<P> President Thomas Jefferson played an important role in establishing the structure of the Library of Congress . On January 26, 1802, he signed a bill that allowed the president to appoint the Librarian of Congress and establishing a Joint Committee on the Library to regulate and oversee it . The new law also extended borrowing privileges to the President and Vice President . </P> <P> The invading British army burned Washington in August 1814 during the War of 1812 and destroyed the Library of Congress and its collection of 3,000 volumes . These volumes had been left in the Senate wing of the Capitol . One of the few congressional volumes to survive was a government account book of receipts and expenditures for 1810 . It was taken as a souvenir by British Admiral George Cockburn, whose family returned it to the United States government in 1940 . </P> <P> Within a month, Thomas Jefferson offered to sell his personal library as a replacement . Congress accepted his offer in January 1815, appropriating $23,950 to purchase his 6,487 books . Some members of the House of Representatives opposed the outright purchase, including New Hampshire Representative Daniel Webster who wanted to return "all books of an atheistical, irreligious, and immoral tendency ." Jefferson had spent 50 years accumulating a wide variety of books in several languages and on subjects such as philosophy, history, law, religion, architecture, travel, natural sciences, mathematics, studies of classical Greece and Rome, modern inventions, hot air balloons, music, submarines, fossils, agriculture, and meteorology . He had also collected books on topics not normally viewed as part of a legislative library, such as cookbooks . However, he believed that all subjects had a place in the Library of Congress . He remarked: </P> <P> 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 . </P>

The library of congress is the responsibility of which governmental branch