My Journey Through the Best Presidential Biographies

My Journey Through the Best Presidential Biographies

The Best Biographies of Thomas Jefferson

16 Thursday May 2013

Posted by Steve in Best Biographies Posts , President #03 - T Jefferson

≈ 62 Comments

American history , best biographies , book reviews , Dumas Malone , John Boles , Jon Meacham , Joseph Ellis , Kevin Hayes , Merrill Peterson , presidential biographies , Presidents , Thomas Jefferson , Willard Sterne Randall

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After nearly two months with Thomas Jefferson involving five biographies (ten books in total) and over 5,000 pages of reading, I still feel I know Jefferson less well than many other revolutionary-era figures…including some like Alexander Hamilton who I’ve only encountered through his numerous appearances in various presidential biographies.

But that’s part of the intriguing mystery that Jefferson presents – even the most dedicated Jefferson scholars such as Malone and Peterson have admitted difficulty in getting to know our third president on a personal level.  In his biography of Jefferson, Merrill Peterson acknowledged being mortified in confessing he still found Jefferson “impenetrable” after years of study.

Part of what seems to make Jefferson so complex is that he is not merely a two-dimensional figure.  The set of internal rules governing his behavior resembles a multi-variable differential equation whose output seems maddeningly inconsistent at times.  But on a basic level, Jefferson is no different than most of us – guided by a small number of core convictions, steered by a larger set of general principles, and influenced by a broad group of more nebulous forces.

Only that smallest group of convictions seemed to guide Jefferson as if they were immutable laws of physics.  His other principles and beliefs were more maleable, able to change under great strain, competing forces, or compelling circumstances of the moment.  He was a passionately private man, yet ended up in public office for most of his adult life.  He professed the evils of slavery, yet owned slaves (and may have even had a long-term relationship with one).  He was intensely afraid of the power of a broad federal government under the direction of a strong president, yet as president did very little to curb that power and in many instances did just the opposite.

Best Jefferson bios

* Dumas Malone’s six-volume series (“Jefferson and His Time”) took over three  decades to complete – it was begun when my parents were not old enough to walk, and finished when I was almost entering middle school. This series, to which Malone dedicated a huge chunk of his adult life, took me just five (rather intense) weeks to read.

Although this series does not receive high marks as a means of “entertainment” it receives the very best marks for its content and scholarship. The first five volumes won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975.

Volume 1 (“Jefferson the Virginian”) covers the first four decades of Jefferson’s life, up to the point when became a diplomat in Europe. Volume 2 (“Jefferson and the Rights of Man”) covers the years 1784-1792 which Jefferson spent in Europe as a diplomat and as George Washington’s first Secretary of State.

Volume 3 (“Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty”) covers the last year of Jefferson’s tenure as Secretary of State, his three-year retirement at Monticello, his years as John Adams’ Vice President and his election to the presidency in 1800. Volumes 4 and 5 (“Jefferson the President”) cover his eight year presidency while Volume 6 (“The Sage of Monticello”) covers the final seventeen years of Jefferson’s life.

As thorough and comprehensive as any biography on Jefferson could possibly be, the series suffers only from being less “readable” than more recent biographies which are written in modern, well-flowing verse, and perhaps for not addressing the Hemings controversy with evidence that has only recently come to light.

Malone’s series on Thomas Jefferson reminds me of Thomas Flexner’s series on Washington and Page Smith’s on John Adams – together, these three great works are in a class all to themselves. (Full reviews: Vol 1 , Vol 2 , Vol 3 , Vol 4 , Vol 5 , Vol 6 )

Merrill Peterson’s “ Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation, ” published in 1970, was written while Malone was about halfway through his series on Jefferson. In no other single-volume biography of any of our first three presidents can a reader find a more comprehensive book, chock-a-block with such an impressive level of relevant detail. Yet compared to Malone’s series, while it seems to contain proportionately similar granularity, it also seems to contain relatively fewer interesting conclusory remarks and insights.

Without a doubt, no serious library would be complete without a copy of Peterson’s classic. But with the benefit of hindsight, if I were forced to choose between reading Malone’s six-volume series or Peterson’s single-volume biography, I would not hesitate to invest the additional time required to experience Malone’s series. ( Full review here )

Joseph Ellis’s “ American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson ” was published in 1996, three years after he published his biography of John Adams. This is by far my favorite of Ellis’s books, and the second most “enjoyable” read among the Jefferson biographies.

Like each of Ellis’s works I’ve read so far, this book is not quite a biography and should not be read as such. In my opinion, the best way to enjoy “American Sphinx” is to first read either Malone’s series or Peterson’s biography. Ellis not only observes Jefferson’s behavior throughout life, as have other authors, but also synthesizes his observations into a set of characteristics that seems to have defined Jefferson’s personality. This book comes as close to getting into Jefferson’s mind as any book I’ve read. ( Full review here )

“ Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson ” by Alan Pell Crawford was published in 2008 and, despite a number of imperfections, proves quite an enjoyable and easy read. Although it exudes a slight tabloid “feel” Crawford has exploited a niche never before fully explored – even Malone’s last volume focusing on Jefferson’s retirement years seems slightly incomplete in hindsight.

By the end of the book, though, it feels as thought the author may have tried too hard to make his case. Rather than coming across as insightful and revealing, the book finally beings to feel hyperbolic and melodramatic. Nonetheless, as my next-to-last book on Jefferson, it was perfectly timed and absorbingly provocative. ( Full review here )

“ Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power ” by Jon Meacham was published in 2012 and is currently the most popular of the Jefferson biographies. As I’ve discovered from readers of this site, Meacham is a polarizing author. Those who love him do so because his primary mission seems to be to entertain and, only secondarily, to inform. Others find him distressing for exactly the same reason, sensing that he merely puts new wrapping paper on an old treasure.

But no matter your take on Meacham, “The Art of Power” is both easy and enjoyable to read. At times it is thoroughly engrossing and contains its own interesting perspective on Jefferson’s life. Although it is lighter on penetrating, recently-uncovered insights and heavier on clever one-liners than previous Jefferson biographies, it probably serves as the perfect “second” biography of Jefferson. ( Full review here )

– – – – – – –

[ Added January 2020 ]

* In 2013, I read four single-volume biographies of Jefferson and the six-volume series described above. Since then I’ve had the chance to read a biography of Jefferson I missed on that first trip through Jefferson: Willard Sterne Randall’s “ Thomas Jefferson: A Life ” which was published in 1993. But while it is uniquely valuable as a study of Jefferson’s legal studies and career, it covers most of the remainder of his life – including his presidency – with less dexterity and it turned out to be my least-favorite biography of Jefferson thus far.  ( Full review here )

[ Added October 2021 ]

* I’ve also now read John Boles’s 2017 biography “ Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty .” With 520 pages of text, this biography proves uncommonly thoughtful, thorough and revealing. Boles expends no small effort in attempting to unravel Jefferson’s complexity and perplexing contradictions – including the large gap between his attitude toward slavery and his actions – and here the book is quite successful. Less ideal is the relative lack of focus on understanding and revealing Jefferson’s friendships with figures such as James Madison and John Adams. And Boles’s writing style, while crisp and articulate, is rarely particularly colorful or engrossing. But overall this is perhaps the best modern, single-volume introduction to Jefferson’s life and times. ( Full review here )

[ Added August 2022 ]

* Published in 2008, Kevin Hayes’s “ The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson ” is a dense, detailed 644-page intellectual biography of the third president focused on the literature he read, wrote and collected. Although it provides much of the framework of a traditional biography, it is decidedly not one and cannot serve as an adequate substitute for anyone seeking a thorough and broad introduction to Jefferson. The natural audience for this book is quite limited, but for someone already familiar with T.J. who is interested in exploring his intellectual evolution through an analysis of the words that shaped his world, this book may prove ideal.  ( Full review here )

[ Added December 2022 ]

* Published two weeks ago, Fred Kaplan’s “ His Masterly Pen: A Biography of Jefferson the Writer ” resembles Kevin Hayes’s “The Road to Monticello” –  in spirit . However, the two books are quite different in approach. This book by Kaplan looks deceptively like a traditional biography – its chapters proceed chronologically and the narrative includes large chunks of Jefferson’s  non -literary life. But it’s focus is on understanding Jefferson’s character, contradictions and philosophy as revealed by his letters, speeches, declarations and books (and not by the books he bought, borrowed or merely read). As a supplemental text for readers acquainted with Jefferson, this book may prove uniquely intellectual and insightful. For readers seeking a traditional biography of Jefferson it is not ideal. ( Full review here )

Best Overall: Dumas Malone’s six-volume series

Most Enjoyable Biography: “ Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power ”

Best Single-Volume Biography: “ Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty ”

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62 thoughts on “the best biographies of thomas jefferson”.

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May 25, 2013 at 9:24 pm

It’s sad how so many modern “scholars” now dismiss Malone’s work.

May 26, 2013 at 4:33 pm

Reblogged this on Practically Historical .

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May 17, 2020 at 6:21 pm

Great website. Fantastic overviews of presidential historiography.

I believe you are a bit easy perhaps on Malone re: the Hemmings issue with “and perhaps for not addressing the Hemings controversy with evidence that has only recently come to light.”

Malone, of course did not have DNA, however, if you look closely at the evidence he did have, he systematically approached what was available to reach a preconceived conclusion. Malone knew that Sally’s children were TJ’s and wrote it otherwise. He simply could not abandon his position as the pied piper of the TJ cult.

And while his work is masterful. It is important to understand his limitations in being objective.

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October 15, 2013 at 12:59 pm

Unfortunately I started my book on TJ – “In Pursuit of Reason” by Noble Cunningham – before discovering your blog, and stupidly chose it only because it was $1 in my library’s bookstore. It wasn’t awful, just not terribly well written or compelling. I’ll happily admit that I’m interested in the presidents’ family lives as well as their political lives, and this was one shortcoming in Cunningham’s book, though not the only one. I think it’s a problem that the author did not even mention the Sally Hemings scandal, since it did come out during TJ’s presidency, via a man who had turned against TJ. The scandal was discussed in McCullough’s book on John Adams, and in the book I just finished on Madison (by Brookhiser). To have it ignored in a TJ bio seemed disingenuous, to put it nicely. I honestly feel I learned more about TJ the man (not the pol) from the Adams bio than from Cunningham’s book!

