Notes on the State of Virginia (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

By Thomas Jefferson and Peter S. Onuf

Thomas Jefferson’s only book, Notes on the State of Virginia, is a rich and revealing compendium of information and opinion on the largest and most important state in the union at the end of the American Revolution.  Presented in the scientific spirit of the Enlightenment as an encyclopedia of useful data, Notes is also an eloquent testament to Jefferson’s faith in the redemptive potential of the republican revolution.  Yet Jefferson’s hopes are shadowed by his fears—his anxieties about the future, and the threat that forthcoming generations of Virginians will fail to fulfill Revolutionary Virginia’s promise—are never far below the surface.  Notes on Virginia, Jefferson’s only sustained and systematic effort to chart Virginia’s revolutionary transformation, illuminates the sources of his eloquence while offering some of his most memorable turns of phrase.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Apr 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781411468771

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was the 3rd president of the United States. William Peden is professor emeritus of English at the University of Missouri.

Book preview

NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA

THOMAS JEFFERSON

INTRODUCTION BY PETER S. ONUF

Introduction and Suggested Reading © 2010 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

This 2012 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

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ISBN: 978-1-4114-6877-1

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

ADVERTISEMENT

I. AN EXACT DESCRIPTION OF THE LIMITS AND BOUNDARIES OF THE STATE OF VIRGINIA?

II. A NOTICE OF ITS RIVERS, RIVULETS, AND HOW FAR THEY ARE NAVIGABLE?

III. A NOTICE OF THE BEST SEAPORTS OF THE STATE, AND HOW BIG ARE THE VESSELS THEY CAN RECEIVE?

IV. A NOTICE OF ITS MOUNTAINS?

V. ITS CASCADES AND CAVERNS?

VI. A NOTICE OF THE MINES AND OTHER SUBTERRANEOUS RICHES; ITS TREES, PLANTS, FRUITS, &C.

VII. A NOTICE OF ALL WHAT CAN INCREASE THE PROGRESS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE?

VIII. THE NUMBER OF ITS INHABITANTS?

IX. THE NUMBER AND CONDITION OF THE MILITIA AND REGULAR TROOPS, AND THEIR PAY?

X. THE MARINE?

XI. A DESCRIPTION OF THE INDIANS ESTABLISHED IN THAT STATE?

XII. A NOTICE OF THE COUNTIES, CITIES, TOWNSHIPS, AND VILLAGES?

XIII. THE CONSTITUTION OF THE STATE, AND ITS SEVERAL CHARTERS?

XIV. THE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE AND DESCRIPTION OF THE LAWS?

XV. THE COLLEGES AND PUBLIC ESTABLISHMENTS, THE ROADS, BUILDINGS, &C?

XVI. THE MEASURES TAKEN WITH REGARD OF THE ESTATES AND POSSESSIONS OF THE REBELS, COMMONLY CALLED TORIES?

XVII. THE DIFFERENT RELIGIONS RECEIVED INTO THAT STATE?

XVIII. THE PARTICULAR CUSTOMS AND MANNERS THAT MAY HAPPEN TO BE RECEIVED IN THAT STATE?

XIX. THE PRESENT STATE OF MANUFACTURES, COMMERCE, INTERIOR AND EXTERIOR TRADE?

XX. A NOTICE OF THE COMMERCIAL PRODUCTIONS PARTICULAR TO THE STATE, AND OF THOSE OBJECTS WHICH THE INHABITANTS ARE OBLIGED TO GET FROM EUROPE AND FROM OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD?

XXI. THE WEIGHTS, MEASURES, AND THE CURRENCY OF THE HARD MONEY? SOME DETAILS RELATING TO THE EXCHANGE WITH EUROPE?

XXII. THE PUBLIC INCOME AND EXPENCES?

XXIII. THE HISTORIES OF THE STATE, THE MEMORIALS PUBLISHED IN ITS NAME IN THE TIME OF ITS BEING A COLONY, AND THE PAMPHLETS RELATING TO ITS INTERIOR OR EXTERIOR AFFAIRS PRESENT OR ANTIENT?

