“ came ascendant, would uncanonise Blackstone, whose book, altho’ the most elegant & best digested of our law catalogue, has been perverted more than all others to the degeneracy of legal science. a student finds there a smattering of every thing, and his indolence easily persuades him that if he understands that book, he is master of the whole body of the law. the distinction between these, & those who have drawn their stores from the deep and rich mines of Coke Littleton, seems well understood even by the unlettered common people, who apply the appellation of Blackstone lawyers to these Ephemeral insects of the law.

" Whether we should undertake to reduce the common law, our own, & so much of the English, statutes as we have adopted, to a text, is a question of transcendant difficulty. it was discussed at the first meeting of the committee of the Revised code in 1776. & decided in the negative by the opinions of Wythe, Mason & myself, against Pendleton & Tom Lee. m ( ^~ r) Pendleton proposed to take Blackstone for that text, only purging him of what was inapplicable, or unsuitable to us. in that case the meaning of every word of Blackstone would have become a source of litigation until it had been settled by repeated legal decisions. and to come at that meaning, we should have had produced, on all occasions, that very pile of authorities from which it would be said he drew his conclusion, & which of course would explain it, and the terms in which it is couched. thus we should have retained the same chaos of law-lore from which we wished to be emancipated, added to the evils of the uncertainty which a new text, & new phrases would have generated . . . ”

In the letter to Thomas Cooper, dated from Monticello, January 16, 1814, Jefferson described the laws of England as being divisible into four separate stages, of which Blackstone’s Commentaries marked the fourth: “ . . . 4. a succeeding interval of changes and additions of matter produced Blackstone’s Commentaries, the most lucid in arrangement, which had yet been written, correct in it’s matter, classical in style, and rightfully taking it’s place by the side of the Justinian institutes. but like them, it was only an elementary book. it did not present all the subjects of the law in all their details. it still left it necessary to recur to the original works of which it was the summary. the great mass of law books, from which it was extracted, was still to be consulted on minute investigations. it wanted therefore a species of merit which entered deeply into the value of those of Bracton, Coke & Bacon. they had in effect swept the shelves of all the materials preceding them. to give Blackstone therefore a full measure of value, another work is still wanting, to wit, to incorporate with his principles a compend of the particular cases subsequent to Bacon of which they are the essence. this might be done by printing under his text a digest like Bacon’s, continued to Blackstone’s time. it would enlarge his work and increase it’s value peculiarly to us, because just there we break off from the parent stem of the English law, unconcerned in any of it’s subsequent changes, or decisions . . . ”

On March 17 of the same year, in a letter to Horatio G. Spafford, Jefferson wrote: “ . . . I join in your reprobation of our merchants, priests and lawyers for their adherence to England & monarchy in preference to their own country and it’s constitution . . . with the lawyers it is a new thing. they have in the mother country been generally the firmest supporters of the free principles of their constitution. but there too they have changed. I ascribe much of this to the substitution of Blackstone for my Lord coke, as an elementary work. in truth Blackstone and Hume have made tories of all England, and are making tories of those young Americans whose native feelings of independence do not place them above the wily sophistries of a Hume or a Blackstone. these two books, but especially the former have done more towards the suppression of the liberties of man, than all the million of men in arms of Bonaparte and the millions of human lives with the sacrifice of which he will stand loaded before the judgment seat of his maker . . . ”

Sir William Blackstone, 1723-1780, English legal writer and judge. It was for Blackstone that Charles Viner, q.v. founded a chair of English law at Oxford, and his lectures were eventually developed into the Commentaries first printed in 4 volumes quarto, 1765-1769.