Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743 in Shadwell, a plantation near present-day Charlottesville, Virginia. After attending the College of William and Mary, he practiced law and sat on Virginia’s legislative counsel, the House of Burgesses. In 1776 Jefferson became, at age 33, one of the youngest delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia as it debated independence from Great Britain. It was Jefferson who was chosen, in June 1776, to draft the Declaration of Independence; he won widespread respect for his articulation of the principles behind the American Revolution.

During the Revolutionary War, Jefferson served the Virginia militia as a colonel and, as state governor, took charge of revising the state’s laws, making them more consonant with democratic ideals. Jefferson’s growing prominence in the political world of the emergent United States culminated in his election to two terms as president (1801-1809).

It was during the Revolutionary War, in 1780, that Jefferson received the set of queries that generated Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson took five years to write the book, compiling a mass of information about Virginia which he had accumulated over a long period of time. Published in French translation in 1784 and in the original English three years later, the book eventually became an “American classic,” one of the key sources of insight into Jefferson’s beliefs and wide-ranging interests.