John C. Van Horne, Editor, in Collaboration with the Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton University and the Center for Digital Editing at the University of Virginia

jefferson3volumes.princeton.edu

This website reconstructs a compilation of documents made by Thomas Jefferson, probably in 1801-1802, as a record of actions and decisions by the Washington Administration during Jefferson’s tenure as the nation’s first Secretary of State, April 1790 through December 1793. Jefferson’s compendium, which included correspondence, reports, and his personal memoranda of conversations and meetings (which were subsequently labeled his “Anas”) provides a window into the formation of executive policy in the formative period when George Washington was President, Jefferson the Secretary of State, and Alexander Hamilton the Secretary of the Treasury. The compilation was taken apart and dispersed among Jefferson’s papers at the Library of Congress early in the 20th Century, but the “3. volumes” website, using Jefferson’s own manuscript list of the documents as its starting point, brings together searchable, full transcriptions of the 630 documents on Jefferson’s list plus almost 200 enclosures and other related papers.

Features:

Texts of approximately 800 documents.

Links to fully annotated versions of documents in the Founding Era Collection of Rotunda (http://www.upress.virginia.edu/rotunda) and in Founders Online (https://founders.archives.gov/).

Images of Jefferson’s manuscript list of documents.

Database view of document entries.

Timeline view of documents.

Filtering by subject headings.

Filtering by personal names.

Timeline of events.