Correspondence, official statements and addresses, including a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, plantation and personal accounts, notebook, fee book, case book, garden book, farm books, calculations of interest, records of early Virginia laws and history and other writings on political, legal, educational, and scientific matters, newspaper clippings, and other papers. The bulk of the correspondence and writings falls within the period 1775-1826 and encompasses the major events of the founding and growth of the United States in that era. Letters, notes, lists, and essays document Jefferson's role as the founder of the University of Virginia and his interest in such diverse areas as agriculture, anthropology, architecture, botany, ciphers, culinary arts, geology, literature and language, meteorology, travel, viticulture, and weights and measures.

Correspondents, in addition to the political and military leaders of the American Revolution and early Federal period, include Abigail Adams, Anne Cary Randolph Bankhead, François de Barbé-Marbois, Joel Barlow, Benjamin Smith Barton, François Jean de Chastellux, William C. C. Claiborne, José Francisco Correia da Serra, Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy, Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, Andrew Ellicott, Francis Eppes, Giovanni Valentino Mattia Fabbroni, Patrick Gibson, Alexander Hamilton, Jean Antoine Houdon, Alexander von Humboldt, George Jefferson, Tadeusz Kościuszko, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Thomas Leiper, Pierre Charles L'Enfant, Meriwether Lewis, George Logan, Filippo Mazzei, John Melish, Robert Mills, Samuel L. Mitchill, André Morellet, Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, Adrienne-Catherine, comtesse de Noailles de Tessé, Charles Willson Peale, Joseph Priestley, J. Philip Reibelt, David Rittenhouse, Benjamin Rush, William Short, Fulwar Skipwith, Samuel Harrison Smith, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, William Thornton, John Trumbull, Benjamin Vaughan, José Ignacio de Viar, Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, C.-F. Volney, Benjamin Waterhouse, John Watson, Jonathan Williams, William Wirt, Caspar Wistar, and Josef Yznardi.