The complete anas of Thomas Jefferson Author:Thomas Jefferson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE ANAS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON. Explanation of the three volumes bound in marbled paper. In these three volumes will be found copies of the official opin... more »ions given in writing by me to General Washington while I was Secretary of State, with sometimes the documents belonging to the case. Some of these are the rough draughts, some press copies, some fair ones. In the earlier part of ray acting in that office, I took no other note of the passing transactions; but after awhile I saw the importance of doing it in aid of my memory. Very often, therefore, I made memorandums on loose scraps of paper, taken out of my pocket in the moment and laid by to be copied fair at leisure, which, however, they hardly ever were. These scraps, therefore, ragged, rubbed, and scribbled as they were, 1 had bound with the others by a binder who came into my cabinet, doing it tinder my own eye, and without the opportunity of reading a single paper. At this day, after the lapse oftwenty-five years, or more, from their dates, I have given to the whole a calm revisal, when the passions of the time are passed away, and the reasons of the transactions act alone on the judgment. Some of the informations I had recorded are now cut out from the rest, because I have seen that they were incorrect or doubtful, or merely personal or private, with which we have nothing to do. I should perhaps have thought the rest not worth preserving, but for their testimony against the only history of that period which pretends to have been compiled from authentic and unpublished documents. Could these documents all be laid upon the public eye, they might be compared, contrasted, and weighed, and the truth fairly sifted out of them, for we are not to suppose that everything found among Gen. Washington's papers is to be taken as...« less