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April 5, 2014 at 9:17 am

Just discovered your site — really good work. In your work on Jefferson did you run into any assessment of Fawn Brodie’s controversial bio?

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May 24, 2014 at 5:46 am

Not in the biographies themselves, but there were numerous references to Fawn Brodie’s work in reviews I later read of the books I had read, and one of my frequent visitors makes no secret of his views: http://practicallyhistorical.net/?s=fawn+brodie

April 5, 2014 at 9:39 am

In your readings on Jefferson, did you ever run into any assessments of Fawn Brodie’s controversial biography?

April 5, 2014 at 1:42 pm

None of the books I read referenced Brodie’s biography in a substantive way (not that I remember, anyway) though I recall thee book being referenced in the bibliography of a few. I shied away from Brodie when I was selecting Jefferson bios to read given the overwhelming and consistently negative feedback I saw, but it’s on my “must read” list for my second pass through the presidents – out of curiosity, if nothing else.

April 5, 2014 at 1:51 pm

I also found the following assessment of Brodie’s biography thought-provoking (so much so that it convinced me to add the book to my follow-up list on Jefferson: http://practicallyhistorical.net/2013/03/06/classic-historical-takedowns-pt-1-2/

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April 14, 2015 at 2:31 pm

I’d also toss into the mix Henry Wiencek’s “Master of the Mountain.” Like American Sphinx, not a full bio, and even less complimentary. But a fully documented dismantling of many of the myths that surround Jefferson and much Jefferson scholarship.

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June 13, 2015 at 1:09 pm

I have also been reading presidential bios in order and am just finishing Trefousse’s Andrew Johnson. I’m wondering if you read Willard Sterne Randall’s Jefferson: A Life and what your thoughts were. So glad to find your blog….onto Grant!

June 14, 2015 at 6:21 pm

Good luck finishing up the A Johnson bio(!) I have not read Willard Sterne Randall’s bio of Jefferson – if you have, let me know what you thought. I seem to remember looking it up and finding it got mixed reviews, and since I had what I thought was a full plate of Jefferson bios I didn’t add it into the mix.

June 17, 2015 at 7:38 am

Randall did a very good job of detailing Jefferson’s early life. His Presidency was not emphasized as much, but there are plenty of other great books that do that as you have pointed out. The focus is more on his early life and his years in France. It was a nice insight into the man. Randall’s writing style can be a bit meandering and repetitive, something that he corrects in his Alexander Hamilton bio, but overall I felt It was a worthy read.

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November 5, 2015 at 4:29 pm

One short bio that merits attention is RB Bernstein’s very fine study for Oxford’s series of shorter biographies. I recall a lot of insight in a very little space (<300 pages) in this volume. Felt like I had a better understanding of the man and his legacy than Meacham.

November 6, 2015 at 7:27 am

Thanks, I’ve had a couple people tell me I need to read that one (as sort of a turbo-charged substitute for an American President Series bio of Jefferson) so I’ll probably add it to my follow-up list.

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September 22, 2017 at 5:37 pm

I agree enthusiastically with you about the brief R.B. Bernstein biography of Thomas Jefferson.

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March 3, 2016 at 7:19 pm

not even a mention of Henry Adams’s work on the jefferson administration?

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March 10, 2016 at 3:37 pm

Steve, have you been inclined to read Chernow’s Hamilton biography, or another Hamilton work, during your journey? Reading through biographies of Washington and Adams and gearing up for Jefferson and Madison it feels like not reading a Hamilton biography would do a disservice to the revolutionary era. Also thank you for the recommendation of Ferling’s John Adams: A Life, really enjoying it.

March 14, 2016 at 7:01 am

Will, I do have a large-ish (and ever expanding!) list of biographies I would like to read about the supporting cast of characters who worked with the presidents over time. One of the first to make the list was Alexander Hamilton (I’ve owned the Chernow bio of Hamilton longer than I’ve owned his book on Washington!) I haven’t given myself the flexibility of reading these non-presidential biographies yet for fear I would never get through the presidents themselves, but I really can’t wait to read about Hamilton, Ben Franklin, Calhoun, Henry Clay, Seward, Elihu Root, etc.

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November 2, 2016 at 4:56 pm

I’m currently reading Brands bio of Franklin, then moving on to Chernow’s Hamilton as preludes before starting on Washington in January

November 2, 2016 at 5:01 pm

I have to admit to being a bit jealous – those are two of the non -presidential biographies that are sitting in front of me begging to be read! I hope you enjoy them and let me know what you’re reading when you work through the presidents!

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September 2, 2016 at 11:51 am

Six volumes for the first two presidents, doubled as I read Dumas Malone’s six volume series. This was a serious investment in time, but absolutely worth it. I found a set of 5 on eBay in very good shape with djs and had to obviously buy one separately. After finishing I felt like I had lost a friend, the books were so absorbing. Even when I am done with this journey, I don’t feel like I need to read any more on Jefferson, I understand him as much as possible as a man and politician.

September 2, 2016 at 8:46 pm

Congrats on getting through so many volumes in your first three presidents! With limited time I don’t think you can go wrong with Chernow (Wash), McCullough (Adams) and Meacham (Jefferson) but the Flexner, Smith and Malone series on those three really provide penetrating, readable depth that’s hard to find in single-volume biographies. I can’t wait to see where you go from here!

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October 13, 2016 at 3:15 pm

This one may answer my question! Loved Chernow’s Washington and am now finishing McCullough’s Adams, which I’ve also enjoyed. Given that, and given that I want to stick to one volume, would Meacham be your recommendation here?

October 13, 2016 at 3:41 pm

If I had to read a single-volume bio of Washington I would probably choose Meacham’s (with Ellis’s in second place). But be forewarned…based on comments I’ve gotten it is clear that “The Art of Power” appeals to most people (as it did me) but there is a not insignificant group who felt let down by the book for one reason or another. If you read it let me know what you thought! (As you probably know I loved the Washington and Adams bios you read. LOVED them.)

January 9, 2017 at 4:03 pm

Finished “The Art of Power,” it was a bit up and down for me, but I liked it on the whole, as I thought that it gave a really good insight into the way Jefferson thought and worked. I did find it to be lacking in detail and context for many of the events Jefferson lived through. McCullough and Chernow, for example, seemed to delve more deeply into the events of Adams’s and Washington’s lifetimes and give you a better sense of understanding of the age. Meachem seemed to give a very brief (couple paragraphs) intro, then moved immediately to how Jefferson interpreted it and exercised his power. They also seemed to spend more time than Meachem introducing and providing meaningful insight on the other power players so you had a better sense of the people their subjects were working with/around.

Having said that, I thought it provided a really fair assessment of TJ, without overly glorifying him and didn’t ignore his many faults. I also thought it did a nice job of going out of its way to be fair to Hamilton’s point of view, and noted that neither Jefferson or Hamilton was the caricature that their opponents (up to the modern day) have painted of them. On the same note, however, I felt it was at times unfairly critical of Adams, but maybe that was just because I had just finished McCullough’s book!

Maybe since Jefferson was more of a personal enigma than Washington or Adams, that’s what consumed Meachem’s efforts, but I felt that if I hadn’t already had a fairly strong grasp on the events of the 1770s-1800s I might have been lost at certain points in this book.

Taking a bit of a presidential break and moving to Hamilton and Lafayette bios next, but I’ll be back for Madison soon, so I’m sure you’ll hear from me again!

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January 2, 2017 at 3:24 pm

I’m curious if anyone has an opinion about Fawn Brodie’s, “Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History,” which I just started reading on the heels of completing Ron Chernow’s superb Washington biography. Brodie is interesting so far, but it doesn’t seem to be in the first rank of presidential bios. Any thoughts?

January 2, 2017 at 3:39 pm

I’ve not read Brodie’s biography but it receives reviews “all over the map.” These two discussions caught my eye back when I was deciding which Jefferson bios to read: Gary Wills’ note and Practically Historical blog’s view .

January 2, 2017 at 3:41 pm

Thanks Steve! I’ll check ’em out.

September 22, 2017 at 5:34 pm

Excellent job with your website. It is one of a kind. Thank you. I agree with your reviews and rankings of biographies — at least the ones I have read. I have not read as many as you.

For example, the FDR biographies you reviewed and the ranked order of those books is spot on.

For Thomas Jefferson, I think an important brief book to add to your list is “Thomas Jefferson” by R.B. Bernstein. A brief biography of this character, who I understand and love (despite his shortcomings), is nearly impossible. I loved this brief book.

Again, thank you for your website.

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February 21, 2018 at 3:49 pm

I am curious if you’ve looked at, or if any one else has, Alf Mapp’s two volume bio on Jefferson from the 1980s, “Passionate Pilgrim” and “The Strange Case of Mistaken Identity.” I own this set but haven’t read it yet. I’ve generally heard good things about it, and know it was well regarded upon its release.

February 22, 2018 at 8:22 am

I never ran across these biographies until well after I finished Jefferson. Because they seem rarely read, I haven’t come across any particularly insightful reviews (not that I’ve looked all that hard) so I’ve got these sitting in a list that’s the literary equivalent of purgatory – I’m not sure whether to make them part of the my follow-up list or whether to avoid them altogether. If you or anyone else does or has read these volumes, I’d love to know what the verdict is…!

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February 22, 2018 at 9:45 am

I’d suggest leaving Mapp’s books in purgatory. Your follow-up list is already massive (and will undoubted grow), includes three (four if you count Dr. Wood’s Friends Divided) Jefferson titles already, and the Jefferson literature is vast enough to keep it there.

By the way, Friends Divided is a wonderful book. The last few chapters dealing with their reconciliation and correspondence are the best parts. Summed up nicely by the final sentence comparing Jefferson’s Idealism v Adams’s Realism: “That’s why we honor Jefferson and not Adams.”