APPENDIX NO. I

APPENDIX NO. II

APPENDIX NO. III

APPENDIX NO. IV

LETTERS AND DOCUMENTS

ENDNOTES

SUGGESTED READING

INTRODUCTION

THOMAS JEFFERSON’S ONLY BOOK, NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA, is a rich and revealing compendium of information and opinion on the largest and most important state in the union at the end of the American Revolution. Written in response to a set of Queries that French diplomat François Marbois circulated among leading men of the new American republics, Notes offers an illuminating portrait of the author as well as of his beloved Commonwealth. Jefferson was a Virginia patriot and his identification with his country was central to his self-understanding: the American Revolution was the epochal, transformative event in his personal history and in Virginia’s history. Presented in the scientific spirit of the Enlightenment as an encyclopedia of useful data, Notes is also an eloquent testament to Jefferson’s faith in the redemptive potential of the republican revolution. Yet Jefferson’s hopes are shadowed by his fears—his anxieties about the future, and the threat that forthcoming generations of Virginians will fail to fulfill Revolutionary Virginia’s promise—which are never far below the surface. The resulting tension is reflected in Jefferson’s prose. Notes on Virginia, Jefferson’s only sustained and systematic effort to chart Virginia’s revolutionary transformation, illuminates the sources of his eloquence while offering some of his most memorable turns of phrase.

Born in 1743, Jefferson was still a young man when he drafted his first responses to Marbois in late 1781. Although he had already made important contributions to the Revolutionary cause, both in Congress as chief draftsman of the American Declaration of Independence and in Virginia as a reform-minded legislator, Jefferson’s allegedly poor performance as war governor clouded his future prospects. Lacking the constitutional authority and political resources to mobilize effective defenses against the turncoat Benedict Arnold’s invasion of the state in December 1780, Jefferson and the legislature fled from Richmond, the state capital, to Charlottesville; Banastre Tarleton’s follow-up assault on Charlottesville precipitated further flight, with the beleaguered ex-governor seeking refuge at his Poplar Forest plantation near Lynchburg while the legislature reconvened at Staunton, across the mountains. Despite the state’s woefully inadequate defenses, the British threat quickly subsided. Commander Charles Cornwallis walked into a Franco-American trap at Yorktown and his surrender (December 19, 1781) sapped Britain’s counter-revolutionary will to fight and pointed toward a peace settlement. Republican Virginia had nearly been wiped off the map and Jefferson’s career had been tarnished, perhaps irredeemably, even though the Virginia Assembly resolved to obviate and remove all unmerited Censure. If the commonwealth had survived, neither Jefferson nor his fellow Virginians—with the glorious exceptions of Commander George Washington and his Continental troops—deserved any credit for this happy outcome.

As Jefferson drafted his Notes and revised them over the next few years, Virginia’s prospects revived. Centrally located and with the largest territory and population of any state, Virginia was bound to take the leading role in the union that had secured its independence as a self-governing commonwealth. The forward-looking, boosterish thrust of many of Jefferson’s Queries (or chapters) reflected his renewed confidence in a future that could be calculated and projected, in the characteristic mode of contemporaneous political economy, in terms of extensive territory, an expanding population, and boundless resources. But fundamental questions lingered for Jefferson about whether Virginians were sufficiently virtuous and patriotic to fulfill their state’s promise. Marbois’ questions led Jefferson to probe Virginia’s constitutional liabilities, both in the familiar modern sense of his concerns about the 1776 state constitution and in the broader sense of his concerns about possible defects in the constitution and character of the body politic.

Jefferson’s authorial presence may not be immediately apparent in Notes on the State of Virginia, but it is nonetheless an extraordinarily personal document, written in a time of epochal changes in his world and in his private life. The malaise of 1781 was exacerbated in the next year by the devastating blow of the death of his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, and was only relieved by new public assignments, first as a Virginia delegate in the Confederation Congress (1783–84) and then as the new nation’s representative in Paris (1784–89). Notes was first published in 1785, in a private French edition intended for limited circulation, and only gained a broader readership in the first English (Stockdale) edition, published in London in 1787. Jefferson was reluctant to publish, but feared that bowdlerized, mistranslated versions of the original text would misrepresent him to the larger world; except for his famous state papers, written in his capacity as a public servant, Jefferson would avoid publication in the future. Jefferson’s reluctance to publish Notes reflected his awareness that some of its passages, particularly on slavery and the Virginia constitution, would provoke controversy, revealing too much about his own private views and thus compromising his public persona. His self-consciousness was also apparent in his choice to include the map of Virginia drafted by his surveyor-father Peter Jefferson and Professor Joshua Fry of the College of William and Mary in 1751 as a frontispiece of the Stockdale edition. Philiopiety and patriotism merged as Jefferson simultaneously merged his own identity with his father’s and with Virginia’s.

