In my first essay on this topic, I surveyed the epistolary evidence for Jefferson’s subtle appreciation of Cervantes’s Don Quijote. In my second, I showed how, for his part, the inventor of the modern novel deployed the picaresque genre as a way to critically examine racism, slavery, tyranny, and monetary manipulation in late-Renaissance Spain. It’s now time to look closely at “Query VI” of the Founder’s Notes on the State of Virginia. “Query VI” remains the greatest literary essay ever written on Don Quijote. Indeed, “Query VI” transforms its quixotic origins to become a revolutionary work of art in its own right. First, let’s consider the larger work within which “Query VI” plays such a pivotal role.
Notes on the State of Virginia is a cosmos, an organic (neo-Platonic) map of eighteenth-century Virginia that integrates everything from its geography and its history to its culture and its laws. The work can be divided into three parts. Starting with nature, Jefferson moves from waterways, mountains, caves, and rock formations onto plants and animals. Rounding out this materialist section is a quirky essay devoted to climate, especially the barometric, wind, and temperature patterns at the former capital at Williamsburg versus those at Jefferson’s home atop Monticello. A second set of essays looks at the races, nationalities, buildings, roads, institutions, customs, and laws of the state. A final set deals with economics and history.
Contemplating the book in reverse, the final essay is a list of the major documents that make up the legal history of Virginia. Jefferson sees history as a gradual juridical victory over nature and barbarism. In this sense, “Query XXIII” is but an epilogue. The thematic effect, however, is to loop us back to the middle of the text. There, we find “Query XI” and “Query XII” counterpoising the state’s nomadic aborigines and its European descendants. The former still bury their dead in collective graves, for example. Relatively more individualistic, the latter live in counties and towns with roads, schools, commerce, and legal codes.
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Jefferson’s larger goal is to establish a new U.S. Constitution. He views this as a legal structure but also a coordinating mechanism that has emerged over time according to the needs of the people it will serve. Thus, the real question is, who are these people? America is not England. The latest Western version of an independent people requiring their own legal code arose between 1651 and 1776 from a ribbon of Virginian settlers living on a frontier with indigenous nomads and proximate to a large black African slave population. On the one hand, much of Notes on the State of Virginia investigates the degrees to which the indigenous and slave communities are willing or ready to participate in a new country. On the other hand, Europeans are also adapting to a new social reality. Those same Virginian settlers on the frontier are also shielding themselves against transatlantic conflicts among various authoritarian or independent-minded English Quakers, Anglicans, Puritans, Catholics, Cavaliers, Roundheads, and Tories.
This fluid entanglement between relatively non-civilized people and conflictive Europeans is critical to understanding Jefferson’s project. At first glance, for example, “Query VI,” “Query VIII,” and “Query XI” center on black Africans and American aborigines; whereas “Query XIII,” “Query XVI,” and “Query XXIII” deal with the English origins of the Virginia colonists. As a result, a kind of hinge or bridge spans “Query XI,” “Query XII,” and “Query XIII.” These three essays embody a categorical transition, a suture or a weave between opposites. “Aborigines,” “Counties and Towns,” and “First Constitutions” demarcate what Jefferson’s readers understood as the fault line between barbarism and civilization, i.e., between European and non-European races and cultures. It’s the crux of the matter. The rest is the familiar stuff of a gradual divorce from Europe. After all, Virginia’s cities and towns in “Query XII” are the basis for the constitutional origins in “Query XIII,” the resistance to Tories in “Query XVI,” and that last glance at the pact with Roundheads buried deep inside “Query XXIII.”
So, the parts of Jefferson’s textual architecture reflect the whole. But here’s where the baroque aesthetic of the Spanish novel comes into play. When considering Don Quijote’s influence on Notes on the State of Virginia, we’re obliged to focus on a series of essays involving the themes of race, slavery, miscegenation, a hint of monetary policy, and yes, great literature. “Query VI,” “Query VII,” and “Query VIII” are the essence of Jefferson’s project. It’s also worth noting that “Query V” ends with a quote in Spanish followed by a deft translation. Jefferson cites Antonio de Ulloa’s description of a “bridge over the Abyss” in Peru in Noticias Americanas (1772), and he then compares it to the Natural Bridge of Virginia, which is different. This signals a future merger with the Hispanic world, and metaphorically speaking, it does so by connecting two distinct social structures which still obey the laws of nature as they converge.