April 3, 2018 at 11:51 am

How would you rate Mapp’s books? Since I already own them, I’m curious now if they’re still worth reading, or if they’re only sub par. Given the amount of Jefferson scholarship, I can see why you’d recommend not adding them to the follow-up list, even if they’re worth reading. They may not offer anything unique enough to warrant reading them after having already read so much! I do plan on reading Malone’s 6 volume work first, as I already own that one as well.

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April 7, 2018 at 12:42 pm

I don’t think you can really understand Jefferson until you understand Hamilton. I suggest Alexander Hamilton by Chernow.

April 8, 2018 at 4:15 am

That is the very first “non presidential biography” I’m planning to read once I get through Obama…!

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February 26, 2020 at 4:43 pm

I would love some advise on choosing a single-volume biography on Jefferson. I am interested in Meacham’s “The Art of Power,” But I’ve also seen good reviews of the 2017 bio “Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty” by John B. Boles.

Most posts above were made prior to the latter’s publishing. I would love to hear some thoughts on either (or both for those who have read them). With opinion of Jefferson being so varied and he being so complicated a person, I am looking for the most “fair” and informative bio.

February 26, 2020 at 4:48 pm

For what it’s worth, I’m also looking forward to hearing from anyone who has feedback on Boles’s biography. Earlier this year I read Willard Sterne Randall’s bio of Jefferson but wonder whether I should have tackled Boles’s instead…?

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May 9, 2020 at 5:04 am

I’ve read both Boles and Meacham, but not Randall (not yet, at least). I think Boles’s book was definitely more on the “informative” side of the scale, as compared to Meacham’s, which is more on the “entertaining” side. So for anyone trying to choose between the two, it really depends which kind of treatment is most appealing to you.

To me, Boles’s book was more factual and straightforward and not as much of an enjoyable, engaging read, to the point that his depiction of Jefferson made him feel a little lifeless and passive – things just happened to Jefferson and he went along with them, as opposed to Meacham’s depiction of an active, ambitious Jefferson who knew what he wanted and controlled his own destiny. I get the sense the truth was somewhere in between.

Joseph Ellis’s was my favorite Jefferson book, but I think you have to read a full-scale biography like Boles or Meacham first before you can fully appreciate Ellis.

So while they all have their strengths, none, to me, stand out as being a definitive single-volume Jefferson biography. Maybe he’s just too complicated to cover in just one book!

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August 12, 2020 at 8:48 am

Six months later you have probably solved this dilemma, but I have read the Meacham book and the Ellis book. In my opinion the Meacham book reads like a collection of chronological facts about Jefferson with not much attempt to provide any insight into Jefferson or any context for his actions.

The Ellis book is much better in my opinion but it is not a biography, as stated above. You might want to read the Meacham book first just to get an idea of what his life was like. You might also want to read a general history of America during the Revolution and the Early Republic years just to get a sense of historical context to Jefferson’s actions.

August 12, 2020 at 8:54 am

Your note & observation underscores one of the numerous reasons I’m now glad I didn’t initially choose “just one” biography per president to read – different authors with differing styles, often from different eras themselves, with access to different information each create a uniquely informative view of their subject. Reading several books on someone (like Jefferson in particular!) provides a far more nuanced, colorful and often complicated portrait of the person. I do think Meacham and Ellis create a particularly interesting duo when attempting to uncover Jefferson (who, I must say, remains a mystery to me even today)…

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August 3, 2020 at 2:29 pm

Has anyone read: 1. The Life of Thomas Jefferson. Three volumes. by Henry S Randall? or 2. The Life of Thomas Jefferson William Linn?

These are efforts from the 1800s.

November 6, 2020 at 8:12 pm

I have not read either, but Randall’s may be interesting. He was the first (only?) biographer to interview Jefferson’s immediate family.

For reading and historical purposes there are probably much better options, but the immediacy of it is interesting.

November 7, 2020 at 10:21 am

Thank you for your comments. Randall looks interesting.

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January 7, 2021 at 12:25 pm

I’d like to have your thoughts on Boles’ Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty. Having just read Chernow’s Hamilton, which is pretty negative about TJ, I’ve seen comments that Boles offers a more balanced perspective.

January 7, 2021 at 1:37 pm

I haven’t read Boles’s biography of Jefferson yet. It was published after I’d already gotten through my biographies of Jefferson, but I’ve added it to my “follow-up” list and plan to read it later this year.

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January 23, 2021 at 11:26 pm

I finally got a chance to go over to the next town and hit their used bookstores.

I was able to procure an immaculate like new set of Dumas’ 6 volumes for just $35 total.

Also found Rayback’s Millard Fillmore (Easton Press edition) for just $10.

And then I ran over to the other store and found a copy of Peterson’s Jefferson biography for $7.

Was completely happy with my trip as I have all the biographies I wanted for the first 3 presidents.

January 25, 2021 at 5:27 am

I wish my town had a next-town-over with a bookstore like that!

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March 13, 2021 at 8:00 pm

I posted briefly on the Madison discussion about Meacham’s Art of Power, and I was just really disappointed by that one. Unfortunately, unless I venture into Malone’s six-volume series, I might not find what I am looking for (and even with this there is still no guarantee). The one beacon of hope of finding a good one-volume bio might be with Boles. I am really hoping you can review that soon, because I really don’t want to sit down for another disappointing Jefferson experience!

In my opinion, Meacham gives only a very broad overview of the life of Jefferson. All of the details, especially the political interactions, seem to be given only superficial treatment. So many of the concluding thoughts of the author read like a high school term paper (like somewhat cringe-worthy filler material). It seems strange that I obtained a better understanding of Jefferson’s mind through his cameo appearances in other books. This is surprising, especially considering that over 200 pages of this volume are dedicated solely to notes. Even then, some of the conclusions are suspect.

For example, Meacham states that the causes of the revolution are not quite clear, and then goes on to suggest it was merely the brainchild of plantation owners who were heavily in debt to Britain and who didn’t like the idea of being taxed, and that Britain’s treatment of the colonies really wasn’t all that bad. Maybe this is true for some folks in Virginia, but thankfully I found much more thorough explanations in recent reads of H.W. Brands’ biography on Franklin and Les Standiford’s Desperate Sons. I was also disappointed that there was hardly more than a couple of pages dedicated to the debate and internal controversy of the Louisiana Purchase, as well as over the repeal of and passage of new Judicial Acts. These seem to be the most important parts of the Jefferson presidency, and yet, I learned next to nothing.

For a book titled “The Art of Power”, I really expected a greater in-depth look at the political dealings of Jefferson. Instead, we just get a broad overview of his personal life, and politics seem somewhat ancillary to that discussion.

March 15, 2021 at 8:19 am

Of all the books I’ve enjoyed over the years, this is the one that people seem to disagree on the most. In hindsight, most of the criticism is well-deserved but at the time I remember finding Meacham’s treatment more readable and penetrating if not quite as thorough as much of what I read elsewhere (with Malone and Peterson most notably and in most instances).

I was hoping to fall in love with Willard Sterne Randall’s bio of Jefferson, or perhaps John Boles 2017 biography. The former was disappointing. The latter is on tap for later this year!

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March 19, 2021 at 8:18 pm

I just finished Boles’ biography and it is one of the finest biographies I’ve ever read. It is well-written. He is even-handed. His discussion of slavery and Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings is thorough. I cannot imagine a better treatment of the Jeffersonian paradox: a man who enslaved other human beings, but was also thwarted in his efforts to move the country toward gradual emancipation – and then he didn’t even free most of his own slaves in his will (paradox x 2). Boles ponders the questions these facts raise. He covers all periods of Jefferson’s life. It is well-researched. And the bibliographical essay at the end almost by itself makes owning the book worthwhile. I could not have been more pleased. Thanks, Steve, for your excellent work.

March 20, 2021 at 4:32 am

Well…now I’m REALLY looking forward to reading Boles’s bio of Jefferson later this year (currently scheduled for September)!

March 20, 2021 at 5:03 pm

Hi Mark, if you don’t mind my asking, how well did Boles’ go into other controversial details? For context, I should have been a bit more specific in my criticisms of Meacham in my earlier comment. In terms of Sally Hemings and the contradiction of Jefferson’s slave ownership, I think that this was actually the strongest aspect of the Art of Power (although I have read some criticize that perhaps Meacham did not explore the nature of the relationship more, i.e., the possible power and subservient dynamics of such a relationship). I was instead concerned with other controversies and contradictions that may not be as popularly known, but which I find fascinating. Some examples, all of which are either glossed over or not mentioned at all by Meacham:

1. Chapter 23 of Hamilton: “Citizen Genêt … wanted the United States to extend more funds to France and supply foodstuffs and other army provisions. Much more controversially, he wanted to strike blows against Spanish and British possessions in North America and was ready to hire secret agents for that purpose. Jefferson became his clandestine accomplice when he furnished Genêt with a letter introducing a French botanist named André Michaux to the governor of Kentucky. Michaux planned to arm Kentuckians and stir up frontier settlements in Spanish Louisiana. Jefferson’s aid violated the policy of neutrality and made Hamilton’s unauthorized talks with George Beckwith seem like tame indiscretions in comparison.” I don’t know what others believe, but this seems borderline treasonous to me.

2. Chapter 2 of “Three Lives of James Madison” notes that as governor of Virginia, Jefferson secretly imprisoned British General Henry Hamilton in the dungeon of the Williamsburg jail for nearly two years, even after General Washington advised Jefferson to release him (Madison was also complicit in this). The implication was that they might have been attempting to conceal atrocities committed by the Virginia militia against native civilians, and that Hamilton’s release was conditioned on his silence. 3. Jefferson’s many contradictions regarding the French Revolution, not the least of which his previous admiration of Louis XVI and subsequent ambivalence over his murder and several other officers who served alongside American soldiers in the Revolutionary War.

4. Freneu’s newspaper – Jefferson putting an obviously unqualified person on the State Department payroll in order to entice (i.e., bribe or finance) a partisan newspaper.

5. Completely brushing off Shay’s Rebellion – “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”. Incomprehensible words, really, from a figure in government.

