The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 67the details, however, he relied as Crèvecoeur and many others did on his belief in the
independent farmer. “I know no condition happier than that of a Virginia farmer,”
Jefferson wrote to a friend in 1787. “His estate supplies a good table, clothes himself
and his family with their ordinary apparel, furnishes a small surplus to buy salt,
coffee, and a little finery for his wife and daughter, ... and furnishes him pleasing
and healthy occupation.” “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens,” he
declared in another letter, written in 1804. “They are the most vigorous, the most
independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country, and wedded to its
interests, by the most lasting bonds.” Fortunately, in his opinion, America would
remain an agricultural country for the foreseeable future; small farmers would
therefore remain “the true representatives of the Great American interests” and the
progress and prosperity of the new republic was consequently assured. “The small
landowners are the most precious part of a state,” Jefferson confided in a letter to his
friend and fellow Virginian James Madison in 1772. In a more public vein, he made
his famous assertion that “those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of
God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit
for substantial and genuine virtue”: which is, surely, the definitive statement of a
determining American myth.
That statement comes from the one full-length book Jefferson published, in 1787,
Notes on the State of Virginia. Written in response to a questionnaire sent to him
about his home state while he was serving as governor, Notes is at once a scientific
treatise and a crucial document of cultural formation. Jefferson examines and docu-
ments the natural and cultural landscape of the New World and, at the same time,
considers the promise and possibilities of the new nation. One of his several aims in
the book is to rebut the argument embraced by many leading European naturalists
of the time that the animals and people of the New World were inherently smaller,
less vigorous, and more degenerate than their Old World counterparts. This gives
him the opportunity to write in praise of the Native American. Jefferson was willing
to accept the idea that Native Americans were still a “barbarous people,” lacking such
advantages of civilization as “letters” and deference toward women. But he insisted
on their primitive strength, “their bravery and address in war,” and “their eminence
in oratory.” As he saw it, they were strong, courageous, “faithful to the utmost
extremity,” and as far advanced in all respects as their relatively early stage in cultural
evolution would allow. Rebutting European claims of this nature also allowed
Jefferson to enumerate white American achievements in such fields as “philosophy
and war,” government, oratory, painting, and “the plastic art,” and to express the
firm conviction that, in other areas too, America would soon have “her full quota of
genius.” Of Great Britain, he declared that it had taken a long time for that nation to
produce “a Shakespeare and Milton”; “the run of her glory is fast descending to the
horizon” and it would no doubt soon be America’s turn.
Like Crèvecoeur, Jefferson also felt compelled to confront the challenge to his
idyllic vision of America posed by the indelible fact of slavery. He condemned the
peculiar institution in his Notes and argued for emancipation. But emancipation, for
him, was linked to repatriation: once freed, the slaves should be sent to some otherGGray_c01.indd 67ray_c 01 .indd 67 8 8/1/2011 7:54:56 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 56 AM