Right after the note on Ulloa in “Query V,” the first two sentences in “Query VI” read like a mere report: “I knew a single instance of gold found in this state. It was interspersed in small specks through a lump of ore, of about four pounds weight, which yielded seventeen penny weights of gold, of extraordinary ductility.” In the wake of Noticias Americanas, however, and in the context of Don Quijote—a context which grows as we dig deeper into “Query VI”—Jefferson is here alluding to Cervantes’s misattribution of a phrase from Aesop in the novel’s first prologue: “Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro.”
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The remainder of my essay explains how I know this.
In one of the more disquieting sequences of “Query VI”—an essay ostensibly about “Productions, Mineral, Vegetable, and Animal”—Jefferson cites a lesson on negative logic articulated by the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon: “One sentence of his book must do him immortal honour. ‘J’aime autant une personne qui me releve d’une erreur, qu’une autre qui m’apprend une verité, parce qu’en effet une erreur corrigée est une verité.’” Here is the negative essence of science as well as art. When a single counterfactual subverts a theory, it’s back to the drawing board. A new theory is required; a new story must be told.
Now for the new story. Despite saying he considers Buffon to be “the best informed of any Naturalist who has ever written,” Jefferson is deeply at odds with his thesis that lifeforms in the Americas are deficient owing to the poor atmosphere. For example, Jefferson takes great offense at Buffon’s description of the indigenous populations of Central and South America. In countering his argument, Jefferson cites the existence of intelligent individuals among North American tribes. This casts enough doubt on Buffon’s claims about Central and South Americans such that we’re free to ignore them. In sum, Jefferson applies Buffon’s negative logic to subvert the Frenchman’s own prejudices regarding the relative capacities of certain types of human beings. Jefferson then rests his case with a literary flurry, eviscerating Buffon’s thinking about Mexica, Maya, and Inca: “I would not honor with the appellation of knowledge what I derive from the fables published of them. These I believe to be just as true as the fables of Aesop. This belief is founded on what I have seen of man, white, red, and black, and what has been written of him by authors, enlightened themselves and writing amidst an enlightened people.”
Luís Vaz de Camões (c.1525–80) — Wikipedia
A few pages after this simultaneous expression of respect and distaste for Buffon, Jefferson turns our attention toward a deeper meditation on the history of European literature. For reasons that escaped most readers until now, Jefferson cites Aesop and Ariosto in passing, and a few pages after that, he produces a list of great authors. He arranges these according to a contrast between the literature of modern nation-states versus that of classical antiquity. English (Milton & Shakespeare), French (Racine & Voltaire), Italian (Tasso), and Portuguese (Camões). Then Greek and Roman (Homer & Virgil). Who’s missing?
Jefferson refers to Cervantes in the literary section of “Query VI” in three ways. In each case, the logic is negative. Like an obvious blind spot, the novelist’s presence is conjured by his absence.
First, the modern grouping of great authors is obviously incomplete. Recalling Ariosto from a few pages earlier, we have a geopolitical puzzle with pairs of authors from England, France, and now also Italy (Tasso & Ariosto). This leaves us with an outlier from Portugal, Camões, whose most logical Iberian partner is Cervantes.
Second, in a footnote, Jefferson explains how the pair of epic authors from classical antiquity have become international icons. Only an Englishman savors Milton. A Frenchman delights in Voltaire. A Portuguese loves Camões. (Does only a Spaniard worship Cervantes?) By contrast, Homer and Virgil “have been the rapture of every age and nation,” and “they are read with enthusiasm” in their original languages by those who can and in translation by those who can’t. Again, Cervantes is silently implicated. Who better carries this other, transnational status among the modern languages of Europe? Moreover, which non-English author requires the most attention by citizens of Jefferson’s new nation?