Thank you in advance for indulging me! I know this is somewhat detailed and specific. Just hoping to not have to dive into the six-volume series if Boles does the job.

March 21, 2021 at 8:31 am

Hi Brandon: I’m not sure my response will make your decision any easier, but here goes.

1. Boles’ definitely discusses Genet and Michaux, but to me Jefferson does not come across in the book as a clandestine accomplice.

2. I am finishing a book on Baron de Steuben now and the “Three Lives of James Madison” is my next book. I regret to say that I remember nothing about Henry Hamilton in Boles’ book and there is no mention of the name in the index under Hamilton. I should add that the text of the Boles book is a mere 520 pages. He mentions in the acknowledgements that he submitted a much longer manuscript. Perhaps his discussion of this episode ended up on the cutting room floor.

3. Certainly, there is much in the book about Jefferson’s attitudes toward France and his time there. My sense is that the Federalists – Hamilton, Adams, and Gouverneur Morris – were more hypocritical in their views of the revolution than Jefferson. They clearly viewed the revolutionaries in France as the rabble. Jefferson enjoyed the finer things that France offered and this can appear as an inconsistency. But ultimately, he was true to his republican principles, Boles would say almost to a fault. Boles states, Jefferson “was almost in a state of denial regarding matters in France, or, perhaps more accurately, he was willing to tolerate dreadful means for such an important end.” 242. Without question, Boles includes some Jefferson quotes that can make Jefferson seem callous when it comes to bloodshed and loss of life. But Boles does a good job of contextualizing Jefferson’s statements to make them a bit less damning.

4. Boles definitely addresses the Freneau newspaper controversy. It’s hard to tell whether it would be in sufficient detail to satisfy you. Hamilton’s use of John Fenno was almost, not quite maybe, as objectionable. I think the closeness of these politicians to these newspaper men shocks our conscience today, but rules regarding conflicts of interest and the like were a little less formal back then. Despite his mild manners, Jefferson could be a no holds barred type of guy. The fact that Jefferson wasn’t drummed out of government when the whole Freneau thing came to light shows the differences between then and now.

5. I thought I remembered the language you quoted, but I couldn’t find it when I went back to look for it. (That doesn’t mean it isn’t in there; I just couldn’t locate it.) Nonetheless, Boles does reference Jefferson’s views on Shay’s Rebellion. Of course, it’s critical to keep in mind that Jefferson was in France when it occurred. Boles states, Jefferson “missed how seriously many in the United States took the threat.” (Please see answer to #3 about Jefferson’s callousness.)

What I liked about the Boles book is his effort to contextualize the things that Jefferson said and did, but it didn’t come across as hagiographic. I loved the book, but Jefferson as a person continues to disappoint as compared with the Jefferson many of us were taught to revere in grade school.

That’s all I’ve got. Not sure this really helps you. Boles does a stellar job in 520 pages, but it’s tough to compete in terms of comprehensiveness with six volumes.

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October 28, 2021 at 12:33 pm

Totally agree with your assessment of John Boles’ biography of Jefferson. I found him sympathetic but critical to his subject – a masterful, thoughtful treatment of a life lived in its historical context. I felt he spoke effectively to many of the contemporary controversies surrounding Jefferson’s legacy. Have you read Kevin Hayes’ The Road to Monticello? Another terrific insight into Jefferson’s life.

January 7, 2023 at 10:52 am

I realize I’m replying to my original reply, but I was drawn back to this page by the recent activity (see below). Regarding Tim Rosenfield’s comment, which should be above, and Steve’s subsequent review, I wondered the extent to which Kevin Hayes in The Road to Monticello addressed the evolution of Jefferson’s views on slavery. How did he evolve from someone who apparently at one point believed in gradual emancipation to someone who didn’t free most of his slaves at his death? Is this discussed in Hayes’ book? (I still haven’t read the Hayes book despite the comment below.) Are there other recent studies of Jefferson that delve into this topic in any detail? Thanks.

October 28, 2021 at 5:34 pm

I have not read the Hayes’ book, but it looks interesting. I will add it to my very long list. Thank you for the recommendation.

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March 18, 2022 at 10:17 am

Thank you so much for this website and all the work you have put into it (and time spent reading)! Have you heard much about Christopher Hitchens’ “Thomas Jefferson: Author of America”? I was discussing my presidential reading campaign with my English professor the other day (some 12 years after I took his class) and he said it was excellent. Hitchens seems like an interesting fellow, though maybe a little sharp around the edges, and am curious how a personality like that examines a president like Jefferson. Thanks again!

March 21, 2022 at 5:38 am

I’ve heard about it but haven’t read it. Hitchens was, indeed, a fascinating fellow, and at some point I’ll probably read his book on Jefferson. But for the moment I have too many traditional biographies to get to, so I’ll probably wait on this for awhile.

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January 6, 2023 at 5:59 am

Hi there! I am such a fan of this site and probably browse it daily at this point, reading various reviews, etc.

I would love to know which of TJ’s biographies gave the most extensive treatment of the Burr Conspiracy. Do you remember off hand?

January 7, 2023 at 6:48 am

The Malone series probably provided the most thorough review, followed by Merrill Peterson’s biography. After that, I’d say the most useful coverage was probably Jon Meacham’s.

January 7, 2023 at 7:15 am

Malone, of course, will win on sheer page count. However, he his rarely objective when it comes to TJ the man of marble. Always the highest and best motives attached, whilst is opponents make up a who’s who rogue gallery of miscreants and Burr is enemy number one.

There are a number of book length studies on the conspiracy as such that provide a more balanced approach and wider source use than Malone.

The debate over Burr will never end because it rests at the very interpretation of what America could be, should be and sometimes actually is. Thus every generation will rework the Burr conspiracy influenced by more contemporary events.

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The Essentials: Five Books on Thomas Jefferson

A Jefferson expert provides a list of indispensable reads about the founding father

Megan Gambino

Megan Gambino

Senior Editor

Thomas Jefferson books

Historian Marc Leepson is the author of seven books, including Saving Monticello (2001), a comprehensive history of the house built by Thomas Jefferson and the hands it passed through since his death in 1826.

Here, Leepson provides a list of five must-reads for a better understanding of the author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States.

Jefferson and His Time , by Dumas Malone

This classic biography of Thomas Jefferson, written by one of the most renowned Jefferson scholars, was published in six volumes over 33 years. It consists of Jefferson the Virginian (1948), covering his childhood through his drafting of the Declaration of Independence; Jefferson and the Rights of Man (1951), about his years as a minister to France and secretary of state; Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty (1962), leading up through his presidential election; Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801-1805 (1970) and Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805-1809 (1974); and The Sage of Monticello (1981), about the last 17 years of his life, as his priorities changed from politics to family, architecture and education. In 1975, author Dumas Malone won the Pulitzer Prize for history for the first five volumes.

From Leepson: Malone is a Jefferson partisan, but his scholarship is impeccable .

American Sphinx  (1996), by Joseph J. Ellis

National Book Award winner Joseph J. Ellis’ newest book,  First Family , takes on the relationship between Abigail and John Adams. But a decade and a half ago, the Mount Holyoke history professor made Thomas Jefferson—and his elusive, complicated and sometimes duplicitous nature—the subject of  American Sphinx . “The best and worst of American history are inextricably entangled in Jefferson,” he wrote in the  New York Times  in 1997.

The book—one volume in length and written in layman’s terms—is perhaps a more digestible read than Malone’s series. “While I certainly hope my fellow scholars will read the book, and even find the interpretation fresh and the inevitable blunders few, the audience I had in my mind’s eye was that larger congregation of ordinary people with a general but genuine interest in Thomas Jefferson,” writes Ellis in the preface.

From Leepson:  An insightful, readable look at Jefferson’s character .

Twilight at Monticello  (2008), by Alan Pell Crawford

Alan Pell Crawford, a former political speechwriter and Congressional press secretary who now covers history and politics, pored over archives across the country, at one point holding a residential fellowship at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, to research this book. And the digging paid off. He found documents and letters of Jefferson’s relatives and neighbors, some never before studied, and pieced them together into a narrative of the president’s twilight years. During this far from restful period, Jefferson experienced family and financial dramas, opposed slavery on principle and yet, with slaves working on his own plantation, did not actively push to abolish it, and founded the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

From Leepson:  The best treatment by far of Jefferson’s life post-presidency (1809-26) .

The Jefferson Image in the American Mind  (1960), by Merrill D. Peterson

“The most important thing in my education was my dissertation,” said Merrill D. Peterson in 2005, about his time studying at Harvard in the late 1940s. Instead of researching the president’s life, Peterson focused on his afterlife, studying the lasting impact he had on American thought.

The idea became the basis of his first book,  The Jefferson Image in the American Mind , published in 1960. And the book, which won a Bancroft Prize for excellence in American history, established Peterson as a Jefferson scholar. After stints teaching at Brandeis University and Princeton, Peterson filled the big shoes of Jefferson biographer Dumas Malone as the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He wrote  Jefferson and the New Nation , a 1970 biography of the president, among other books, and edited the Library of America edition of Jefferson’s collected writings.

From Leepson:  A revealing history of Jefferson’s historical reputation from the 1820s to the 1930s .

The Hemingses of Monticello  (2008), by Annette Gordon-Reed

Harvard law and history professor Annette Gordon-Reed tells the story of three generations in the family of Sally Hemings, a slave of Thomas Jefferson’s thought to have bore him children. She starts with Elizabeth Hemings, born in 1735, who with Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, had Sally, and then follows the narrative through Sally’s children. Without historical evidence, no one can be certain of the nature of Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings. But Gordon-Reed argues that it was a consensual romance. She won the 2008 National Book Award for nonfiction, the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for history and, in 2010, a MacArthur “genius grant.”

From Leepson:  No list would be complete without a book on Jefferson, slavery and the Hemings family. This is the best one .

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Megan Gambino is a senior web editor for Smithsonian magazine.

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History Books » American History » Books on American Presidents

The best books on thomas jefferson, recommended by andrew burstein.

