In working on the Williamsburg years and poetry of Virginia Hamiton Adair (and involving therefore to some extent her husband, Douglass Adair), I find that in 1949 there was some excitement when they and Brooke Hindle all thought VHA had found in the Virginia Gazette a number of letters that Thomas Jefferson had written but that had been overlooked.
The letters, signed Academicus, appeared in the 1770's and in 1774 largely concerned the reorganization of William and Mary. The Adairs and Hindle thought circumstances pointed to Jefferson as the author (as early as a 1922 article in the W&M Quarterly, the letters were seen as anticipating in some ways Jefferson's reorganization of the College in 1779).
Nothing further seems to have come from this frisson (though VHA at a later date endorsed her letter as one especially to be retained). Robert Polk Thomson deals with the letters in his 1971 article on the reorganization of the College, but doesn't advance a guess as to the identity of the writer. David Robeson in 1985 seemed cool about a suggestion that the future bishop James Madison wrote the letters.
I'd hoped that the Jefferson Papers folks at Princeton might be helpful, but queries there have yet to be answered, so I thought I'd ask the collective knowledge here if the writer of the letters has ever been identified.
tlm
PS. If anyone has anything to offer about the Adairs' years in Williamsburg (1943-1955), I'd be delighted to hear it, off-list--Thad Tate records that DA called Williamsburg the city of his manhood's grief, which so far seems corroborated on a number of levels.
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Terry L. Meyers, Chancellor Professor of English, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg Virginia 23187 757-221-3932
http://wmpeople.wm.edu/site/page/tlmeye/
http://www.ecologyfund.com/ecology/_ecology.html
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Have we got a college? Have we got a football team?.... Well, we can't afford both. Tomorrow we start tearing down the college.
--Groucho Marx, in "Horse Feathers."
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