Unlike “Publius,” Thomas Jefferson was anything but silent about David Hume. Time and again, but only after 1807, Jefferson barked loudly his hatred for Hume's History. Jefferson's Humean animus is an entrenched part of scholarship on Jefferson and on the American Founding. For Jefferson's nineteenth-century biographers, such as James Parton, Hume's History was a book that Jefferson “never ceased to hate.” Early twentieth-century biographers, such as Francis W. Hirst, painted a similar scene: “If Jefferson had been an ardent young English radical, he could not have denounced with more fervour … the villainy of Hume's Tory history.” Over the years Jefferson's biographers have followed that lead, repeatedly asserting Jefferson's hatred for Hume, the details of which they have fleshed out. So too have specialized scholars of Jefferson's constitutional, philosophical, political, and social thought. A few studies have even focused their primary attention on Jefferson's hatred of Hume's History. Modern scholars are agreed that Hume was Jefferson's “bête noire in the realm of ideas” and even that he had always felt that way, waging “a lifelong campaign against” the “insidious influence” of Hume's political thought.

Jefferson's own comments about Hume in the 1760s, 1770s, 1780s, and 1790s, as shown above, provide very little foreshadowing of his later antagonisms. Indeed, the younger Jefferson purchased, read, commonplaced, re-purchased, re-read, and otherwise absorbed Hume's History of England and Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. He also recommended that others do the same.