Natural history and moral-sense philosophy bound American independence to domestic affections in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. By surfacing the racial and spatial architecture of family feeling as the text’s cut-off locus of attachment and traumatic loss, we can locate the centrality of gender and sexuality to the book’s racial project and to the lonely pose of mourning performed by its author. This affective architecture then reveals the relationship among very different forms of collective trauma – plantation slavery, frontier warfare, sexual violence – registered in Jefferson’s text as a failure to recognize or remember.