Thomas Jefferson

April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826

Principal author of the Declaration of Independence, third President, and one of the most influential and most contradictory of the Founding Fathers.

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Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743, at Shadwell, a plantation on the Virginia frontier. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a planter and surveyor, and his mother, Jane Randolph, came from one of Virginia's most prominent families. When his father died in 1757, the fourteen-year-old Jefferson inherited more than 5,000 acres of land and about twenty enslaved people. He studied at the College of William & Mary and then read law under the respected George Wythe, joining the Virginia bar in 1767. Throughout his life Jefferson was a restless learner, teaching himself architecture, science, several languages, and the violin, and filling his home with thousands of books. Jefferson entered politics in Virginia's House of Burgesses and quickly became one of the boldest voices for the American cause. In 1774 he wrote 'A Summary View of the Rights of British America,' arguing that Parliament had no real authority over the colonies. Two years later, at just 33 years old, he was chosen for the Committee of Five to draft a statement of independence, and his colleagues handed the writing to him alone. The result was the Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4, 1776, whose most famous words, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,' became the promise the nation would spend centuries trying to live up to. During the Revolution Jefferson served as governor of Virginia, a difficult term that ended under a cloud when British cavalry raided Charlottesville in 1781 and he narrowly escaped capture by fleeing Monticello. He poured his deepest convictions into the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which he drafted in 1777 and saw enacted in 1786; it separated church from state and became a model for the First Amendment. From 1785 to 1789 he served as U.S. Minister to France, where he watched the French Revolution begin. Because he was in Paris, Jefferson missed the Constitutional Convention of 1787, following it through letters from his close friend James Madison and urging that the new plan include a bill of rights. Back home, Jefferson became the nation's first Secretary of State under President Washington. His running battles with Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton over how much power the federal government should have split the country's leaders into its first political parties: Jefferson and Madison's Democratic-Republicans against Hamilton's Federalists. Jefferson served as Vice President under John Adams, then defeated him in the bitter election of 1800. That contest ended in an electoral tie with Aaron Burr and was decided only after 36 ballots in the House of Representatives, a crisis so alarming it led to the Twelfth Amendment. As the third President, from 1801 to 1809, Jefferson made one of the most consequential decisions in American history. In 1803 he bought the vast Louisiana Territory from France for about 15 million dollars, nearly doubling the size of the country. It troubled him deeply, because he believed the federal government should use only powers the Constitution clearly granted, and buying territory was not one of them, but he judged the opportunity too great to pass up. He sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the new land all the way to the Pacific, and in 1807 he signed the law that banned the importation of enslaved people, effective in 1808, though it did not end slavery itself. His second term ended in frustration with the Embargo Act of 1807, an attempt to punish Britain and France by halting American trade that mostly wound up hurting American merchants. Jefferson considered his life's proudest work to lie outside the presidency altogether. He designed his mountaintop home, Monticello, and rebuilt it over decades as an experiment in architecture. He founded the University of Virginia in 1819, designing its buildings, choosing its books, and shaping its lessons. After the British burned Washington in the War of 1812 and destroyed the congressional library, Jefferson sold his own remarkable collection of nearly 6,500 volumes to the nation in 1815, forming the core of the rebuilt Library of Congress. In his final years he reconciled with his old rival John Adams, and the two exchanged one of the great correspondences in American letters until, in a coincidence that stunned the country, both men died on the same day, July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration. Jefferson wrote his own epitaph and asked to be remembered for three things, pointedly leaving out the presidency: 'Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia.' Jefferson's legacy carries a deep contradiction that cannot be set aside. The man who wrote that all people are created equal enslaved more than 600 people over his lifetime, the most of any U.S. president, and freed only a handful. In 2000 the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs Monticello, concluded that Jefferson fathered the children of Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman at Monticello; the conclusion rests on DNA evidence from 1998 together with detailed historical records. He died deeply in debt, and within a year most of the people he had enslaved were sold at auction, tearing families apart. Understanding Jefferson means holding both truths at once: he gave the country some of its highest ideals of liberty, self-government, religious freedom, and education, and he lived a life that fell painfully short of them. Both are part of why he still matters. You can explore the framework he helped create in the U.S. Constitution & Civics journey.