Lisa,
  Thank you very much. All of us are interested in working from the most
accurate available texts, so your comments below are very useful to us
all. The family letters texts are a wonderful resource. Again thank you.

Jon Kukla

PS Candor demands mention of the fact that in my statement of 'editorial
policy' for handling Jefferson texts in _A Wilderness So Immense_, I
alerted readers to the fact that I was consistently rendering TJ's
customary "it's" as "its" (just as I decided to spell Mississippi
correctly regardless of how imaginatively various 18th- and 19th-century
writers rendered it in their letters).  Andrew Burstein once told me that
he regarded Ellen Coolidge as the grandchild most similar to Jefferson in
personality - perhaps in spelling habits, too.

> Hello fellow listers...
>
> An interesting conversation has been taking place recently regarding
> Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge's 1858 letter to her husband Joseph, and
> the reliability of Annette Gordon-Reed's transcription of this letter,
> subsequently printed as an appendix in Thomas Jefferson and Sally
> Hemings: An American Controversy.
>
> First, I must point out that the original of  the letter written to
> Joseph Coolidge in 1858 probably no longer exists.  If it does exist its
> location is not currently known. There is, however, a transcript created
> by Ellen Coolidge herself, included in her letterbook (MSS 9090,
> University of Virginia, Special Collections, available on microfilm).
> This letterbook, according to the catalogue, "consists of copies of
> letters, or of portions of letters, that Ellen Wayles Coolidge had sent
> to Henry Stephens Randall while he was writing his three-volume
> biography, The Life of Thomas Jefferson (New York, Derby & Jackson,
> 1858), but which were edited for publication, or were not included in
> the published work." This is probably the version that Gordon-Reed cites
> at the bottom of her transcript.
>
> Unfortunately, the version in Gordon-Reed and Ellen's transcript do vary
> in at least two significant ways. The other instances are possibly due
> to some sort of editorial policy that corrects spellings and inserts
> punctuations to enhance readability. For example, Ellen Coolidge retains
> her preference for "it's" instead of the possessive "its" - a habit
> probably learned from her grandfather - and those have been altered in
> Gordon-Reed's transcription and in at least one place a question mark
> replaces an exclamation point. The two most important differences, and I
> am in no way implying that they are intentional, are as below:
>
> MS - "That my brother, then a young man certain to know all that was
> going on behind the scenes, positively declares his indignant disbelief
> in the imputations and solemnly affirms that he never saw or heard the
> smallest thing which could lead him to suspect that his gradfather's
> life was other than perfectly pure." Gordon-Reed's transcription uses
> "belief" instead of "disbelief."
>
> MS - "No female domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when
> he was known not to be there and none could have entered without being
> exposed to the public gaze." Gordon-Reed's transcription deletes the
> bold-faced portion and  instead reads "No female domestic ever entered
> his chambers except at hours when he was known not to be in the public
> gaze."
>
> As for other transcriptions available, there are two that have already
> been mentioned: that within the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian
> Society, printed as "Mr. Jefferson's Private Life," by Dumas Malone
> (April 1974), and the same can be found in the New York Times, 18 May
> 1974. These transcriptions match that in Ellen Coolidge's Letterbook.
>
> The Family Letters Project website
> (http://familyletters.dataformat.com/default.aspx) does include a
> transcript, and it follows the Coolidge Letterbook as indicated above. I
> must apologize for the fact that we have been doing some restructuring
> of the site which means that at this moment its content is temporarily
> unavailable. We anticipate that this work will be finished in the next
> day or so. The Monticello website cites all known transcriptions of this
> letter, including Ellen Coolidge's Letterbook transcript.
> http://www.monticello.org/plantation/hemingscontro/hemings_report.html
>
> Finally, I will point out the obvious...that there is no shortage of
> material to turn to if one is interested in exploring the
> Jefferson-Hemings topic.
>
> Lisa Francavilla
> Managing Editor
> Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series

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