Thomas Jefferson is famous for having written the Declaration of Independence, with its ringing claim that "all men are created equal".  In modern times he has been castigated for hypocrisy, given his ownership of slaves and his failure to campaign for abolition. Here, historian Andrew Burstein discusses Jefferson's wider political career and whether it is fair to judge his attitude to slavery by contemporary standards.

Interview by Eve Gerber

The best books on Thomas Jefferson - Jefferson and the Virginians: Democracy, Constitutions, and Empire by Peter Onuf

Jefferson and the Virginians: Democracy, Constitutions, and Empire by Peter Onuf

The best books on Thomas Jefferson - Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry that Forged a Nation by John Ferling

Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry that Forged a Nation by John Ferling

The best books on Thomas Jefferson - Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty by John B. Boles

Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty by John B. Boles

The best books on Thomas Jefferson - Madison and Jefferson by Andrew Burstein & Nancy Isenberg

Madison and Jefferson by Andrew Burstein & Nancy Isenberg

The best books on Thomas Jefferson - "Those Who Labor for My Happiness": Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello by Lucia Stanton

"Those Who Labor for My Happiness": Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello by Lucia Stanton

The best books on Thomas Jefferson - Jefferson and the Virginians: Democracy, Constitutions, and Empire by Peter Onuf

1 Jefferson and the Virginians: Democracy, Constitutions, and Empire by Peter Onuf

2 jefferson and hamilton: the rivalry that forged a nation by john ferling, 3 jefferson: architect of american liberty by john b. boles, 4 madison and jefferson by andrew burstein & nancy isenberg, 5 "those who labor for my happiness": slavery at thomas jefferson’s monticello by lucia stanton.

T he third president of the United States is our topic today. Before we get to the books, please introduce us to Thomas Jefferson.

We think of the early presidents as nationalists. But, in the early days of the Republic, Americans identified most strongly with their state and local communities. Jefferson represented the states’ rights strain that eventually grew into the defensive mentality that led the South to secede in 1860. So, there’s an interesting interplay in Jefferson’s life: at times he stood for the interests of Virginia, at others for the interests of the nation.

We don’t like the word imperialism now, but back then Jefferson’s efforts to expand America were massively popular and ‘American empire’ had a hopeful ring to it. He was responsible for the Louisiana Purchase, which more than doubled the territorial extent of the United States in the first years of the 19th century. He sent Lewis and Clark to explore the entire North American continent, crossing the as yet unknown Rocky Mountains, which helped Americans imagine becoming a nation that extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific. So Jefferson was very much a nationalist in his idea that the republic would extend itself 3,000 miles west.

Thomas Jefferson is one of the idols of what you call ‘founder worship’. A marble temple for him, in the shape of Rome’s Pantheon, was constructed on Washington’s National Mall and dedicated in 1939. At its center is a bronze 19-foot tall 10,000-pound statue of Jefferson. Why the pedestal?

Jefferson and the Virginians , your first recommendation, a book by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor at History at University of Virginia Peter S. Onuf, places our subject in the context of the state that shaped him.

The University of Virginia was founded by Jefferson. Peter inherited the mantle of senior Jefferson scholar at Mr. Jefferson’s university. His best-known book is the brilliantly conceived Jefferson’s Empire . Jefferson and the Virginians is his latest book, written since his retirement. The book examines Jefferson’s interactions with several prominent Virginians at different stages of his political career and helps us understand how Jefferson advanced his political agenda for the United States. It is divided into sections focused on Jefferson’s interactions with each of these individuals.

“When Jefferson was called ‘a democrat’, it was not a compliment.”

Onuf starts with Patrick Henry, a charismatic courtroom lawyer whose oratory fueled the Revolution in Virginia. He was the one who got people fired up in 1775-76 and he became the first governor of independent Virginia. Their relationship was initially friendly. Then, when Jefferson succeeded Henry as Governor, it turned adversarial. Henry opposed Jefferson’s legislative agenda in Virginia, especially when it came to what has since become known as the separation of church and state. So, Henry starts out as a hero of Jefferson and becomes a nemesis.

There’s another chapter about Jefferson and James Madison’s long political alliance, which began based on their common distrust of and opposition to Patrick Henry. Onuf distinguishes Jefferson’s abstract ideas from his practice of politics. He shows that Jefferson has an ecstatic approach to popular politics, whereas Madison, best known as ‘The Father of the Constitution’, was resistant to key elements of Jefferson’s performative democracy.

When people talk about  ‘Jeffersonian democracy’, what do they mean?

Our next Thomas Jefferson book is Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry that Forged a Nation by historian John Ferling.

Ferling has written many books about the American Revolution; he has an encyclopedic knowledge of this period.

His Jefferson and Hamilton is a portrait in partisanship, a blow-by-blow account of the ideological contest between men with divergent visions. Jefferson feared centralization and a strong national government. Jefferson is, comparatively speaking, a states’-rights advocate. Hamilton believes in the strong central government. Jefferson is a Francophile and Hamilton is an Anglophile.

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Both Jefferson and Hamilton were underhanded in advancing their agendas. Hamilton revealed privileged information to a British representative, subverting Jefferson’s efforts, as secretary of state, to keep a distance from Britain. Jefferson wrote a long letter to Washington, in September 1792, trying to convince him that Hamilton was a monarchist intent on destroying the Republic. Jefferson and Hamilton went head-to-head in Washington’s cabinet. When Washington sided with Hamilton, Jefferson retired to his plantation. Hamilton ultimately got the better of Jefferson—until 1800.

Jefferson referred to his presidential election as the ‘Revolution of 1800’. It sounds grandiose. Please explain what he meant by that and how that fits in with the temperament you’re describing?

You call Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty by John B. Boles the “best full-length Jefferson biography of the 21st century”. What makes this book the best life of Thomas Jefferson?

Let’s turn to another very well-written book, Madison and Jefferson by you and your partner Nancy Isenberg.

Madison and Jefferson had a personal and political partnership that lasted fifty years. These two men loved each other, respected each other, and enjoyed each other’s company. It’s an enduring 50 year partnership, which no one had written a book about since 1950.

It’s called Madison and Jefferson , rather than the other way around, because although Madison is generally thought of as Jefferson’s protégé, they were in all respects equals. You could say the Jefferson’s presidency was a co-presidency with Madison, his secretary of state. People think of Madison as the cerebral father of the Constitution, which is accurate, but he was also a power player in Congress, especially in the troubled 1790s, when he held political seniority. Madison was instrumental in forging the anti-Hamilton political interest in Congress that ultimately backed Jefferson. There was nothing Jefferson did not consult Madison on.

The book identifies awkward truths that generations of patriotic mythmakers have avoided facing. It’s a story of country gentlemen practicing hardball politics. We think of democracy as something open and above board, but both Madison and Jefferson came to believe that political progress was best arranged in secret.

You show that Jefferson was a person for whom friendship had a public purpose, as well as a private purpose. He drew so much from his partnership with Madison and in later life, from his correspondence with his former nemesis, John Adams. Should we remember Jefferson as among America’s most successful political users?

Well, he had many lifelong friendships, and he knew how to use them to his advantage. He used his pen to mold opinion, to build alliances, and to forge plans sometimes in coded letters or in small conclaves. Then he and Madison presented pre-formed plans to Congress. Jefferson goaded his allies to enact his political will.

It is impossible, at least for me, to think about any aspect of Thomas Jefferson without turning to the fact that his life of luxury, leisure and civic involvement was made possible by slavery. I look forward to hearing about the 600 enslaved individuals whose labor gave Jefferson liberty.

In Democracy’s Muse , I write about how, from FDR to the present, every president and many members of Congress have quoted Jefferson to advance their own partisan agendas. His words were heroic. But he was someone who had inherited from his father and from his father-in-law a couple of hundred African Americans as property. That’s the world he was born into.

“When I lecture, I use the term ‘timid abolitionist’”

The question is: Why didn’t he do more to bring it to an end? He wrote about slavery as a sin, boldly, in the early 1780s. He wrote that slavery destroyed the virtue of white kids, who, growing up, had to learn the attitudes that embodied mastery. When I lecture, I use the term ‘timid abolitionist’ which is to say Jefferson wasn’t going to say anything more in public than what he wrote when he was young when he hoped that Virginia’s Legislature would find a way to eradicate slavery. He left the task of getting rid of this evil to the next generation.

We focus on Jefferson as the man who should’ve done more. But Washington was president for eight years and he didn’t lift a finger to free African Americans in his lifetime. He did free his slaves in his will, but it wasn’t immediate. Those slaves were only freed after his widow, Martha, died.

John Adams wrote the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution and Declaration of Rights, including the statement that “all men are born free and equal” which provided the basis for Massachusetts courts to abolish slavery in 1783. Prior to that he represented African Americans in suits to win their freedom. He hired freedmen and never enslaved labor.

Nancy and I just wrote a book about John and John Quincy Adams called The Problem of Democracy . It does distinguish the Adams family from the Virginian founders. In New England, they didn’t grow up around slaves. A New Englander might’ve had a household slave or one person who helped in the field. None of the New England states held as slaves more than 1-2% of its population at any time. In Virginia that figure was around 40%.

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Virginians’ economic well-being depended on slavery. Yet some in the state did work to find an end to slavery by compensating owners for their loss of property—a bill promoted by Jefferson’s grandson that nearly passed the Virginia legislature in 1832. Jefferson said that blacks and whites could never live together peacefully, because of understandable black resentments as well as white prejudices. This is what a majority of white early Americans probably believed. So, we would have to indict his entire generation and the entire leadership group for greed and a collective failure to cure their society of a species of injustice and immorality we find ugly and impossible to reconcile.

That brings us to Lucia Stanton’s “Those Who Labor for My Happiness”: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

This book represents the consummation of Stanton’s career researching the history of plantation slavery. It traces the lives of the extended families of Monticello over generations. Annette Gordon-Reed’s work on the connection between Jefferson and the Hemings family won a Pulitzer. Stanton’s work, as a senior researcher at Monticello for decades, laid a foundation for what Annette wrote. Stanton pretty much started from scratch in reconstructing the world of the slaves and free laborers in Jefferson’s neighborhood.

