The Library Jefferson Rebuilt: Three Thousand Books Burned, Six Thousand Sold

On the night of August twenty-fourth, eighteen fourteen, British soldiers walked into the Library of Congress and burned it. The library occupied two rooms in the Capitol's north wing at the time. The three thousand volumes that Congress had been accumulating since eighteen hundred burned in under an hour.

Congress needed to replace them. Thomas Jefferson, then seventy-one years old and retired to Monticello, had a solution. He had spent fifty years building a personal library of sixty-four hundred and eighty-seven volumes, one of the largest private collections in the country. The books covered law, science, philosophy, literature, architecture, history, geography, botany, cookery, and fine arts, in six languages. Jefferson offered to sell it to Congress.

The price he named was twenty-three thousand nine hundred fifty dollars. Congress debated the offer for months, with some members arguing that many of the books, particularly the works in French and the irreligious philosophy, were inappropriate for a national library. The purchase was authorized in January of eighteen fifteen.

Jefferson used the money to pay his debts, which had accumulated over decades of extravagant building and entertaining. He died still in debt in eighteen twenty-six.

The idea implicit in Jefferson's collection, that a national library should hold everything rather than only the respectable, shaped what the Library of Congress became. It now holds one hundred seventy-five million items and is the largest library in the world. The original Jefferson books are partly still in the collection; a fire in eighteen fifty-one destroyed roughly two thirds of them. Congress replaced those, too.

The Jefferson Building, opened in eighteen ninety-seven, is the ornate Italian Renaissance structure directly east of the Capitol. Jefferson's portrait is carved above the entrance. His collection of books, or what remains of it, is inside.