Mr. Jefferson at the Last: Epilogue

On and off in this column, in part by using the Lewis and Clark Expedition, I have been telling you a story about Mr. Thomas Jefferson, about America therefore, about Jefferson’s incomparable Monticello Library, and about the origin from it of the Library of Congress as we now know it. That story in all its numbered weekly articles can be found in archive at the Murrysville Community Library website. In this epilogue, I offer a summary by quoting two of Jefferson’s own pointed remarks. Together they could be the essence in brief of this truly remarkable and singular man, and America as he and his contemporaries conceived it. From his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” the only book that he himself authored: “Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may commenc…