jefferson Correspondence for this period and, in fact, more than that for the letters jefferson wrote because we tend to be missing more of the ones he received thanks to that Polygraph Machine of his there are two ways for his letters to survive, one he sent and the one he kept. We know were missing that percentage and we sometimes can find more of them. The original Document Search back in the 1940s and 50s involved writing basically every Library And Collector in the world and we have maintained those connections ever since. We now have material between princeton and here from about 1,000 different collections, ranging from the library of congress down to a single individual. Still every now and again more material comes up and there are kind of two ways that new material will reappear, one is when something surfaces usually on the market, although occasionally somebody will just get in touch with us and say they have a Jefferson Document we dont have. I will tell you this method of saying that if you have a Jefferson Document you dont think we have please let us know because we are always looking for more material. Also as editor we sometimes as we work on the document will have an idea where to look that might not have occurred in that general search. We have occasionally located a new item that way. For example, we had a missing letter that jefferson had received from a man named Thomas Cooper on the subject of education, an important letter. We didnt have the letter because jefferson received t it was marked and scribbled up and jefferson and the man said he was going to publish it at some point so jefferson sent it back to him in the scribbled form. We didnt have it but we were able to eventually figure out where the man published it and found it there in its published form and print it had that way. We have all sorts of ingenious methods of trying to track down material were missing. We do have the advantage as i said knowing what we are missing. When the journal of letters says there is a letter we should have we are able to account for that in our annotation at other documents and create that hole. Finally you say what happens when a new document comes to light. We have the advantage of the digital edition now so we are able Tin Stead of waiting until the last volume comes out there will be a printed supplement to our last volume which will include material turned up after the volume came out. We are now thanks to the digital edition to include documents, supplemental documents, there is errata mistakes. We do make mistakes and we are able now to correct them digitally as well. So whenever we get a new volume going online we can also submit a package of other material, corrections of one sort or another and also new material had a has turned up. We are just about to submit such a supplement in the near future. Well, natalia watching our live stream would like to know if jefferson wrote letters in foreign languages, maybe spanish or french . Thats another great question. Everybody knows that jefferson was quite the linguist, fluent in several languages, certainly fluent in french. However, jefferson rarely if ever actually corresponded by writing in the language of the letter he received. The tendency was for jefferson to receive a letter in french or spanish and to respond to it in english. Mostly thats to keep who he knows are not going to have any trouble with this because theyre diplomats who are fluent enough in english to understand it and he doesnt want to be misunderstood. So he will normally write back in the language he receives. For our period most of our foreign language letters are in french but partly from his time in france and Part Correspondence he retained connections with partly because its the language of Science And Diplomacy so he receives lots of letters from scientists who are fluent in that language and he will respond to them in english. But he was certainly very fluent in french, particularly he was heavily involved in our period in creating a translation of two monographs by a french author named tracy so he helped see those into print and corrected or in some case created those translations. We also have received and dealt with letters in spanish and italian and a great and a fair number of not full letters, but letters with passages in greek, so we have had to learn the greek how to use the greek alphabet. At least once he got an entire poem in latten which we had in our first volume. Fortunately we had helpful collaborators that help us make sure we get the Translation Transcription Right and to help us provide translations for this material so we give translations. Snow another question from our viewers. A scholar who has been grateful for the supplementary documents that help include context for these papers and wants to know how do you decide when to include that kind of extended contextualization. Thank you for that. One of the things we have done is added all kinds of value to our work to take on what we call the family letters project. This is material not by family letters we dont mean letters between jefferson and members of his family because those would always be printed in our edition. We became aware as we worked that letters survive in which family members talk about what Grandpa Pa is up to and so we started obtaining those and eventually we decided they were so important that we would transcribe and put those online as well. You can now go to the Monticello Website and look for the jefferson quotes and family Letters Portion of our website. We have more than 1,000 letters up there now and they are just full of really interesting material about Jeffersons Life in monticello and about the life of his family there, the life of the enslaved and what its like for women in that world. So we got this material originally only because we wanted to have the snippets that we thought were particularly valuable for understanding jefferson and those tend to be what we are selective and what we put into the volumes that way, but we have the comfort of knowing that were putting many more of these documents that dont add quite enough to go into our printed volumes, but that we are putting on our website so theres this much broader group of materials that can be found there. Also they extend beyond Jeffersons Lifetime. Weve gone decades beyond in finding this material and that enables us to trace what happens to Jeffersons Estate when its sold and the familys memories of jefferson, all kinds of useful information there, and also, sadly, it enables us to include material on the sales of the enslaved in 1827 and later. So its a very valuable and rich resource and sometimes its funny because the grandchildren talk about jefferson in a way that he wouldnt himself. He likes to control his own image but they are not going to be party to that. My favorite example is a letter in which one of the grandchildren says as theyre about to set out to poplar forest grand papa decided that it would not rain. Well, grand papa was not