51 to Go

THE PAPERS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON, Vol. I (679 pp.)--Edited by Julian P. Boyd --Princeton University ($10).

On a fall day in 1946, some 300 Indians of the Oto tribe sat themselves down in a solemn, elm-shaded circle near Ponca City, Okla., and received a delegation of white men. As the ceremonies began, Moses Harragara, an elder of the tribe, handed a copy of a manuscript to the boss white man, Princeton Librarian Julian P. Boyd. It was no ordinary document. President Thomas Jefferson had written it and handed it personally to Oto Chief Standing Buffalo in Washington in 1806. Librarian

Boyd needed that document and he was glad to go through tribal protocol to get it. As editor of the projected 52-volume Papers of Thomas Jefferson, he was reaching for everything that Thomas Jefferson ever wrote.

Now, seven years after Boyd and the Thomas Jefferson Bicentennial Commission hatched the project, the first volume is ready. At the planned rate of four volumes a year,* No. 52 will leave Princeton's presses in 1963.

This week, Princeton's Jefferson project was getting a sendoff seldom if ever matched in the history of scholarship. Among those scheduled to mark the occasion in a ceremony at the Library of Congress were President Truman, General George C. Marshall, and Historian (Lee's Lieutenants, George Washington) Douglas Southall Freeman.

Anglo-Saxon & Macaroni. Scholarship aside, and simply as a sheer editorial enterprise, the Jefferson Papers deserved the applause. Of its kind, nothing so massive has ever been attempted in the U.S. The 39-volume bicentennial edition of George Washington's papers runs to only one-third the number of words and documents, Yale's great, still incomplete 50-volume Horace Walpole Correspondence to about one-fourth the documents.

Into the Papers will go not only some 18,000 letters written by Jefferson, but 25,000 or more that were written to him by others. To be included: practically every recoverable scrap Jefferson ever wrote, from his state papers and his travel notes down to his jottings and essays on the scores of subjects which interested him, from the Anglo-Saxon language to recipes for macaroni and ice cream. Already, Editor Boyd has over 50,000 items on tap from more than 425 sources, and more are trickling in all the time.

Ideals & Works. When completed, Princeton's Jefferson Papers will be a magnificent hunting ground for scholars. More than that, they will preserve for all Americans the record of a man in whom the U.S. traits of democratic idealism and practical works were uniquely blended.

It was literally true, as Biographer James Parton wrote of him, that at 32, only months before he wrote the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson "could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, and play the violin."

As minister to France, he spent a day in an Italian dairy learning how to make Parmesan cheese. His design of a more efficient moldboard for a plow won a gold medal from a French agricultural society. His library at Charlottesville, Va., which was the finest private library in the U.S., was bought by the Government to restock the gutted Library of Congress, burned by the British in the War of 1812.

Volume I begins with a sprightly, boyish letter to one of his guardians in 1760, when Jefferson was 16, ends with a militia strength return he made as a county lieutenant in 1776. Between these commonplace entries are some of the greatest state papers in the nation's history, all drafted by Jefferson: the Declaration of Independence, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, Jefferson's three drafts for the Constitution of Virginia. Even in times of enormous stress his free-wheeling mind could shuttle between the gravest matters and his airiest interests. Writing to John Randolph on possible reconciliation with England in August 1775, he reminded him about a deal involving Randolph's fiddle: "I now send the bearer for the violin ... I beleive [sic] you had no case to her. If so, be so good as to direct Watt Lenox to get . . . coarse woolen to wrap her in, and then to pack her securely in a wooden box."

With the beginning barely made, the Jefferson Papers already expose an attractive intelligence and a first-rate human being, open the door to what Historian Gilbert Chinard once called "the richest treasure house of historical information ever left by a single man."

*And with a $200,000 gift from the New York Times to help pay for it (TIME, May 8).

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