Hi there, my name is John Jefferson loony. I am the editor of the papers of Thomas Jefferson at monticello. We are here today to talk about jefferson and his correspondents. My moderator will be my esteemed colleague who will handle the questions for us. I will turn it over to her. Thanks, jeff. Can you start by telling us what is your role in working with jeffersons correspondents . Im in charge of a project to produce a total of 24 volumes between 1809 in 1826. I work with a total of 10 people to do that. Our job is to take jeffersons letters and papers and produce an authoritative addition for edition for those years that will enable future scholars to rely on that and not have to go back to the originals. So then, what exactly do you do as a documentary editor . One of the most important things is to make it clear what we arent. You hear of a documentary editor and you think either that you are creating film documentaries, and we have in fact have people apply for jobs were baffled at first because the application was all about how they could splice film, and that was not what we were after. We are also not like editors in a newspaper that would take an incoming letter to the editor and mark it through and make all sorts of corrections. Our job is to give as accurate a representation of the materials that we are editing as possible , so as to convey what was on the hand written page to the doesnt have to go back and read it again. Part of our job is to create an accurate transcription of the letter, or paper, and the other part of the job is to annotated it so our readers can understand what they are reading, without telling too much so that it gets lost in all of our commentary. We try to steer in between. When and how did the papers of Thomas Jefferson project get started . Inwell, the papers began 1943 in honor of the bicentennial of Thomas Jeffersons birth. There had been four earlier editions of jeffersons collective papers. None of them were very good. The Founding Editor in princeton, a great man named julian boyd, started this new project to create the authoritative edition of jeffersons papers. He did two things that were new to documentary editing and which kind of both became standbys for how the work is now done. One is that we are including all of the letters to jefferson as well as the letters from him. Up to that point, that was not how it was done and there was a tendency, now it seems obvious because you could not understand the letters hes writing if you dont have the letters hes reading, but at that point there was a tendency to not include those. The other thing boyd, the first editor, did was look for all known copies for every letter to and from jefferson. Up to that point, there was a tendency to just take of the big collection of papers and work from that, but he realized that to understand, to get a full picture, you need the copies that were retained as well as those that were sent. And jeffersons case, we have lots of letters that he kept for himself. If you dont have the letter that went out the door, you dont necessarily have the post script he might have added. If its an incoming letter, he might have drafted the other and that will tell you all kinds of things about how the letter was composed. That is how it got started in 1943. The goal was to do all of the important jefferson material from that period on. The original plan was to get everything done in about ten years and 40 volumes. And here we are much, much later because it turned out to be a much bigger job that anyone could have anticipated. But we are still doing that work. It started in princeton. They are still doing it in princeton. They are doing wonderful work there and are roughly halfway into his presidency. Here at monticello, it was the realization in the 1990s that they had been doing it for almost 50 years and jefferson wasnt even president yet. And monticello decided to get involved and try to figure out how to get the job much sooner in peoples foreseeable lifetime. And so, monticello decided negotiated with princeton and we got a great deal where princeton would just continue working on the period they were working on through the presidency and we would take on about half of the remaining documents, which was the retirement period. So we are responsible, as i said, 1809 to 1826. Which we think is going to take about 24 volumes just for that period. Overall, its going to take Something Like 90 volumes to get from start to finish and include all the material we want to include. Next question. Can you tell us a little bit more about this retirement series that you are working on . Well, its a period that, in some ways, of course we would think that, we think its the best period to work on of all. Its a period when jefferson is finally released from what he calls the shackles of public office. He was able to come back to monticello and just settle down and work on everything that interested him. And everything does interest him. So we are able, on any given day, we might be working on a letter about agriculture or a letter about politics or a letter about science or a letter about greek and latin. The incoming material is also fascinating for this period. Jefferson is known to be this kind of sage in retirement. And people write him on all sorts of topics. Inventors write him frequently with ideas theyve got and they want him to comment on. You also get your occasional anonymous writer. To lots of people who think that jefferson has a lot more money than he does, hoping he will get ive the money. The best thing really, though, is some of the exchanges he has with people like john adams. Its one of the great treasures of this correspondence ever getting everything worked out before they die. Its also a period in which jefferson found the university founds the university of virginia one of his great , achievements. Its also a period in which jefferson sells his library to the nation after the libraries y has burned. And it helps turn the library of congress from a legislative reference tool to a great cultural institution. Its a wonderful period and we are very happy. We are now about two thirds of the way through and every day is equally interesting for us. Thats a high volume of content with lots of different topics. Natalia, who is watching our live