“The United States of Virginia”: Jefferson’s Invention of America through a Virginian Lens

On October 13, 2022, historian Robert Pierce Forbes took a fascinating look at Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia.

When Thomas Jefferson used the term “my country,” he almost always meant Virginia. Nowhere is this truer than in his only published book, "Notes on the State of Virginia." Released while the United States was just taking shape, Notes profoundly influenced the perception of the infant republic by foreigners and countrymen alike. Through his subtle but powerful rhetoric, Jefferson made Virginia stand in for America as a whole, while revising the meaning of “all men are created equal,” thereby writing Americans of African descent out of the narrative of American liberty.

Dr. Robert Pierce Forbes taught U.S. history at the University of Connecticut and was the founding associate director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He is the author of The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America and the editor of Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition.

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