What we know about Jefferson's friendships, we know primarily through his familiar letter writing. While there is anecdotal information in the published accounts of some who interacted with him personally, and family stories that have been passed down, by far the best source for the historian is the large body of correspondence (some 16,000 letters, it has been reliably estimated) in the Library of Congress, University of Virginia, and Massachusetts Historical Society collections. Many, although not all, of these letters have been published. Though Jefferson, in general, adheres to eighteenth-century conventions, and thereby disguises his emotions, we can be fairly certain that the picture we obtain from his ample correspondence is not always constructed so that we, his posterity, are only able to perceive him as strong, consistent, and well intentioned. That is, there were times when he wrote in a less self-censored way than he ordinarily did; there were times when he felt impassioned and unconstrained, and took a chance in committing his feelings to paper. When he wrote, he wrote to have an impact on the person or persons to whom he addressed his letter - the plural is mentioned here because, in his century, one's correspondence was less private and often shared, unless the letter writer insisted on utter confidence or directed that the letter was meant for incineration. (We know this, because letters that instructed the recipient, “Burn this,” were in fact preserved.) Jefferson is public property now, and the meaning we derive from his writing is contingent on our ability to shed twenty-first-century skin and recover the foreign inner world of an eighteenth-century being.