stream, wants to know how do you catalog the letters . Is it possible to coffer fence crossreference those . It is clearly a big task. It is a big task. Our series is chronologically organized. Thats really the only way you can keep track of something. Theres possible ways to organize it, but the only way you can maintain some kind of consistency is to were ork chronologically from start to finish. There are some documents that dont really fit into a chronological context and they go into the jefferson paper s second series. That has things like his literary commonplace books or his expertise in the gospel. We also devote a great deal of time to creating useful indexes to the work. That gets subject entries and persons names. Now we are in a world where there is a digital addition as edition as well. The digital edition, there are particular advantages to have that because you can have internal references that just link to a different place. When jefferson says i am responding to your letter of the seventh, we can have a live link that you can click and get taken to that letter. Jefferson himself, kept himself organized, he had a journal in which he logged in every letter he received. You can imagine a man for 40 odd years, including as president , logging in and out all of his junk mail. That is immensely valuable for us because it lets us know what we have, what we dont have. Jefferson when he received a letter, he endorses it with the date he received it. So we are able, and this is true for very few other people of this period, we are able to know what he when he received it as well as when it was sent. So you can kind of turn that around and see recreate his mail pouch. See what he got on the day and what he is responding to. And that is because of his organizational methods. Great. So what are some of the steps in taking jeffersons letters and getting them ready for publication . The first and most important step for me is to have a Wonderful Team that i work with. We have a team, a total of ten people who do this work. And we have found that to not get in each others way, we divide ourselves into or three into two or three teams. A team that works on the individual volume and a team that provides all sorts of essential support. We take the document, we verify the text, but first its transcribed for us by one of our people and checked that way. But the most important thing is it goes to one of our teams that creates a volume. That team will first verify the transcription. They will do that with at least three character for character word for word proofings against the original manuscript. There are two ways to do that. You can do it by one Person Holding the copy, the original, and checking it, working their way down the page. Or two people, one reading aloud to the other holding the original. We have found that each has its advantages, so weve decided to do it both ways. We have two person editing teams working on adjacent volumes so that the team that means a team can have two people on the team doing all the proofing and dividing up and also verifying it individually. They also then provide the initial annotation of the document. I said the goal is not to over annotate. We call it the lean and mean method, where we to take an example, if there is a reference to the big fire in philadelphia last week, we will annotate that by finding a newspaper account and being able to say more of what happened in that fire. But we dont follow that up with a long discussion of 19th century firefighting and secondary sources. That is kind of the job of the reader. You can understand it, but we also do not want to write a lot of annotation that will be superseded by the next generation. But we do explain obscure terms you cant understand and we account for missing documents this way. And after that, it comes to me as the editor to do my review. And my main job is to try to smell a rat if i can find one. Places where we left something out, places where we could lengthen it further, but also to kind of smooth out the language so it is not obvious one team wrote one thing and one team wrote the other, to give it a consistent style. When i am done with that, we have editorial assistance who do nts who do very important work checking to make sure that what weve said in our voice is accurate. Just as we dont trust our verification that has been checked several times, we dont trust our annotations until theyve been checked by another set of eyes. After all of that, all the editors censor read the whole volume and try to see what weve left out or what one team has already said, so we can sort of sort out any discrepancies like that. When it is smoothed out that way, it goes to our press and then it goes through a whole other year of going through page proofs. They come to us and we read that character for character against the original again to make sure that nothing got messed up in translation. Also, that is where we produce our index. The index is where we do basically, it carries a lot of the weight of the annotation of volume. At the end of that, it ultimately takes two years to get the volume from transcription to submission to the press and another year to get it all the way through. But because we have these teams, we are able to get a volume a year in press into print every year and weve been doing that since we got our first volume out. Were hoping to maintain that until we are done hopefully in 2027. Next question. Ted wants to know if there is a relationship between this project and the adams letter team. Are there ever disagreements amongst documentary editing teams about how to interpret different letters . Thats a really great question. The fact is that we are part of the movement that has been going on for decades now to create editions like this for all of the Founding Fathers, basically. We are, in fact, part of a consortium called Founding Fathers papers, which is responsible for george washington, Thomas Jefferson, john adams, James Madison and benjamin franklin. Also Alexander Hamilton was part of that originally. Itionsese and other ed like that are responsible for basically making all of Early American History accessible to the reader without having to go and read the original documents. We are in close contact with our friends at the atlas papers and some