Thomas Jefferson (380)

Thomas Jefferson (13 April 1743–4 July 1826) was a politician, diplomat, author of the Declaration of Independence, third President of the United States, slaveholder, and a Member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1780. Born in Albemarle county, Virginia, to Peter Jefferson, a slaveholding plantation owner and politician, and his wife Jane Randolph, young Thomas Jefferson entered the world with privileges which enabled him to become a remarkable young student. Inheriting his father’s land, enslaved staff, library, and social status in 1757, he continued his study of the classical world under a local tutor before he entered William and Mary College in 1760. He then studied law (1762-1765), and finally gained admittance to the Virginia bar (1767), whereby he began what could have been an extremely successful law career, if the impending revolution had not consumed his attention. He entered politics only two years after earning the bar, when the freeholders of Albemarle elected him to the House of Burgesses.

In his new position, he continually sided against British Parliament in its attempts to curb various American grasps for increased autonomy. Jefferson summed up the beliefs he developed as a culmination of his studies and early political career into his pamphlet, A Summary View on the Rights of British America (1774). The paper became one of the first to claim America ought to be entirely self-governed, with nothing but allegiance to the same King tying the colonies to Britain. Meanwhile, Jefferson also began building his own residence, only a few miles away from the family property, which he dubbed Monticello, inspired by his studies of Italian renaissance architecture. Having recently inherited his father-in-law’s estate as well (1773), he gained two new plantations, more enslaved workers, and debts that would plague him for the rest of his life. Jefferson had little time to tend to all of this though, as by 1775 he landed a seat in the Second Continental Congress, and the following year lent his by now well-known writing skills to a draft of a declaration of independence in anticipation of worsening relations with Britain. After a long editing process in Congress, that document became the Declaration of Independence, approved by Congress on July 4th, 1776.

Later that year, Jefferson returned to Virginia to enter the new House of Delegates, where his reforms injected some republicanism into the oligarchical colony of Virginia. To that end, he successfully abolished entail and primogeniture, established religious freedom; less successfully he attempted to create a universal education system (including universities), and gradually emancipation and repatriation of enslaved people. In 1779 he ascended to Governor of Virginia and thereafter most of his time went to the defense of the state. Benedict Arnold invaded Virginia in 1781; Jefferson spent the remainder of his time in office running away from the Redcoats. Likely tired and humiliated by the turn of events, Jefferson briefly retreated from public life.

Jefferson spent his newfound free time at Monticello absorbed in his correspondence with French secretary François Marbois, producing a set of musings Jefferson later compiled in Paris into Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson’s Notes touched on many of the philosophical, scientific, and social questions facing his state, and the nation at the time: most notably the institution of slavery. Despite being a slaveholder himself, he painted the institution of slavery as barbaric and violent, and continued to advocate for emancipation -- the caveat being that once enslaved individuals attained their freedom, they ought to be shipped off to somewhere else: Jefferson saw an equal, biracial society as wholly unfeasible. He put those beliefs back into action after the death of his wife, briefly serving as a congressman (1783-1784), where he penned legislation that would allow new self-governing territories to form as the United States expanded westward, and he attempted to thwart the legalization of slavery in those territories as well, to no avail. Accomplishing much in little time, he moved on to Paris to join a commission including Benjamin Franklin and John Adams to negotiate trade partnerships in Europe, and he succeeded Franklin as minister to France less than a year thereafter. Lacking the leverage for heavy negotiation, Jefferson spent most of his time in Europe traveling, studying, frequenting the salons of Paris, and throwing his support behind burgeoning revolutionary activity. It is also around this time he began a relationship with the enslaved woman Sally Hemings, who shared a father with his late wife, and with whom Jefferson had multiple children who would be born into enslavement.

Returning to the United States in 1789 on what he thought was temporary leave, President Washington appointed Jefferson Secretary of State. Reluctant to abandon his post in France, he accepted the position nonetheless, and began the task of establishing the forms and functions of American foreign policy. However, Jefferson quickly learned he had an enemy in Washington’s cabinet: Alexander Hamilton, leading figure among the coalescing federalist party, forcing Jefferson to tilt toward the developing “republican” faction. Hamilton thwarted Jefferson’s attempts to preserve an alliance with France as tensions in Europe boiled and the federalists sought lucrative British trade partnerships. Seemingly unable to escape the grip of the federalists, Jefferson ended up as President John Adams’ Vice President in 1796, where he called on state legislatures to resist the authoritarian rulings of the Adams administration.

The battle between Jefferson and Adams raged into the election of 1800, when the two ran a bitter campaign against one another for president that resulted in a tie between Jefferson and running mate Aaron Burr (a quirk soon Amended). The decision fell to the House of Representatives, which cast thirty-three votes over four days, each ending in a tie, too, before Jefferson emerged victorious. As President, Jefferson sought to cultivate an era of peace after two decades of tumult in the fledgling nation, in part by appointing men lacking in generational wealth or title to various government offices. Federalist resentment of his policies led to the proliferation of gossip surrounding Jefferson’s relationship to the enslaved mother of some of his children. However, Jefferson refused to respond and instead ushered in his greatest triumph in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson’s luck did not carry over into his second term: as war raged in Napoleonic Europe, American neutrality policies ultimately led to the War of 1812 after he left office.

However, his reputation was anything but tarnished: within his own lifetime Jefferson became a national hero, and his beloved Monticello a tourist attraction. He served as President of the American Philosophical Society for nearly two decades (1797-1814). His library, bought by Congress after the British burned the capitol, became the foundation of the reborn Library of Congress. His efforts to establish a universal education system for the state of Virginia wrought the University of Virginia.

Jefferson was the era’s peerless epistolarian, and his letters, including those to APS Members—especially John Adams and James Madison—remain the most treasured of Jefferson’s writings. By 1818 Jefferson began to feel the crushing weight of his health and his debts, and he died less than a decade later, just hours before his friend Adams—exactly fifty years since America declared its independence through his hand: July 4, 1826. (ANB, DNB)