Jefferson emphasized three major themes in ordering his responses to Marbois’ Queries. He began with a set of Queries (I–VII) on Virginia’s physical geography that can be read as a sustained commentary on, and prose equivalent of, the Fry-Jefferson map, and then proceeded to a survey and analysis of the Commonwealth’s population in Queries VIII–XI and a discussion of its government, laws, manners, and public statistics in Queries XII–XXII. Notes concludes with a Query (23) on previous histories of Virginia (which Jefferson considered inadequate) and a catalogue of important state papers. Bracketed by a prospectus for Virginia’s future growth and by a compilation of resources for understanding its past, Jefferson’s ambivalent analysis of contemporary Virginians and their capacity for fulfilling the American Revolution’s promise constitutes the heart of his book.

Virginia’s prospects seemed boundless, if only Virginians would seize them. The Commonwealth’s territorial claims, not yet recognized by other states or by foreign powers when Jefferson began writing, were bounded on the north and west by the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, embracing a total of 121,525 square miles, a vast domain one third larger than the islands of Great Britain and Ireland (Query I). Rivers (Query II) would be key to the development of Virginia’s inland empire, particularly if the Potomac could be connected with the Mississippi River system. Nature favored Virginians, but it was incumbent on them to improve its advantages. This was the implicit message of Query VI, with its extensive inventories of mineral, vegetable, and animal resources. Refuting the claim of prominent European naturalists that animal species, including humans, degenerated in the New World, Jefferson assembled data that demonstrated that Americans were at least as big, probably bigger than their Old World counterparts. The new nation had already produced a cohort of geniuses (including George Washington, one of the most celebrated worthies of the world, scientist-statesman Benjamin Franklin, and the astronomer David Rittenhouse) who augured well for its human development. Yet even these patriotic polemics betrayed Jefferson’s anxieties. Would succeeding generations live up to the Revolutionary generation’s high standard? Would Americans successfully exploit their natural advantages? Would Virginia extend its effective jurisdiction to the limits depicted and described by Peter Jefferson and his son Thomas?

Virginia’s future depended on the size and character of its population. Jefferson’s data showed that Virginians had doubled in number every 27 ¼ years, suggesting that the state might one day replicate the population density of the British islands. But what sort of population would that be? Too many non-English speaking immigrants, ignorant of the principles of the English constitution, with others derived from natural right and reason, would make Virginia a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass (Query VIII). Virginia’s total population of 567,614 also included 259,230 slaves of all ages. The benign natural conditions Jefferson celebrated in earlier Queries had the perverse effect of promoting the growth of the slave population: this blot in our country increases as fast, or faster, than the whites. Slaves were even worse than unassimilated immigrants, for as Jefferson later argued (in Query XIV), the injuries they have sustained under slavery made them white Virginians’ natural enemies.

Even as Jefferson elaborated on Virginia’s boundless prospects, troubling questions came to the fore when Jefferson turned from the state’s land and people to its government and laws. As an independent commonwealth, Virginia could control the growth and character of its population, assert and vindicate territorial claims against other states, and determine the course of future social and economic development. Jefferson was particularly anxious about the uncertain future of his Bill for Religious Freedom, introduced in 1779 as part of a broad set of legal reforms that would complete Virginia’s republican revolution: shackles . . . which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion (Query XVII). The legislature’s failure to emancipate and expatriate slaves would also produce convulsions (Query XIV) that would jeopardize Virginia’s republican future. Jefferson’s misgivings about the Commonwealth resonated with the crisis in his own career in late 1781.

The British invasion showed that Virginia’s constitution was fundamentally flawed. In June 1781, the legislature considered creating a dictator who would exercise extraordinary, despotic powers in the emergency, thus supplanting the constitutional executive (Jefferson himself) and destroying the republic. The very thought alone was treason against the people; indeed it would be treason against mankind in general (Query XIII). The tendency toward despotism was inherent in the disproportionate concentration of power in the House of Delegates under the 1776 constitution, for 173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one. The constitution itself had been enacted by a self-appointed revolutionary convention, without the authorization or ratification of the people. Instead of rectifying these defects, Virginians seemed all too prone to sacrifice their rights and regress to a condition worse than monarchy.

