Jefferson included extensive data about the state's natural resources and economy and wrote at length about slavery and miscegenation; he articulated his belief that blacks and whites could not live together as free people in one society because of justified resentments of the enslaved.[106] He also wrote of his views on the American Indian, equating them to European settlers in body and mind.[107][108]
Notes was first published in 1785 in French and appeared in English in 1787.[109] Biographer George Tucker considered the work "surprising in the extent of the information which a single individual had been thus far able to acquire, as to the physical features of the state";[110] Merrill D. Peterson described it as an accomplishment for which all Americans should be grateful.[111]

Member of Congress
Independence Hall Assembly Room where Jefferson served in the Continental Congress
The United States formed a Congress of the Confederation following victory in the Revolutionary War and a peace treaty with Great Britain in 1783, to which Jefferson was appointed as a Virginia delegate. He was a member of the committee setting foreign exchange rates and recommended an American currency based on the decimal system which was adopted.