of these other places. We we use their volumes when they are out ahead of us and vice versa. We arent usually working on a document at the same time. So most of our disagreements are in how we handle a document. We we dont do gotcha in the volumes that we print but we , will do it our way and we will tell them and they might put something into theirs, and certainly the opposite is for us. Most of our differences are not so much in our disagreement about how a word was transcribed, we are pretty good at that, but we may have a difference in how to present it because we have a body of documents that goes in a certain direction, and they go in another direction. They may not look the same, but the basic feel will be pretty similar. Question. How do you decide which letters to print and can you give an example of a time you had to make a decision about whether to print a specific letter . Sure. The original plan for the edition set out in the 1940s, was we were to include everything jeffersonian by association or authorship, while excluding what was called a great massive material that was routine and formulaic, but was not pertinent to jefferson himself. So that exclusion comes into play mostly for our friends at princeton, because while hes president he is giving lots and lots of ships passports and land grants and things like, that officers commissions that is just going to sign that just anything about jefferson to the solution there would be to print a single example of one but not to try to track them all down because theyre not really important for us. That rule, everything, legitimately jeffersonian means we tend either print or in a few cases, somewhere, else all the jefferson material letters come in that he writes and most of letters he receives. Occasionally we have left, one we have noted, rather than printed one, because it is really a very routine letter of transmittal, i have received your letter, i am passing it on. But the rule is definitely not that it can be, very long material we are still printing and also very short material. Our favorite example is something that we agonized about and finally printed. It was a serious letter, of it was a short notice that jefferson sends off to a merchant in town and jefferson will sometimes take a very small and put what he wants and ascended it to a merchant. We debated over whether we should actually afford these the full dignity of a letter and print them. We finally decided we really need to because teaches us so much about jefferson and the material culture and what hes ordering and finishing monte carlo with, as some even can be quite significant. One of my favorites is a letter he writes, the whole letter for burle, just as he should choose. Because it ising the butler who can go into the store and get whatever he needs, First Clothing and it is not smollett of forehead, and that is different than he is that his relationship with others where he would say they have a cake for this person. So this it has interesting implications for jeffersons relationship with the enslaved at monticello. Next question. So, along the same lines just you were talking about, is it more difficult to find letters between jefferson and enslaved people, and when you do find, them, how did they fit into his larger correspondence . Well, sadly there are very few letters between jefferson and the enslaved at monticello, or really anywhere else. Anything we can find, we are certainly going to print. We are only really aware of two correspondents to jefferson. Hemmings the , enslaved carpenter and , jefferson has quite a robust correspondence with him at one point because jefferson is at and hemmings is at proper forest, his other home in bedford. So jefferson is receiving and writing lots of letters to hemmings, basically specifying what he wants done in the erms of the construction of pauper forest. So these are really important, interesting letters. One of the more interesting things about the letters is jefferson routinely begins his letters sir or dear sir. Sir would imply somebody that he knows in some way and sir would not. We think that is important because jefferson was in a bit of a bind in terms of his letters to hemmings, because jefferson had very unfortunately different views about the status of the enslaved and he did not im sure want to call them either sir or dear sir and his solution was to use a different formula. And his letters to him are just to john hemmings. Ter that wet have are from an enslaved person, a single letter from hannah at poplar forest, who wrote a very nice letter once just expressing her concern about his health. So, those are great letters. We do not know if there are others, because they are not recorded, but this is what we have. We know that very few were illiterate, but enough were illiterate that there was reason to think that he may have gotten some short notes that we just dont have. Speaking of correspondents that we dont have, we have thousands and thousands of letters that jefferson wrote, but we know it is not all. Can you talk to us a little bit about jeffersons letters that are missing and how they are after, and what happens when you find those letters . That is a great question. I mentioned that jefferson had a journal of letters, and there he records his incoming and outgoing correspondence. There are some exceptions. I could get into that at another time, but we know that for this time, thanks to that journal of letters we know what we are missing in most cases. I am happy to say we are only missing about 10 . Jeffersonst 90 of correspondence for this period and in fact we have more because of the polygraph machine. There have been two ways for them to survive, the ones that he sent and the ones that he cap. But we know we are missing that percentage and we sometimes can find more of them. The original document search in the 1940s and 1950s involved writing to every library and collector in the world and we maintained those connections ever since, so now we have materials from about 1000 different collections ranging from the library of congress down to a single individual. Still, every now and again more material comes up and there are two ways that new material will reappear. One will be when something surfaces, usually on the market, although occasionally someone will