Perhaps, as Jefferson’s wartime experience suggested, Virginians lacked the necessary spirit and virtue to sustain their republican experiment and fulfill the glorious future that Notes on Virginia envisioned for them. The centrality of slavery to Virginia’s prosperity underscored his misgivings. On one hand, Jefferson understood that private wealth and public revenue depended on value of our lands and slaves, taken conjunctly continuing to double every generation: slaves were integral to the political economist’s Virginia (Query XXII). But the republican moralist tremble[d] for my country, knowing that a just God would one day authorize a revolution of the wheel of fortune. Would the slaves’ emancipation be with the consent of the masters or by their extirpation in a bloody race war (Query XVIII)?

As he responded to Marbois’ Queries, Jefferson assumed various roles and voices, thus conjuring up different Virginias and betraying his own profound ambivalence at a particularly troubled moment in his career. His concerns about Virginia’s national character are most conspicuous in successive Queries on Manners (XVIII) and Manufactures (XIX). For the great Enlightenment French philosopher Montesquieu (Charles de Secondat) in his Spirit of the Laws (1743) and his many followers, the moeurs or manners of a people were fundamental to the constitution of any regime. It is striking that Jefferson emphasized the degrading effects of slave-holding on the master class in his discussion of manners: the whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions and unremitting despotism. Worse still were slavery’s demoralizing effects on the rising generation, nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny. Only when Jefferson turned to manufactures did he recover his faith in the people, for those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, the peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. Now he portrayed Virginians as farmers, not slaveholding despots, virtuous antitypes of the corrupt and dependent mobs of Europe’s great cities. Yet again, as in his discussion of the size of animals, the juxtaposition of virtuous New World to degenerate Old restored Jefferson’s sense of the American Revolution’s redemptive potential for Virginia and for mankind in general.

Notes on Virginia is a self-portrait of its author at a pivotal moment in his career, much more revealing than the autobiography he drafted in 1821, near the end of his life, for the private benefit of family and friends. Of course, Jefferson could not know how his own story, or Virginia’s story, would turn out when he drafted his responses to Marbois’ queries. Jefferson, torn between hope and fear, offers readers of Notes on the State of Virginia vital insight into the uncertainties and contingencies of the American Revolutionary experience.

Peter S. Onuf is Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Educated at Johns Hopkins University, Onuf has written extensively on Thomas Jefferson and his age. He has held positions at several institutions, including visiting professorships at University College Dublin and Oxford University.

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

THE FIRST EDITION OF NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA APPEARED IN PARIS in 1785 in a small edition of two hundred copies. Although Jefferson tried to restrict circulation of the book, a copy fell into the hands of a French bookseller, and a translation by the Abbe Morellet into French appeared in early 1787. Unhappy with this translation, Jefferson authorized the London printer John Stockdale to publish an English edition that appeared later in 1787. This edition included a number of revisions Jefferson had made to the 1785 printing, as well as the appendices containing Charles Thomson’s comments, the Draught of a Fundamental Constitution for . . . Virginia, and the Act for Establishing Religious Freedom. The Stockdale edition also became the basis for all other printings of Notes in Jefferson’s lifetime, but in 1800 he published separately a fourth appendix, Relative to the Murder of Logan’s Family, after his account of these events had been sharply criticized. This appendix was included in printings after 1801. Jefferson extensively annotated his personal copy of the Stockdale edition, apparently with the intention of bringing out a new edition, but these annotations remained unpublished until 1853. In that year, Joseph W. Randolph included them in an edition of Notes he published in Richmond. Paul Leicester Ford later used this text to prepare the version of Notes he included in his 1894 edition of The Notes of Thomas Jefferson. Randolph and Ford kept Jefferson’s annotations as footnotes, but in 1954 William Peden prepared an edition, working directly from Jefferson’s personal copy, that included the annotations in the text, producing a work that supposedly conforms to the author’s final intentions. This is a work of careful scholarship, but it presents a text read by no one in Jefferson’s lifetime, nor in most of the nineteenth century for that matter.

