This website is a digital version of “3. volumes bound in Marbled paper” – Thomas Jefferson’s own compilation of about 800 letters, reports, and memoranda that was essentially a documentary history of his tenure as Secretary of State, from mid-April 1790 until his resignation at the end of 1793. The “3. volumes” no longer exist as physical entities, having been disassembled early in the twentieth century and the documents dispersed chronologically throughout Jefferson’s papers in the Library of Congress. But with the discovery in the 1980s that a six-page list in Jefferson’s hand was the “table of contents” of the three volumes, and with the more recent advent of freely accessible electronic collections of Jefferson’s (and other Founding Fathers’) writings via the National Archives’ Founders Online and the University of Virginia Press’s Rotunda websites, it is now possible to virtually restore to the historical record the documentary history of his tenure as Secretary of State that Jefferson so meticulously compiled, but that has been hidden from view for more than a century.
Project Director: John C. Van Horne
Project Collaborators: Princeton University
