A look at Query 3 of Notes on the State of Virginia: Seaports

Query 3 is the shortest in the book:

"Qu. 3. a notice of the best seaports of the state, & how big are the vessels they
can receive?
            "Having no ports but our rivers and creeks, this query has been answered under the preceding one (Rivers)."

This is a misleadingly curt statement, since Hampton Roads is one of the largest natural harbors in the world, and Norfolk was Virginia’s largest and most promising city. The chief focus of Jefferson’s discussion of Virginia’s rivers, however, is their connection to the western back country; the eastern seaboard is of little interest to him. This is perhaps a  majority view in Virginia, but not a unanimous one; and it put him profoundly at odds with mercantile New England and the Middle Atlantic.

A look at Query 2 of Notes on the State of Virginia: Rivers

“2. Rivers”
The word “river” appears 170 times in Notes, more than any other noun. Indeed, rivers are central to Jefferson’s imperial view of Virginia. It is in this section that the state reclaims the expansiveness shorn from it in the recitation of limits in Query 1. If once all roads led to Rome, all rivers flow from Virginia. Jefferson follows the course of rivers no longer within Virginia’s borders, from Lake Michigan via the Mississippi to “the mines of Charcas, Zaccatecas & Potosi” and Mexico City. In Jefferson’s hands, nearly all of North America is in effect recast as Greater Virginia. For Jefferson, as for many of his fellow “countrymen,” the rivers are Virginia’s highways to the future, and connecting them with the great waterways of the West an essential part of its destiny. More immediately important as one of the functions of Notes, Jefferson is linking Virginia to the entire North American continent in the minds of his readers.