The text that follows, based on the 1787 Stockdale edition and the 1800 appendix about the murder of Logan’s family, aims to present a version of Notes on the State of Virginia that would have been familiar to most readers of the editions printed before 1954. It also seeks to indicate the nature of Jefferson’s continuing attention to the text. His annotations in his personal copy of Notes are included here but are presented in the endnotes, where their source is identified. The attempt to present an edition of Notes that gives some sense of the 1787 printing’s appearance entails some difficulties, however. This edition does not include the map based on the one by Joshua Fry and Jefferson’s father, Peter Jefferson, and the fold-out chart listing the Indian tribes native to Virginia has been printed as part of the regular pagination. Second, Jefferson used a daunting array of quotations in languages other than English, both in the original text and in his annotations in his personal copy. Quotations of material in non-English languages that were a part of the 1787 Stockdale edition have been kept as they appeared there and in the early reprints, and translations are offered in the endnotes. Quotations in non-English languages in Jefferson’s annotations in his personal copy, however, have been routinely translated with a notice of the languages in which he originally quoted.

Finally, reproducing Jefferson’s own system of printed annotations to the Stockdale edition is challenging because he used at least three different systems. Numbers within parentheses, such as (1), refer to the comments of Charles Thomson contained in the first appendix; this system has been retained here. Jefferson also marked his own footnotes with various typographical symbols, such as *, , and §; these marks are also retained, and the notes at the foot of the page are always Jefferson’s own as they appeared in the Stockdale edition. In addition, Jefferson put abbreviated references to authoritative texts, such as those by Buffon, Linnaeus, and others, in the margins, particularly in Query VI; these have been moved to the endnotes in the interest of avoiding an excessively cluttered look. Since numbers within parentheses always refer to Thomson’s comments that appear in the first appendix, the present editor’s endnotes are linked to the text by page number and key words. Jefferson’s original manuscript, now in the Massachusetts Historical Society, was also consulted in preparing this edition, and major differences between it and the printed text have been noted.

ADVERTISEMENT

THE FOLLOWING NOTES WERE WRITTEN IN VIRGINIA IN THE YEAR 1781, and somewhat corrected and enlarged in the winter of 1782, in answer to Queries proposed to the Author, by a Foreigner of Distinction, then residing among us. The subjects are all treated imperfectly; some scarcely touched on. To apologize for this by developing the circumstances of the time and place of their composition, would be to open wounds which have already bled enough. To these circumstances some of their imperfections may with truth be ascribed; the great mass to the want of information and want of talents in the writer. He had a few copies printed, which he gave among his friends: and a translation of them has been lately published in France, but with such alterations as the laws of the press in that country rendered necessary. They are now offered to the public in their original form and language.

FEBRUARY 27, 1787

QUERY ONE

AN EXACT DESCRIPTION OF THE LIMITS AND BOUNDARIES OF THE STATE OF VIRGINIA?

LIMITS

VIRGINIA IS BOUNDED ON THE EAST BY THE ATLANTIC: ON THE NORTH by a line of latitude, crossing the Eastern Shore through Watkins’ Point, being about 37°. 57'. North latitude; from thence by a streight line to Cinquac, near the mouth of Patowmac; thence by the Patowmac, which is common to Virginia and Maryland, to the first fountain of its northern branch; thence by a meridian line, passing through that fountain till it intersects a line running East and West, in latitude 39°. 43'. 42.4 which divides Maryland from Pennsylvania, and which was marked by Messrs. Mason and Dixon; thence by that line, and a continuation of it westwardly to the completion of five degrees of longitude from the eastern boundary of Pennsylvania, in the same latitude, and thence by a meridian line to the Ohio: On the West by the Ohio and Missisipi, to latitude 36°. 30'. North: and on the South by the line of latitude last-mentioned. By admeasurements through nearly the whole of this last line, and supplying the unmeasured parts from good data, the Atlantic and Missisipi, are found in this latitude to be 758 miles distant, equal to 13°. 38'. of longitude, reckoning 55 miles and 3144 feet to the degree. This being our comprehension of longitude, that of our latitude, taken between this and Mason and Dixon’s line, is 3°. 13'. 42.4. equal to 223.3 miles, supposing a degree of a great circle to be 69 m. 864 f. as computed by Cassini. These boundaries include an area somewhat triangular, of 121525 square miles, whereof 79650 lie westward of the Allegany mountains, and 57034 westward of the meridian of the mouth of the Great Kanhaway. This state is therefore one third larger than the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, which are reckoned at 88357 square miles.

