Printed document (DLC). Hazard’s letter is signed in autograph. Addressed: “To Thomas Jefferson Esqr. Virginia.” The list of subscribers appears below Hazard’s letter, and TJ’s rough list of colonial records appears on blank portions of three different pages of the four-page leaflet.

The pioneer efforts of Ebenezer Hazard (1744–1817), of New York and Philadelphia, in collecting the archival records of the United States resulted in a two-volume compilation entitled Historical Collections; Consisting of State Papers … Intended as Materials for an History of the United States, Philadelphia, 1792–1794. Though officially supported by the Continental Congress, the work suffered a long interruption from Hazard’s appointment in 1782 as postmaster general, and after the publication of two volumes (containing documents through the year 1664) it was dropped for want of patronage (DAB description begins Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, New York, 1928–36, 20 vols. description ends ; JCC description begins Worthington C. Ford and others, eds., Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789, Washington, D.C., 1904–37, 34 vols. description ends , xi, 682, 705–6; Hazard’s Preface to vol. i). As one who had a lifelong interest in American history and in the preservation of historical records, TJ responded cordially; see TJ to Hazard, 30 Apr. 1775, and also 18 Feb. 1791; and for a documented discussion of TJ’s important collection of Virginia archival records, acquired not long after he compiled this list, see Kingsbury, Records of the Virginia Company of London, i, 41–54. TJ’s list of papers to be brought to Hazard’s attention is actually a set of rough notes of which a portion, without much doubt, is now missing. That he later copied the list in more finished form is evident from his having numbered the items chronologically and then run a line from top to bottom through the entire list. No fair copy has been found, though many of the same entries appear in a list appended to the answer to Query xxiii in Notes on Virginia (Ford, description begins Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, “Letterpress Edition,” N.Y., 1892–1899 description ends iii, 283–95). No attempt has been made to annotate the documents listed, but the principal printed collections consulted by TJ should be given fuller titles. They were: Daniel Neal, The History of the Puritans or Protestant Non-Conformists, from the Reformation to the Death of Queen Elizabeth, London, 1732, 4 vol.; William Stith, The History of the First Discovery and Settlement of Virginia, Williamsburg, 1747; William Smith, An Examination of the Connecticut Claim to Lands in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1774; Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony of Massachusets-Bay [1628–1691], Boston, 1764 (completed in 3 vol., 1828); and [Robert Beverley] The History and Present State of Virginia, London, 1705. Petty bag: “An office formerly belonging to the Common Law jurisdiction of the Court of Chancery, for suits for and against solicitors of that court” (OED description begins A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Oxford, 1888–1933 description ends ).