Summarize Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia.

It is difficult to summarize Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia because it does not unfold in traditionally narrative fashion.  Rather than offering a story, or sequence of tableaux, Jefferson divides the book into answers to twenty three queries.  He begins with "An exact description of the limits and boundaries of the State of Virginia" and concludes with "The histories of the State...".  Though many of the chapters present rather dry--at least by contemporary standards--accounts of geographical features of the state, Jefferson's text contains several noteworthy and oft-quoted moments.

In Chapter V, "Its Cascades and Caverns," Jefferson recounts his experience at the Natural Bridge, "the most sublime of nature's works":

Though the sides of this bridge are provided in some parts with a parapet of fixed rocks, yet few men have resolution to walk to them and look over into the abyss. You involuntarily fall on your hands and feet, creep to the parapet and peep over it.  Looking down from this height about a minute, gave me a violent head ache.  If the view from the top be painful and intolerable, that from below is delightful in an equal extreme.  It is impossible for the emotions arising from the sublime, to be felt beyond what they are here: so beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light, and springing as it were up to heaven, the rapture of the spectator is really indescribable! 

This passage is a textbook example of the sublime, as Jefferson becomes overawed by this natural feature, the view being both "painful and intolerable" and "beautiful."

In Query XIX, "The present state of manufactures, commerce, interior and exterior trade?" presents perhaps Jefferson's most detailed account of his vision for the republic.  Instead of industrial manufactures (which were developing in Europe), Jefferson contends that,

Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.

On moral grounds, Jefferson believes in a kind of yeoman republic in which all citizens "labour in the earth" to cultivate "substantial and genuine virtue," as opposed to manufacture which degrades employees and employers alike.

Finally, Notes is often quoted for Jefferson's articulation of his racial theory, which quickly devolves from the scientific language of the Enlightenment to aesthetic discourse:

 The first difference which strikes us is that of colour.  Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us.  And is this difference of no importance?  Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races?  Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?  Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species.

In this passage, Jefferson justifies his racist denigration of African Americans though a discourse of beauty.  He contends that the "greater or less share of beauty" between blacks and whites depends on color, posing questions of racial difference in terms of aesthetics.