The only slaves freed in Jefferson’s will were part of the Hemings family. In 1997, DNA effectively proved they were his children. Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who was the biological half-sister of Thomas Jefferson’s wife, gave birth to several of Jefferson’s children. Stanton traces the Hemings family from Jefferson’s plantation to their post-emancipation lives in Ohio. It’s a marvelously interesting story about the diaspora of Jefferson’s house servants, how they made lives for their descendants, their work and professional accomplishments.

What about the other enslaved people? What was the nature of their lives and labor? How did they produce Jefferson’s wealth?

In this book, you meet people who worked in Jefferson’s house. The field laborers’ names were recorded but their lives went unrecorded.

Jefferson spoke of his servants as his “family”. They learned marketable skills. Sally, for example, was a seamstress. One of Sally’s brothers was a chef, another a brewer. Jefferson’s white grandchildren taught members of the Hemings clan how to read and write. One of Jefferson’s granddaughters, Ellen, moved to Boston and became a critic of slavery and she wrote to Jefferson about her objections. She maintained correspondence with the Hemings family; one named a child after Ellen. So, there was clearly fondness felt, something more than a master-servant relationship. Stanton is so good at teasing all this out.

In 2020, a descendant of Jefferson’s, Lucian Truscott IV, opined that the Jefferson Memorial is a monument to “a man who famously wrote that ‘all men are created equal’ in the Declaration of Independence that founded this nation—and yet never did much to make those words come true.” Fair assessment?

Yes, it’s fair. But on the other hand, as I tried to explain before, we have to indict the whole generation for its collective failure, you can’t place the brunt of America’s responsibility on the shoulders of one individual. Are we going to celebrate only those very few people who took an economic hit by freeing their slaves when everyone knew that slavery was evil? That’s a rather narrow way to examine history.

We cannot extract Jefferson from Virginia or the fact that he inherited 200 slaves and died a hundred thousand dollars in debt, which is in the neighborhood of $6 million today. Jefferson is always going to be a man of the 18th century and we can’t impose our moral expectations on men of the 18th century.

June 21, 2021

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Andrew Burstein

Andrew Burstein is the Charles P. Manship Professor of History at Louisiana State University.

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20 Best Books on Thomas Jefferson (2022 Review)

September 16, 2020 by James Wilson

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When asked to look back on some of the most well-known and famous presidents of the United States, the third president Thomas Jefferson is often one of the first to come to mind. Thomas Jefferson served as president between the years 1801 to 1809, and before that, served a term as the Vice President. While he was known for this, he holds even higher esteem in history books as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.

What are the Best Thomas Jefferson Books to read?

Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates: The Forgotten War That Changed American History

There are some common facts known about Thomas Jefferson in this way, but much like any renowned historical figure, there are little details about his life, work and strategies that remain unknown. Books about Thomas Jefferson have been printed again and again, each with its own bits of knowledge to take away. When it comes to finding the book on Thomas Jefferson that will interest you most, there are a few things to take into consideration.

No matter what sort of issues surrounding Jefferson pique your interests, there is a book out there for you, and this Thomas Jefferson buying guide will help you find it. With these books, you can uncover the truth in the myths surrounding him and understand some of the most important facts about the Founding Father himself.

Best Books on Thomas Jefferson: Our Top 20 Picks

Here are some of the best Thomas Jefferson books that you can consider to expand your knowledge on the subject:

1. Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates: The Forgotten War That Changed American History

Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates

During the time that Thomas Jefferson started his presidency in the year 1801, the brand new nation of America was already in deep debt and was in need of a swiftly growing economy. To make matters worse, its merchant ships were constantly under siege by pirate ships from North Africa that regularly kidnapped American sailors and took them as slaves and hostages, demanding ransoms higher than what the budding nation could afford to pay.

Because Jefferson found it next to impossible to negotiate with these pirates who showed little mercy for religious reasons, he moved past diplomacy, sending warships to fend off the Tripoli pirates and ultimately taking the first strides of America’s journey toward becoming a future superpower.

All of this is detailed in the book through exciting chapters that document events like cannon battles on the sea, night raids of enemy harbors and General Eaton’s 500-mile journey to the port of Derna from Egypt where, after a surprise attack, the American flag stood victorious on foreign land for the very first time.

  • Authors : Brian Kilmeade (Author), Don Yaeger (Author)
  • Publisher : Sentinel; Illustrated Edition (October 24, 2017)
  • Pages : 304 pages

2. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

Thomas Jefferson The Art of Power

From Pulitzer prize winning author Jon Meacham comes Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power , an in-depth biography of Thomas Jefferson that deals with the man’s time on Earth in vivid detail, chronicling him through his extraordinary life and all of the feats that came with him. The book shows Thomas Jefferson as a complex and compelling man who spend his life engaged in wars, blending his philosophical mind with the skill of a politician to help get America off on the right foot to becoming what it is today.

This biography takes a deeper look at Jefferson as we know him today, showing the inner workings of his mind and his understanding of human nature and humanity as a whole, approaching the difficult tasks of the president of a fledgling nation while touching on his passions that included books, family, architecture, gardens, Paris and even women, painting a wholly human picture of the Founding Father.

  • Authors : Jon Meacham (Author)
  • Publisher : Random House; Illustrated Edition (November 13, 2012)
  • Pages : 800 pages

3. The Jefferson Bible

The Jefferson Bible

Thomas Jefferson was famous for and talked about for many reasons, and perhaps one of the most peculiar was the fact that he essentially rewrote the Christian bible. In the book, you can see for yourself the man’s take on the bible itself, as even though he was not a devout Christian, still found himself inspired by some of the passages and uncomfortable with some of the others and sought to make it his own.

The Jefferson Bible is full of the words, passages and ideas that Jefferson believed to be the most important, writing in bits that resonated with him and leaving out things that didn’t. This is the original Government Printing Office 1904 edition of his version of the bible, the same one presented to members of Congress with its original Cyrus Adler introduction intact.

  • Authors : Thomas Jefferson (Author), Cyrus Adler (Introduction)
  • Publisher : Digireads.com (December 3, 2009)
  • Pages : 72 pages

4. The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson

The Jefferson Lies

Perhaps the most controversial book about Thomas Jefferson, the book is a highly argued-over book that underwent campaigns to stop its publication. Thought of as perhaps the very first history book to ever make history, this book tackled all of the various misconceptions about what had once been the beloved Founding Father and sought to shine light on the truths of his character. Cutting through the struggle of having the pages pulled from shelves, the book tears through the layers of political correctness that sought to change the image of the former president, deconstructing all of the myths surrounding the man and leaving in its wake information given through Jefferson’s own words and accounts from his close contemporaries at the time.

The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths answers questions about the rumors of his fathering a slave’s child, as well as potential racist ideologies and the idea that he even rewrote the bible to suit his beliefs.

  • Authors : David Barton (Author)
  • Publisher : WND Books; Reprint Edition (January 12, 2016)
  • Pages : 416 pages

5. Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (Eminent Lives)

Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (Eminent Lives)

Social critic and journalist Christopher Hitchens authors Thomas Jefferson: Author of America , a book that offers a provocative and brand new take on one of the most famous of the Founding Fathers of the United States. This biography takes a look at the author of the formative Declaration of Independence, given immense power through the creation of the document and as the ambassador to France when, really, all he wanted was a smaller, quieter place in the Virginia legislature.

The book explores the contrast present between Jefferson being an awkward public speaker but a masterful writer, showing his personality in a new light. The contrast continues in the way that he opposed slavery but still owned his own slaves. Thomas Jefferson: Author of America will surely give you an insight into the life and times of Jefferson in a way you’ve never before seen.

  • Authors : Christopher Hitchens (Author)
  • Publisher : Harper Perennial; Illustrated Edition (May 5, 2009)
  • Pages : 206 pages

6. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

American Sphinx The Character of Thomas Jefferson

Anyone who has taken a few basic history classes knows the basics of Thomas Jefferson, including his role as a Founding Father and President of the United States; however, much like every human being, his life extended well past what he did for a living. Even for a man who did not want to live his life on the public stage, much of what he did was ultimately turned into a public affair. With so much information surrounding the life and times of Thomas Jefferson, the author of American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson delves into the rumors, facts, accounts and tales of him to give an insight into the mind of Thomas Jefferson himself.

In this book, you can learn little-known facts about him, like the fact that he only delivered two public speeches in his eight years serving, to smaller facts like he liked to constantly sing under his breath.

  • Authors : Joseph J. Ellis (Author)
  • Publisher : Vintage Books (April 7, 1998)
  • Pages : 440 pages

7. Thomas Jefferson Reprint Edition

Thomas Jefferson

Taking cues from the concise and straightforward epitaph on Thomas Jefferson’s tombstone, the Thomas Jefferson biography by R. B. Bernstein is just as straightforward and short, giving you an unbiased view of the Founding Father in a way that seeks to educate in a simple way. Between the covers of Thomas Jefferson , you will find all of Jefferson’s failings, triumphs and many contradictions spelled out that leave him as one of the most discussed people in history.

The book explores everything from his passionate belief in and desire to uphold democracy while also arguing toward reasons why slavery should still be permitted to his complicated relationship with Sally Hemings. More than just a Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson was an inventor, diplomat, architect, writer and more, and you’ll learn about all of his many roles in this biography.

  • Authors : R. B. Bernstein (Author)
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press; Illustrated Edition (September 15, 2005)
  • Pages : 253 pages

8. Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson

Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson

A principle author of the Declaration of Independence and one of America’s Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson is known as a main proponent of democracy and republicanism that drives the nation today. In Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson , you will learn about his passion for individual rights and his efforts toward helping the fledgling nation continue to break away from Great Britain to become their own entity.

The book explores his brief time practicing law and defending slaves to his representation in the American Revolution and his anonymous publications that sought to embolden those looking to strengthen states’ rights as he was so passionate about doing. Follow along with Jefferson’s timeline where he organized the Louisiana Purchase and fought off pirates while trying to work out the British trade policies and see why he is one of the most talked about historical figures to this day.

