A subscriber wrote to me regarding today's Jefferson citation, which I have as:

"When an individual uses a new word, if illformed it is
rejected in society, if wellformed, adopted, and, after
due time, laid up in the depository of dictionaries.
And if, in this process of sound neologisation, our
transatlantic brethren shall not choose to accompany
us, we may furnish, after the Ionians, a second example
of a colonial dialect improving on it's primitive."

He questioned, of course, the possessive pronoun "it's". The quote is pasted from here; but there are three possible answers to his question:

1) the error was in the transcription of the letter
2) the error was Jefferson's
3) it's not an error; that was the style of the day (or there was no style)

Does anyone know when the current rulz were adopted?

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It looks like it *could be a transcription error; googling gives four it's and two its, and Google(Books) gives two it's and four its. So we have either transcription error or overcorrection!?

I don't know the answer to your question. I did notice, though, this disclaimer "further reading" link at the bottom of the letter you linked to:

Because of copyright reasons we cannot publish all texts that are available on the internet in our own format, which would allow us to provide links to relevant background material for the letters.

Which *may suggest your hunch is right.

Hmm--well-educated people do make mistakes, of course. Here's a little background on his:
Thomas was five years old when he began his education under the family tutor at Tuckahoe. In 1752 the Jeffersons returned to Shadwell and again started work on a plantation home. Thomas, however, spent little time at Shadwell. Almost immediately he was sent to Northam in St. James Parish, Virginia, where he studied Latin with the Reverend William Douglas until 1757, when his father died. He was then sent to the school of the Reverend James Maury in Fredericksville Parish, Virginia, and spent two years studying Greek and Latin classics, history, literature, geography, and natural science.
web page

But my bet is on 1 or 3.