SOURCE: “Argumentation and Unified Structure in Notes on the State of Virginia,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 26, No. 4, Summer, 1993, pp. 581-93.

In the following essay, Davy examines the rhetorical strategies employed by Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia and suggests that the work's detailed descriptive passages add credibility to the portions devoted to argument.

Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia has been called “in form primarily a handbook”¹; and indeed, Jefferson's own statements about the book's origins suggest that it was intended as a reference work. In his autobiography, he writes that

I had received a letter from M. de Marbois, of the French legation in Philadelphia, informing me he had been instructed by his government to obtain such statistical accounts of the different states in our Union, as might be useful for their information; and addressing to me a number of queries relative to...