  • Authors : Thomas Jefferson (Author)
  • Publisher : CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (July 6, 2017)
  • Pages : 98 pages

9. The Real Thomas Jefferson (American Classic Series)

The Real Thomas Jefferson (American Classic Series)

One of the most central and important actors in America’s history and democracy, it would stand to reason that Thomas Jefferson is one of the most heavily discussed and debated historical figures in American history. In The Real Thomas Jefferson , you can get a clear and concise look at who Thomas Jefferson was as a person outside of just his political career.

Over the years, he has been both deified and vilified by authors and historians with different motivations. Author Andrew M. Allison takes an unbiased, facts-based look at the former president, using Jefferson’s own words to describe his life to allow his own spirit to shine through history instead of the biases of historians so you can form your own understanding of who the Founding Father as was a person, according to him.

  • Authors : Andrew M. Allison (Author)
  • Publisher : National Center for Constitutional Studies; 2nd Edition (June 1, 1983)
  • Pages : 709 pages

10. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy

Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings

One of the most controversial and debated topics surrounding Thomas Jefferson’s life is the rumor that he was involved with Sally Hemings, one of his own slaves. In Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy , you can learn about all of the compelling arguments toward this purported relationship as well as the many inconsistencies within the stories, leaving you the ability to come to your own conclusions about this heavily debated topic.

The story begins in the early 1800’s and debunks the story from there with historians and scholars having their ideas challenged by biographers who heavily studied Jefferson’s character, beliefs and overall life long enough to give them substantial evidence against the claim. This telling and personal book takes a peek into the controversial topic in a way you’ve never read about it before.

  • Authors : Annette Gordon-Reed (Author)
  • Publisher : University of Virginia Press; Updated ed. Edition (March 29, 1998)
  • Pages : 320 pages

11. A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the Twenty-First Century

A Thomas Jefferson Education

For educators in a professional and homeschooling environment alike, A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the Twenty-First Century is a book that will help you learn how to best teach your students through tried and true methods that have been proven to work.

The book takes a new approach to education thought to be the Thomas Jefferson approach that will help you craft an individualized leadership-based education plan by showing you the way that the greatest thinkers and leaders in history were taught to get your students in the right state of mind as they take in new information. Also detailed is the manner in which these men and women were educated and able to produce lasting impacts and effects on the country that are still felt today.

  • Authors : Oliver DeMille (Author)
  • Publisher : TJEdOnline.com; First Paperback Edition (September 1, 2009)
  • Pages : 198 pages

12. Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson

Friends Divided John Adams and Thomas Jefferson

Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson compares and contrasts two of the prominent Founding Fathers and showcases all of the ways that they were different, both in their upbringing and in their differences in temperaments and ideals. Jefferson, a southern slave owner, has been painted as an optimist that had plenty of faith in the goodness present in people which could fuel their democracy, while Adam was a New England-born overachiever from the middle class that was skeptic about most people and held a rather elitist style review about government as a whole.

Though they worked closely together during the difficult times, their differences were too profound to ever truly come together, leaving them to hold interesting arguments against one another’s beliefs while at the same time rising to the top as figureheads for the budding political parties in America.

  • Authors : Gordon S. Wood (Author)
  • Publisher : Penguin Books; Reprint Edition (October 23, 2018)
  • Pages : 512 pages

13. The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams

The Adams-Jefferson Letters

Take a peek into the minds of two prominent founding fathers, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, in The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams . In this compilation are numerous back and forth letters that show the high-minded, intellectual conversations between the two men spanning over half a century that offer insight into the type of thought processes that helped build the nation.

Between the pages are conversations of religion, government, philosophy and even deeply human and personal topics such as griefs and joys surrounding their respective families. The book features letters that were previously unpublished in other similar compilations, helping fill in the gaps and give you a clearer look at the exchanges between these two influential leaders up until the days of their deaths.

  • Authors : Lester J. Cappon (Editor)
  • Publisher : University of North Carolina Press; 1st Edition (September 30, 1988)
  • Pages : 690 pages

14. Thomas Jefferson : Writings : Autobiography / Notes on the State of Virginia / Public and Private Papers / Addresses / Letters (Library of America

Thomas Jefferson Writings

One of the best ways to get to know historical figures is through the terms of their own words and ideas, written out by the men and women themselves, and in Thomas Jefferson : Writings : Autobiography/Notes on the State of Virginia/Public and Private Papers/Addresses/Letters , you get a firsthand look at the inner workings of Thomas Jefferson, one of the most famous Founding Fathers of America.

In between the pages of this book, you are given access to more than 287 letters as well as addresses to the public and both the original and the revised drafts of the Declaration of Independence—giving you plenty of insight into the way this great leader once thought and seeing how his various thought processes culminated in the ultimate success of his goals that are still felt today.

  • Authors : Thomas Jefferson (Author), Merrill D. Peterson (Editor)
  • Publisher : Library of America (August 15, 1984)
  • Pages : 1600 pages

15. Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty

Jefferson Architect of American Liberty

In Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty , John B. Boles has taken on the ambitious endeavor of creating the most comprehensive biography of one of the nation’s most complex and hotly debated Founding Fathers. In the book, the author explores every available access to Thomas Jefferson’s life, taking note of even the smallest details all while keeping him appropriately situated against the remarkable levels of chaos and upheaval in his times to keep everything in perspective.

Through this book, you’ll meet Thomas Jefferson in his various forms, including Jefferson the scientist, architect, musician, gourmet chef and bibliophile to the more famous parts of him such as his status as the author of the Declaration of Independence, his part in the Louisiana Purchase and the way he worked hard for states’ rights.

  • Authors : John B. Boles (Author)
  • Publisher : Basic Books; 1st Edition (April 25, 2017)
  • Pages : 640 pages

16. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History

Thomas Jefferson An Intimate History

Through the educated eyes of a novelist who has been studying Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History is a biography that tackles the many issues and thought processes that will help you understand the Founding Father through an unbiased scholarly lens. This book highlights different parts of his life, including the more famous aspects such as the writing of the Declaration of Independence, his ideas on revolution, race, love, religion and power, giving a comprehensive look at who he was as a person, not just as a political, revolutionary figurehead.

This novel also features a new introduction by the Pulitzer-Prize winning author Annette Gordo-Reed who talks about the impact of this book and why it is one of the most accurate and powerful accounts of what is arguably one of the greatest presidents of this country.

  • Authors : Fawn M. Brodie (Author), Annette Gordon-Reed (Introduction)
  • Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company; Illustrated Edition (September 6, 2010)
  • Pages : 624 pages

17. Notes on the State of Virginia (Penguin Classics)

Notes on the State of Virginia (Penguin Classics)

Understand the history of Thomas Jefferson through his own eyes in Notes on the State of Virginia authored by the man himself. In this book, you will learn about the time period through the words of Thomas Jefferson as he chronicles the social, political and natural history, giving you a look into the past from his perspective. Notes on the State of Virginia offers a unique look at what defines America as well as the Founding Father’s examination of what it really means to have freedom.

It is published by Penguin Classics, a renowned publisher with integrity and a history of publishing English-speaking classic literature. They work once again to provide you with authoritative texts that censor nothing and offer you notes and introductions that will help you further understand what you’re reading without interrupting the author.

  • Authors : Thomas Jefferson (Author), Frank Shuffelton (Editor)
  • Publisher : Penguin Classics; Annotated Edition (December 1, 1998)
  • Pages : 384 pages

18. Thomas Jefferson’s Education

Thomas Jefferson's Education

While Thomas Jefferson was a famously complex man, there are usually only a select few themes that are explored when it comes to his life. In Thomas Jefferson’s Education , you can read directly about the historical events that led up to the eventual creation of his historic university and what sort of social climate this institution was built in.

While following the path to its creation, the book keeps you enveloped in the planters experiencing a decline in their business, the trials and tragedies of enslaved black families that were ripped apart by their sales, and the interesting intricacies of male honor. It includes the way he advocated for overall emancipation of slaves while being reluctant to give up his own and the way that he hypocritically supported education for white children but eventually just worked toward building this rather elite university.

  • Authors : Alan Taylor (Author)
  • Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company; Illustrated Edition (October 15, 2019)
  • Pages : 448 pages

19. Thomas Jefferson: The American Presidents Series: The 3rd President, 1801-1809

Thomas Jefferson The American Presidents Series

It is believed that very few presidents have been as impactful as Thomas Jefferson both during the times he was alive and in the decades following. In Thomas Jefferson: The American Presidents Series , you can explore all of the reasons that he is considered to have been one of the greatest embodiments of the American spirit.

Being the originator of various principles that were crucial to the founding of American democracy, his ideals are ones that still ripple through time and reach us in the modern age, making them an important point of study for anyone interested in modern politics, such as his introduction of bills that mandated free public education and the separation of church and state. Follow along with the compelling words of historian Joyce Appleby as she examines all of the aspects of Jefferson’s character and life in an impactful new way.

  • Authors : Joyce Appleby (Author), Arthur M. Schlesinger (Editor)
  • Publisher : Times Books; First Edition (February 1, 2003)
  • Pages : 184 pages

20. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson Library Edition – Vol. 6 (of 20)

The Writings of Thomas Jefferson Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20)

Commonly believed to be one of the finest, most compelling thinkers and activists in history, Thomas Jefferson, one of the most prominent founding fathers, is a topic of limitless interest, debate, and controversy. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson Library Edition is the sixth volume in a 20 volume continuation that breaks down all of the interesting aspects of his life for you to digest and ponder.

In this particular volume, you can learn more about Thomas Jefferson’s inner workings through the thoughts and ideas of the man himself delivered on a firsthand account through various mediums such as many of his letters and addresses that were written in the mid 1780s, as well as two biographical essays that will give you a third-party view on the firsthand information you’ve read.

