TJ compiled these notes on both sides of a single sheet of paper. The work was clearly done in several different sittings as information became available to him. Statistics for St. Andrews and other communities in upper Louisiana match census data from 1799, which Daniel Clark sent to Madison in August 1803. TJ chose to replicate only the figures Clark supplied for the white population of each locality, although Clark’s data also included population totals for free blacks, slaves, and “free mulattoes” (DNA: RG 59, TP, Orleans; Madison, Papers, Sec. of State Ser., 5:317-18; Vol. 41:258n). The source for updated population figures along the right margin of that section of the notes is less certain. The population total of 7,000, however, matches the total for upper Louisiana that appeared in an issue of the New Orleans Moniteur de la Louisiane. Although the issue in question is no longer extant, a transcription of an article entitled “Population de la Louisiane” ended up in TJ’s papers. The article listed population totals for all the major territorial divisions, as defined by the Spanish, for lower Louisiana. The Moniteur did not specify totals for most individual localities in upper Louisiana, but did add New Madrid’s 1802 population of 1,500 to an 1803 estimate of 5,500 persons living in the communities north of New Madrid (MS in DLC: TJ Papers, 146:25365-6; in a clerk’s hand; endorsed by TJ: “Moniteur de la Louisiane. 1804. Apr. 7.” and “Louisiana. population”).

Those figures, as well as TJ’s first effort to delineate district boundaries for upper Louisiana, all of which he entered on the recto of the sheet, clearly predate the information that Amos Stoddard (Stoddert) sent Dearborn in a letter of 3 June 1804. Stoddard’s population totals and geographic divisions match the information that TJ entered on the verso and appear to have encouraged the president to revise the districts he had previously worked out. On 14 July, he informed William Henry Harrison of his determination to divide Louisiana District into five districts, which roughly conformed to those established under Spanish governance. Stoddard had separately advised Harrison on a different districting plan, which would have combined the St. Louis and St. Charles districts and created a new district for Arkansas. Harrison advised the president to adopt this plan in his letter of 24 June, but TJ did not receive that letter until 28 July and did not change his instructions (Glimpses of the Past, 2 [1935], 104-10; William E. Foley, The Genesis of Missouri: From Wilderness Outpost to Statehood [Columbia, Mo., 1989], 84; Vol. 43:640-2).