de mortuis nîl nisi bonum: “of speaking no ill of the dead.”

In his postscript TJ supplied a number of corrections to the biography of himself that had recently appeared in Delaplaine’s Repository description begins Joseph Delaplaine, Delaplaine’s Repository of the Lives and Portraits of Distinguished Americans, Philadelphia, 1816–18, 2 vols.; Poor, Jefferson’s Library, 4 (no. 139) description ends , 1:125–55. He reported that the place of his birth was actually albemarle County; indicated that the biography had erred in stating that his Notes on the State of Virginia had first been published in the french language and then translated into English, instead of the reverse; clarified that it was in the summer of 1776 that he drafted a Virginia constitution and served in the Second Continental Congress; corrected the reference to the French body of tax collectors from Farmers-generally to Farmers-general; specified that he had sold his whole collection of books to the nation after the British destroyed the first congressional library in 1814; and stated that his daughter mrs Maria Jefferson Eppes, not her husband, died leaving two children.