Third, in the process of pairing Tasso with Ariosto, our attention must move in retrograde fashion back through “Query VI” until we sight Ariosto in the vicinity of Aesop (cf. Rittenhouse). In case we missed them during our first transit, we now recognize Jefferson’s dual allusions to Aesop from Don Quijote’s first prologue and Ariosto from DQ 1.26 (and DQ 2.62). Note too that the Italian pair we must reunite forces us to link Spain (Cervantes) and Portugal (Camões). This is what happened in geopolitical terms in 1580 (the same year of Cervantes’s ransom and Camões’s death). It’s also what incorporated race-based slavery into the Habsburg empire. Which strongly suggests that Jefferson grasped the roles of Cipión (imperial Spain) and Berganza (slaver Portugal) in The Colloquy of the Dogs—also in his library—and all in relation to Cervantes’s rejection of race-based slavery in Don Quijote by way of Aesop and Ariosto.
So far, then, we’ve seen two signs that “Query VI” alludes to the theme of race-based slavery in Cervantes’s great novel. First, its opening salvo on a small quantity of gold—“interspersed in small specks through a lump of ore,” and reportedly “of extraordinary ductility”—signals Aesop’s evaluation of liberty in the first prologue. It also signals the racial and metamorphic metallurgy used by Sancho in his tyrant-slaver fantasy in DQ 1.29. Second, we find Don Quijote and The Colloquy of the Dogs implicated in the literary section of “Query VI.” Here Jefferson signals Aesop yet again, but this time overtly and tied to races (“white, red, and black”), and combined with a footnote that cites the same Ariosto found in DQ 1.26, where the hidalgo rejects the impurity of the sexual union between Angelica and Medoro.
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The third sign that “Query VI” follows a Cervantine pattern is Jefferson’s labored investigation of vitiligo. This echoes the “Knight of the Lake,” Eugenio’s “spotted she-goat,” and the Virgin dressed in black from DQ 1.50–52. Moreover, Jefferson casts doubt on the idea that black Africans are stupid or incapable of a transformation that might make them merit manumission. He points out the existence of albinos, and then he remarks extensively on the progression of vitiligo, pausing to note that the sufferers of it whom he has met personally are “uncommonly shrewd, quick in their apprehension and in reply.”
This passage offers another example from nature that subverts the logic of race-based slavery. Along with his discussion of improvements through breeding in response to Buffon’s theory that America produces degenerate lifeforms, Jefferson turns to albinos and vitiligo, positing miscegenation and the existence of unique individuals as counterfactuals to the idea that slavery is natural. And we must read this passage in the context of Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings—rumored at the time, and recently confirmed by Harvard historian Annette Gordon-Reed. In short, “Query VI” is a confession and affirmation of his sexual relations with Hemings, a slave who was also the illegitimate sister of his deceased wife, and with whom he sired four children. Professor Gordon-Reed could have asked me if Jefferson procreated with Hemings. I lost my doubts years ago when I read “Query VI.” Evidence of his new Venus lies in plain sight, scribbled all over its review of breeding and folded into its final turn to albinos and vitiligo.
After considering albinos and vitiligo, Jefferson posts a curious coda at the end of “Query VI.” He reflects again on the animal world by way of brief musings on the bees of North America and the fish of Jamaica. He alludes here to Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714), but with a racial twist. Mandeville’s Whiggish argument that a moralizing and centralized mode of governance ruins the harmony of a beehive is supplemented by Jefferson’s Jamaican fish. This is the uniquely American problem of a different species of beings inhabiting a more expansive political fable in the New World. As subaquatic creatures, fish don’t even breathe the same atmosphere as bees. Nor do they ever come ashore. How then are we to imagine giving the people that these fish represent a stake in a new constitutional government in America? The existence of a people who might not share the social conditions that are the basis for a new constitution is the key to understanding Jefferson. Let’s keep this problem in mind, keep it afloat or in the air, so to speak. Let’s circle it or make a note of it.
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Image from page 171 of “Intermediate history of the United States, for use in the fifth and sixth grades of Catholic schools” (1915) — Flickr
