This is the second post in a series that examines strands of Thomas Jefferson’s life and world, from 1791-1803, through entries in his manuscript account book. Read the first installment.

Travel was arduous in early America. Just how much this simple fact influenced the lives of early Americans is hard to overstate. A farmer’s economic prospects depended on how close they lived to good roads and navigable waterways that allowed them to transmit their crops to market. A person’s ability to bring lawsuits and to avail themselves of the legal system grew harder the further they lived from the county seat, or from roads that led to it. Americans even conceived of political representation in geographic terms. Northerners and Southerners passionately debated over the location of the nation’s capital. With the passage of the Residence Act in 1790, they determined that capital would be centrally located between the northern and southern ends of the United States, in what is now Washington D.C. The location of state capitals was also a matter of contention. Between 1776 and 1812, eleven states moved their capital at least once. All of this is to say that the more historians know about roads, ferries, and travel, the more they also know about how the economy worked, how law operated, and how political representation was structured.

Thomas Jefferson, as a man of the Enlightenment, recorded, measured, and calculated things obsessively. This was especially true when he traveled. Jefferson recorded his observations about the flora and fauna he encountered on his journeys, jotted down details about the towns he visited and the people he met, and kept records of food and goods that he bought. All the while, Jefferson kept copious notes in his account book on the distances he traversed and the roads he traveled.

On May 17, 1791, Jefferson and James Madison left the nation’s temporary capital in Philadelphia on a month-long jaunt through the Hudson Valley, up to Lake George, then down through western Massachusetts, and finally back to Philadelphia. All told, according to Jefferson’s calculations, they traveled 920 miles. During the trip, Jefferson made notes when they stopped for meals or lodging or to meet with people. Then on June 20, a day after the duo returned, Jefferson recorded the entire itinerary of the trip, including the towns they passed through, the taverns between towns at which they stopped, and the miles they traveled between places by land and water. Even more interestingly, Jefferson kept track of the quality of the roads and ferry routes. He used an asterisk (*) to denote good quality routes, a cross (+) for “middling” ones, and a dash (-) for bad routes.

A few months later, Jefferson left the capital to return to Monticello. Again, he kept a detailed account of the distances he traveled each day and the places he passed through. This time, Jefferson made even more notes about the terrain, which ranged from “tolerably level,” to hilly, to “very mountainous.”

Most of the roads were made of clay, gravel, sand, or loam (muddy, clay soil), though he also described a few as stumpy and others as “frogeaten.” In the margin, Jefferson scribbled a note that underscores just how compulsively he kept records of these journeys. Before he left on the trip, Jefferson bought from a Philadelphia watchmaker an odometer that counted the revolution’s of his carriage’s wheel. He had measured distance based “on the belief that the wheel of the Phaeton [his carriage] made exactly 360. revoln’s in a mile.” After the trip, though, he re-measured circumference of the wheel and found that it made only 354.95 revolutions in a mile. So for every seventy-one miles Jefferson thought he traveled, he had actually traveled seventy-two. How Jefferson found the time to do all of these calculations while serving as Secretary of State is another matter altogether.

On one level, these pages of Jefferson’s account book are merely records of two journeys he took, and testimonials to his propensity for measuring the world around him. On another level, these notes constitute a record of the travel routes and the quality of transportation infrastructure in a large swath of the most densely populated areas of the early United States.

Mapping Jefferson's travel to Monticello from Philadelphia