‘You are going to the land of literature and learning and of books’

Jefferson set himself two practical goals in writing his Manual, both of which he met. First, he presented the essential points of specialised knowledge that legislators were obliged to master.

The Manual directed the reader’s attention to the major figures in the field and their output. In this volume, I have referred to Henry Scobell and William Hakewill. Jefferson cited to the works of these two authors on 46 and 35 occasions, respectively. Jefferson’s references to all sources total 658 citations, of which 123 were to Hatsell’s first three volumes. The citations ornamented the Manual and won, for Jefferson’s scholarship, the reader’s confidence that his research was exhaustive and well-directed. This trust, in turn, permitted Jefferson to seek the reader’s approval for his pedagogical and confidence-building goals.

Jefferson fixed the reader’s attention on the nation’s future. He utterly disregarded the republic’s immediate past. For example, Jefferson studiously

refused to cite to 1776 and all that. Relating the development of legislative competence in the Continental Congress was not a narrative that Jeffer­son found attractive. Threading his Manual around hundreds of citations to British works, drawn from ordered spines freighting Monticello’s book­shelves, most certainly did inspire him.

This literary journey permitted Jefferson to assure his audience that Brit­ish legislators had given relevant issues their serious and detailed consid- eration.²⁴ From that point, Jefferson effortlessly guided his readership to a place that was entirely congenial to American sensibilities. The wealth of citations was designed to make reading Hatsell, Scobell and Hakewill in the United States unnecessary. This was most certainly to Jefferson’s taste, because this approach would render Jefferson the essential in must-be-cited works. This pivot, in turn, supported Jefferson’s identification of the essen­tial skill in specialised knowledge which legislators must acquire: writing a ‘code of rules’ even if they must do it rule by rule. After all, as Jefferson might have said, everything begins with ‘a sketch’.

Once Jefferson had given code-writing his blessing, American legisla­tors could create and evolve codes without troubling to locate a pedigree for their inventories. Despite the timely publishing of the Journals of the Continental Congress, amnesia flourished in the United States after 1801. The political history of Great Britain was confined to specialists. Interest in American developments from 1774-1789 withered as well. Jefferson’s Manual, I suggest, smothered parliamentary history. If Thomas Jefferson didn’t say it, it wasn’t worth talking about. And if Thomas Jefferson wrote about it, everything that could be said on the subject was already in print.

None of this came about by accident. Occupying the field of parliamentary procedure was an ambitiously conceived literary accomplishment, which Jefferson’s well-mannered prose brought to press. Domination of a field of specialised knowledge enabled Jefferson to recapture the literary summit he had previously reached on 4 July 1776. In short, Jefferson raised the Manual of Parliamentary Practice for the Use of the Senate of the United States to the aesthetic summit he reached in his Declaration of Independence.