These limits result from, 1. The antient charters from the crown of England. 2. The grant of Maryland to the Lord Baltimore, and the subsequent determinations of the British court as to the extent of that grant. 3. The grant of Pennsylvania to William Penn, and a compact between the general assemblies of the commonwealths of Virginia and Pennsylvania as to the extent of that grant. 4. The grant of Carolina, and actual location of its northern boundary, by consent of both parties. 5. The treaty of Paris of 1763. 6. The confirmation of the charters of the neighbouring states by the convention of Virginia at the time of constituting their commonwealth. 7. The cession made by Virginia to Congress of all the lands to which they had title on the North side of the Ohio.

QUERY TWO

A NOTICE OF ITS RIVERS, RIVULETS, AND HOW FAR THEY ARE NAVIGABLE?

RIVERS AND NAVIGATION

AN INSPECTION OF A MAP OF VIRGINIA, WILL GIVE A BETTER IDEA OF THE geography of its rivers, than any description in writing. Their navigation may be imperfectly noted.

Roanoke, so far as it lies within this state, is nowhere navigable, but for canoes, or light batteaux; and, even for these, in such detached parcels as to have prevented the inhabitants from availing themselves of it at all.

James River, and its waters, afford navigation as follows.

The whole of Elizabeth River, the lowest of those which run into James River, is a harbour, and would contain upwards of three hundred ships. The channel is from 150 to 200 fathom wide, and at common flood tide, affords 18 feet water to Norfolk. The Strafford, a sixty gun ship, went there, lightening herself to cross the bar at Sowell’s point. The Fier Rodrigue, pierced for sixty-four guns, and carrying fifty, went there without lightening. Craney island, at the mouth of this river, commands its channel tolerably well.

Nansemond River is navigable to Sleepy hole, for vessels of 250 tons; to Suffolk, for those of 100 tons; and to Milner’s, for those of twenty-five.

Pagan Creek affords 8 or 10 feet water to Smithfeild, which admits vessels of 20 ton.

Chickahominy has at its mouth a bar, on which is only 12 feet water at common flood tide. Vessels passing that, may go 8 miles up the river; those of 10 feet draught may go four miles further, and those of six tons burthen, 20 miles further.

Appamattox may be navigated as far as Broadways, by any vessel which has crossed Harrison’s bar in James river; it keeps 8 or 9 feet water a mile or two higher up to Fisher’s bar, and 4 feet on that and upwards to Petersburgh, where all navigation ceases.

James River itself affords harbour for vessels of any size in Hampton Road, but not in safety through the whole winter; and there is navigable water for them as far as Mulberry island. A forty gun ship goes to James town, and, lightening herself, may pass to Harrison’s bar, on which there is only 15 feet water. Vessels of 250 tons may go to Warwick; those of 125 go to Rocket’s, a mile below Richmond; from thence is about 7 feet water to Richmond; and about the center of the town, four feet and a half, where the navigation is interrupted by falls, which in a course of six miles, descend about 80 feet perpendicular: above these it is resumed in canoes and batteaux, and is prosecuted safely and advantageously to within 10 miles of the Blue ridge; and even through the Blue ridge a ton weight has been brought; and the expence would not be great, when compared with its object, to open a tolerable navigation up Jackson’s river and Carpenter’s creek, to within 25 miles of Howard’s creek of Green briar, both of which have then water enough to float vessels into the Great Kanhaway. In some future state of population, I think it possible, that its navigation may also be made to interlock with that of the Patowmac, and through that to communicate by a short portage with the Ohio. It is to be noted, that this river is called in the maps James River, only to its confluence with the Rivanna; thence to the Blue ridge it is called the Fluvanna; and thence to its source, Jackson’s river. But in common speech, it is called James river to its source.

The Rivanna, a branch of James river, is navigable for canoes and batteaux to its intersection with the South West mountains, which is about 22 miles; and may easily be opened to navigation through those mountains to its fork above Charlottesville.

York River, at York town, affords the best harbour in the state for vessels of the largest size. The river there narrows to the width of a mile, and is contained within very high banks, close under which the vessels may ride. It holds 4 fathom water at high tide for 25 miles above York to the mouth of Poropotank, where the river is a mile and a half wide, and the channel only 75 fathom, and passing under a high bank. At the confluence of Pamunkey and Mattapony, it is reduced to 3 fathom depth, which continues up Pamunkey to Cumberland, where the width is 100 yards, and up Mattapony to within two miles of Frazer’s ferry, where it becomes 2½ fathom deep, and holds that about five miles. Pamunkey is then capable of navigation for loaded flats to Brockman’s bridge, 50 miles above Hanover town, and Mattapony to Downer’s bridge, 70 miles