After capturing Washington, D.C. in 1814, the British burned the U.S. Capitol, destroying the Library of Congress and its 3,000-volume collection. Thomas Jefferson, in retirement at Monticello, offered to sell his personal library to the Library Committee of Congress in order to rebuild the collection of the Congressional Library.
Congress appropriated the funding and
on this date in 1815 President James Madison signed the bill. Twice as large as the original Library of Congress destroyed by the British, the Jefferson collection included a range of topics beyond the first collection's scope. As Jefferson said,
“I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection; there is, in fact, no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.”
Nowadays, we might be more accurate if we replace "subject" with "lobbyist."
