A Wilderness So Immense Read Online Free

River and the world beyond. This time Jefferson asked Banister for the eighteenth-century equivalent of a Dun and Bradstreet report about the credit and reputation of a firm doing business in France and America. The letter closed with greetings to Anne Banister and a quick report that Jefferson had seen their son John in good health prior to the boy’s departure for Italy and the grand tour.
    Jefferson’s third letter of the day went to the Philadelphia astronomer, inventor, and mathematician David Rittenhouse along with a copy of the French edition of
Notes on the State of Virginia
(the only book Jefferson ever wrote) and nautical almanacs for 1786 through 1790, “which are as late as they are published.” Jefferson was grateful for details of frontier geography that Rittenhouse had sent in September—in a letter that journeyed for four months to Paris and had reached him only “a few days ago”—but the future president of the United States pressed him for facts about “the Western boundary beyond the Meridian of Pittsburgh.” Jefferson told Rittenhouse merely that he needed this information “to enable me to trace that boundary in my map.” He was more expansive,however, with his thoughts on fossils, shells, and other “curiosities of the Western country” that he had written about in
Notes on the State of Virginia.
He knew that Rittenhouse, the self-taught Quaker genius who designed and built sophisticated instruments for the American Philosophical Society and taught at the University of Pennsylvania, would share his curiosity about a new reflecting telescope developed by the Abbé Rochon using “the metal called Platina,” which could be polished to a mirror finish as fine as gold or silver with less chance of tarnishing.
    Finally, having attended to the immediate demands of diplomacy, business, and science, Jefferson’s thoughts turned to Virginia and a letter that his young protégé Archibald Stuart had posted toward Paris in October. “Nothing is so grateful to me at this distance as details both great and small of what is passing in my own country,” he told Stuart. A graduate of William and Mary, member of Phi Beta Kappa, and veteran of the Carolina and Yorktown campaigns of the American Revolution, Stuart had declined the chair in mathematics at his alma mater to read law with Jefferson. With clients throughout the Valley of Virginia, at twenty-five he had won election to the lower house of the Virginia legislature from Botetourt County, across the Blue Ridge some eighty miles southwest of Jefferson’s Monticello. While Jefferson was writing to him from Paris, Stuart was attending the legislature in Richmond, where thirty-four-year-old James Madison was engineering the passage of Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom—one of the three achievements the author of the Declaration of Independence and founder of the University of Virginia would choose to inscribe on his gravestone.
    About three o’clock, Jefferson took his thermometer outside and noted that the skies had cleared and the temperature risen to 51 degrees—but there was no FedEx truck idling at the curb, Ezra Bates was not leaving until tomorrow, and in January 1786 humanity had not yet substituted data for thought and surrendered to the technology of instantaneous miscommunication. Archibald Stuart’s news “of what is passing in my own country” had drawn Thomas Jefferson into profound contemplation.
    “The quiet of Europe at this moment,” Jefferson told Stuart, “furnishes little which can attract your notice, nor will that quiet be soon disturbed, at least for the current year.” The current peace in Europe “perhaps … hangs on the life of the King of Prussia,” the American minister informed his young friend, “and that hangs by a very slender thread.” Jefferson was not the only statesmen alert for news from Potsdam, justoutside Berlin, where Frederick the Great had retired to spend his last months in the