This article is only available in the PDF format. Download the PDF to view the article, as well as its associated figures and tables.
To give a total picture of the total man as revealed in all his writings, papers, and correspondence, an idea with much appeal to historians, requires a great amount of effort and industry, substantial financial backing, and the highest form of editing in which scholarship and creative artistry must be combined. A group of editors working under the aegis of Julian P. Boyd, Alfred L. Bush, and Lucius Wilmerding, Jr., abetted by a galaxy of consultants and assistants, have been publishing the papers of Thomas Jefferson now for approximately ten years. When this great adventure in scholarship and history was announced the editors hoped to publish four or five volumes a year. This Herculean task, this vast and complex labor was not to be done so swiftly. The complexity of editing, as well as many unforeseen problems, have delayed the appearance especially of recent volumes, the present one, the sixteenth,