“ occasion resolved to be before my enemies . . .”

On March 10 Jefferson wrote to General Wilkinson: “ Your favor of Jan. 21. has been recieved, and with it the 2 ^d. vol. of your Memoirs, with the Appendices to the 1 ^st. 2 ^d. & 4 ^th. volumes, for which accept my thanks. I shall read them with pleasure. the expression respecting myself, stated in your letter to have been imputed to you by your calumniators, had either never been heard by me, or, if heard, had been unheeded & forgotten. I have been too much the butt of such falsehoods myself to do others the injustice of permitting them to make the least impression on me. my consciousness that no man on earth has me under his thumb, is evidence enough that you never used the expression. Daniel Clarke’s book I have never seen, nor should I put Tacitus or Thucydides out of my hand to take that up. I am leaving off the Newspapers, desirous to disengage myself from the contentions of the world, and consign to entire tranquility and to the kinder passions what remains to me of life. I look back with commiseration on those still buffeting the storm, and sincerely wish your Argosy may ride out, unhurt, that in which it is engaged. my belief is that it will, and I found that belief on my own knowledge of Burr’s transactions, on my view of your conduct in encountering them, & on the candour of your judges. I salute you with my best wishes & entire respect. ”

James Wilkinson, 1757-1825, Governor of Louisiana Territory, published his Memoirs in an attempt to vindicate himself from the charge of having received money from the Spanish Government, and of having been an accomplice of Aaron Burr. The quoted correspondence shows that John B. Colvin [q.v.], for a time a clerk in the State Department in Washington, was the author of a part of the Memoirs. Wilkinson was in frequent correspondence with Jefferson.

Originally bound for Jefferson by John March in 1809, rebound in half morocco by the Library of Congress, 2 compartments of the original calf back preserved, one with a red label lettered Louisiana in gold, the other with 1800 / Lewis / Dunbar / Sibley in ink in Jefferson’s autograph. On the second leaf of the first sheet, which is unnumbered, Jefferson has inserted in ink the signature mark I preceded by his initial T.

Jefferson’s Message, dated February 19, 1806, occupies one leaf at the beginning, and is followed by an Extract of a letter from Captain Meriwether Lewis, to the President of the United States, dated Fort Mandan, April 17th, 1805, 2 leaves.

This is the first published account of the Lewis and Clark expedition. All the original letters (those from Jefferson in polygraph or letter press copy) connected with this expedition are in the Jefferson Papers in the Library of Congress, as is also Jefferson’s account of the life of Meriwether Lewis, sent in a letter to Paul Allen of Philadelphia on April 13, 1813. The original of Lewis’s letter to Jefferson printed at the beginning of the volume was dated April 7, 1805, not April 17, as printed (see above).