always able to decide when it would rain so some of these trips were full of mud and difficulty. Again, jefferson may not say much about it himself but these very rich accounts from his grandchildren are wonderful so we include those whenever we can. Next question . So was jefferson unusual in his time for the number of letters that he wrote and for whom and to whom and the manner of his writing as well . I think jefferson was unusually prolific not not completely unprecedented. The washington papers have maybe as many documents as we do, certainly comparable numbers for those than some of the others. Jen son may have written more letters than most and maybe almost all. He certainly probably wrote more with his own hand because one of the things that jefferson very rarely did, did as little as possible, which most men of business in this time would have done would have been to dictate the letter, get somebody else to write it as they wrote or to take their draft that the person might have made and smooth it up and put it out. Jefferson is uncomfortable with anything but his own handwriting, so for his letters. So while he has clerks occasionally mostly even as president he writes the letters in his own hand, and uses the polygraph to keep copies of it, so, again, you dont have multiple copies floating around. Jefferson is unusual in that respect. John adams says whatever you write keep a copy, but mostly his copies are made by family members or a clerk copping them into a bound book, whereas jefferson doesnt usually rely on that, hes got his own retained copies. So he is a good man of business in keeping all of these copies. Later in life probably he is also aware that this is going to be important for posterity, so i think hes even more careful to maintain and retain his correspondence and keep it in kind of order. Did he not, unlike, for example, James Madison, he did not make any real effort to go through and sort them out and make some revisions or comments on them. Madison did a little of that later in life. Jefferson did that very little. He also didnt get rid of anything with very rare exception ps. The only one we know about is he almost certainly destroyed his correspondence with his wife, but we are not missing much that we think he got rid of on purpose. We have time for one more question and i have saved sort of a fun one for last year. Jen sofr correspondented with lots of very interesting people. Can you tell us about maybe one or two letters that you think are especially interesting . Very. Can you tell us about maybe one or two letters that you think are especially interesting . Of v. Can you tell us about maybe one or two letters that you think are especially interesting . Lots. Can you tell us about maybe one or two letters that you think are especially interesting . Sure, maybe two, maybe three if i talk fast. This is a letter that jefferson writes to a man named Thomas Law. There is not usually a lot of humor in his letters but every now and then the letters guard down. This man named Thomas Law was invited him to subscribe to a very expensive new book thats just come out and he response by saying he has just turned 69, he is probably only going to live for seven more years, his Bib Leo Mania has put him in possession of what he describes as 20,000 volumes. He says of these he maybe only has time to read 1,000 more during his lifetime. So he would probably rear many of those before he reads this letter and anyway he probably would die before he reads this letter to this guy. Its a description of the geography of europe. This is in 1811 and jefferson is saying theres not much point in my reading a book about the geography of europe right now because napoleon keeps changing of borders and Everything And Shuffling the deck all over again and dealing out a new hand. So until hes dead, jefferson says, theres not much point in my buying a boom that wont be worth the room it takes up. He says im going to leave to you judger men to encourage this enterprise by really reading the book which i should never do. Then there is a letter that jefferson receives from two gentlemen in portsmouth, virginia, which is apparently the first recorded visit of an extraterrestrial in virginia. These two guys come out of their tavern in portsmouth and it may be significant that theyre coming out of a tanch and they describe having seen in the sky a ball of fire as large as the sun off on the west and then after a bit it changed into an agitated looking turtle and then it changed from that into a skeleton and then it changed from that into a highlander dressed for war. Then it kind of faded off into the distance. The great thing about this what did these two guys do . They look at each other and go back into the Tavern And Call for a letterer and say we must tell this to mr. Jefferson. They dont ask him to do anything they just say we thought you would want to know. I will close with a brief letter late in life that i really like and thats a letter in which jefferson writes to a man named Bernard Peyton and says peyton has received a letter that was intended for James Madison so he sends it back to Jefferson And Jefferson redirects the letter intended for madison to madison, but he writes a brief letter thanking Bernard Peyton for what he says i correct my blunder of misdirecting my letter and he says i committed a similar blunder while in paris while crossdirecting two letters to two ladies out of which scrape i did not get so easily. So we can just imagine that these two ladies each got the letters and saying i thought he liked me better. Unfortunately we dont at this point know what those two letters were, but when we get to 1826 hopefully we will get to figured out because he wrote that late in life. I think with that we are out of time. I thank you all for your time and attention. Please come back to our next of these live streams and i hope you have a great day. Take care now. Today Army Secretary Christy War Moth and chief of staff general James Mccon Vil testify on the president s 2022 budget at a hearing at the armed services committee. Live coverage begins at 11 00 a. M. Sr. On cspan 3, cspan. Org or listen live on the free cspan radio app. Tonight on american History Tv u. S. Capitol historical society chief guide and public Historian Steve Livengood will take you on a tour of the grounds constructed by olmsted. He shows how many designs have survived and been a dakted as the needs of the congress have changed. That starts at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on american History Tv. Next on the presidency, a conversation between Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson as portrayed by Bill Loeblng and bill barker. They talk about their roles in shaping revolutionary War Era America and the constitutional government it produced. Thomas Jeffersons Monticello hosted this event and provided the video. Well, good afternoon, citizens. What a pleasure to greet you once more at our monticello, but as you can readily see, we have so