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!?