The title of Cara Rogers Stevens’s very fine first book, Thomas Jefferson and the Fight Against Slavery, does not fully capture its central argument. Yes, Stevens, an associate professor of history at Ashland University, manages to cover Jefferson’s long and consistent opposition to slavery, beginning with his failed effort to co-sponsor a bill in 1769 to abolish it, but she does so in a most original way, tracing the complicated history and reception of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. CRB readers will likely know that Jefferson’s only book began as a response to 22 queries sent to each of the newly independent United States in 1780 by the secretary of the French delegation in Philadelphia, Francois, the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois. What most people do not know is that it took Jefferson seven years before the official London edition of his book finally appeared (though he had printed a small number of copies earlier for friends) and only then because an unauthorized French translation had been published the previous year. During this time, as Jefferson moved back and forth between Charlottesville, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, and then in 1784 to