  • Authors : Thomas Jefferson (Author), Taylor Anderson (Editor)
  • Publisher : CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (September 13, 2017)

Choosing the Best Thomas Jefferson Books

Thomas Jefferson was a wildly complex man with inner workings every bit as interesting and compelling as the feats he performed on the public stage as the third President of the United States. Throughout the books listed here, you will learn remarkable tidbits and facts about one of the Founding Fathers, allowing you to see him in a new light not previously shone before. Each of these books presents new information on the president that will change your view of this famous president and allow you to see him for what he really was at the end of the day—a passionate human being.

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Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was a Founding Father of the United States who wrote the Declaration of Independence. As U.S. president, he completed the Louisiana Purchase.

thomas jefferson

(1743-1826)

Who Was Thomas Jefferson?

Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743, at the Shadwell plantation located just outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. Jefferson was born into one of the most prominent families of Virginia's planter elite. His mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, was a member of the proud Randolph clan, a family claiming descent from English and Scottish royalty.

His father, Peter Jefferson, was a successful farmer as well as a skilled surveyor and cartographer who produced the first accurate map of the Province of Virginia. The young Jefferson was the third born of 10 siblings.

As a boy, Jefferson's favorite pastimes were playing in the woods, practicing the violin and reading. He began his formal education at the age of nine, studying Latin and Greek at a local private school run by the Reverend William Douglas.

In 1757, at the age of 14, he took up further study of the classical languages as well as literature and mathematics with the Reverend James Maury, whom Jefferson later described as "a correct classical scholar."

  • College of William and Mary

In 1760, having learned all he could from Maury, Jefferson left home to attend the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia's capital.

Although it was the second oldest college in America (after Harvard ), William and Mary was not at that time an especially rigorous academic institution. Jefferson was dismayed to discover that his classmates expended their energies betting on horse races, playing cards and courting women rather than studying.

Nevertheless, the serious and precocious Jefferson fell in with a circle of older scholars that included Professor William Small, Lieutenant Governor Francis Fauquier and lawyer George Wythe, and it was from them that he received his true education.

Becoming a Lawyer

After three years at William and Mary, Jefferson decided to read law under Wythe, one of the preeminent lawyers of the American colonies. There were no law schools at this time; instead aspiring attorneys "read law" under the supervision of an established lawyer before being examined by the bar.

Wythe guided Jefferson through an extraordinarily rigorous five-year course of study (more than double the typical duration); by the time Jefferson won admission to the Virginia bar in 1767, he was already one of the most learned lawyers in America.

In 1770, Jefferson began construction of what was perhaps his greatest labor of love: Monticello , his house atop a small rise in the Piedmont region of Virginia. The house was built on land his father had owned since 1735.

In keeping with the interests of one of America's greatest "Renaissance Men" — Jefferson's interests ranged from botany and archaeology to music and birdwatching — Jefferson himself drafted the blueprints for Monticello’s neoclassical mansion, outbuildings and gardens.

More than just a residence, Monticello was also a working plantation, where Jefferson kept roughly 130 African Americans in slavery. Their duties included tending gardens and livestock, plowing fields and working at the on-site textile factory.

Thomas Jefferson's Children

From 1767 to 1774, Jefferson practiced law in Virginia with great success, trying many cases and winning most of them. During these years, he also met and fell in love with Martha Wayles Skelton, a recent widow and one of the wealthiest women in Virginia.

The pair married on January 1, 1772. Thomas and Martha Jefferson had six children together, but only two survived into adulthood: Martha, their firstborn, and Mary, their fourth. Only Martha survived her father.

His six children with Martha, however, were not the only children Jefferson fathered.

Sally Hemings

History scholars and a significant body of DNA evidence indicate that Jefferson had an affair – and at least one child – with one of his enslaved people, a woman named Sally Hemings, who was in fact Martha Jefferson's half-sister.

Sally's mother, Betty Hemings, was an enslaved owned by Jefferson's father-in-law, John Wayles, who was the father of Betty's daughter Sally. It is overwhelmingly likely, if not absolutely certain, that Jefferson fathered all six of Sally Hemings' children.

Most compelling is DNA evidence showing that some male member of the Jefferson family fathered Hemings' children, and that it was not Samuel or Peter Carr, the only two of Jefferson's male relatives in the vicinity at the relevant times.

Political Career

The beginning of Jefferson's professional life coincided with great changes in Great Britain's 13 colonies in America.

The conclusion of the French and Indian War in 1763 left Great Britain in dire financial straits; to raise revenue, the Crown levied a host of new taxes on its American colonies. In particular, the Stamp Act of 1765, imposing a tax on printed and paper goods, outraged the colonists, giving rise to the American revolutionary slogan, "No taxation without representation."

Eight years later, on December 16, 1773, colonists protesting a British tea tax dumped 342 chests of tea into the Boston Harbor in what is known as the Boston Tea Party . In April 1775, American militiamen clashed with British soldiers at the Battles of Lexington and Concord , the first battles in what developed into the Revolutionary War .

Jefferson was one of the earliest and most fervent supporters of the cause of American independence from Great Britain. He was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1768 and joined its radical bloc, led by Patrick Henry and George Washington .

In 1774, Jefferson penned his first major political work, A Summary View of the Rights of British America , which established his reputation as one of the most eloquent advocates of the American cause.

A year later, in 1775, Jefferson attended the Second Continental Congress , which created the Continental Army and appointed Jefferson's fellow Virginian, George Washington, as its commander-in-chief. However, the Congress' most significant work fell to Jefferson himself.

Declaration of Independence

In June 1776, the Congress appointed a five-man committee (Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin , Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston) to draft a Declaration of Independence .

The committee then chose Jefferson to author the declaration's first draft, selecting him for what Adams called his "happy talent for composition and singular felicity of expression." Over the next 17 days, Jefferson drafted one of the most beautiful and powerful testaments to liberty and equality in world history.

The document opened with a preamble stating the natural rights of all human beings and then continued on to enumerate specific grievances against King George III that absolved the American colonies of any allegiance to the British Crown.

Although the version of the Declaration of Independence adopted on July 4, 1776, had undergone a series of revisions from Jefferson's original draft, its immortal words remain essentially his own: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

After authoring the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson returned to Virginia, where, from 1776 to 1779, he served as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates. There he sought to revise Virginia's laws to fit the American ideals he had outlined in the Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson successfully abolished the doctrine of entail, which dictated that only a property owner's heirs could inherit his land, and the doctrine of primogeniture, which required that in the absence of a will a property owner's oldest son inherited his entire estate.

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Thomas Jefferson Fact Card

Separation of Church and State

In 1777, Jefferson wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which established freedom of religion and the separation of church and state.

Although the document was not adopted as Virginia state law for another nine years, it was one of Jefferson's proudest life accomplishments.

Governor of Virginia

On June 1, 1779, the Virginia legislature elected Jefferson as the state's second governor. His two years as governor proved the low point of Jefferson's political career. Torn between the Continental Army's desperate pleas for more men and supplies and Virginians' strong desire to keep such resources for their own defense, Jefferson waffled and pleased no one.

As the Revolutionary War progressed into the South, Jefferson moved the capital from Williamsburg to Richmond, only to be forced to evacuate that city when it, rather than Williamsburg, turned out to be the target of British attack.

On June 1, 1781, the day before the end of his second term as governor, Jefferson was forced to flee his home at Monticello (located near Charlottesville, Virginia), only narrowly escaping capture by the British cavalry. Although he had no choice but to flee, his political enemies later pointed to this inglorious incident as evidence of cowardice.

Jefferson declined to seek a third term as governor and stepped down on June 4, 1781. Claiming that he was giving up public life for good, he returned to Monticello, where he intended to live out the rest of his days as a gentleman farmer surrounded by the domestic pleasures of his family, his farm and his books.

Notes on the State of Virginia

To fill his time at home, in late 1781, Jefferson began working on his only full-length book, the modestly titled Notes on the State of Virginia .

While the book's ostensible purpose was to outline the history, culture and geography of Virginia, it also provides a window into Jefferson's political philosophy and worldview.

Contained in Notes on the State of Virginia is Jefferson's vision of the good society he hoped America would become: a virtuous agricultural republic, based on the values of liberty, honesty and simplicity and centered on the self-sufficient yeoman farmer.

Jefferson's Enslaved People

Jefferson's writings also shed light on his contradictory, controversial and much-debated views on race and slavery . Jefferson owned enslaved people through his entire life, and his very existence as a gentleman farmer depended on the institution of slavery.

Like most white Americans of that time, Jefferson held views we would now describe as nakedly racist: He believed that Black people were innately inferior to white people in terms of both mental and physical capacity.

Nevertheless, he claimed to abhor slavery as a violation of the natural rights of man. He saw the eventual solution of America's race problem as the abolition of slavery followed by the exile of formerly enslaved people to either Africa or Haiti, because, he believed, formerly enslaved could not live peacefully alongside their former masters.

As Jefferson wrote, "We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other."

Minister to France

Jefferson was spurred back into public life by private tragedy: the untimely death of his beloved wife, Martha, on September 6, 1782, at the age of 34.

After months of mourning, in June 1783, Jefferson returned to Philadelphia to lead the Virginia delegation to the Confederation Congress. In 1785, that body appointed Jefferson to replace Benjamin Franklin as U.S. minister to France.

Although Jefferson appreciated much about European culture — its arts, architecture, literature, food and wines — he found the juxtaposition of the aristocracy's grandeur and the masses' poverty repellant. "I find the general fate of humanity here, most deplorable," he wrote in one letter.

In Europe, Jefferson rekindled his friendship with John Adams, who served as minister to Great Britain, and Adams' wife, Abigail Adams . The educated and erudite Abigail, with whom Jefferson maintained a lengthy correspondence on a wide variety of subjects, was perhaps the only woman he ever treated as an intellectual equal.

Jefferson's official duties as minister consisted primarily of negotiating loans and trade agreements with private citizens and government officials in Paris and Amsterdam.

After nearly five years in Paris, Jefferson returned to America at the end of 1789 with a much greater appreciation for his home country. As he wrote to his good friend, James Monroe , "My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy."

Secretary of State

Jefferson arrived in Virginia in November 1789 to find George Washington waiting for him with news that Washington had been elected the first president of the United States of America, and that he was appointing Jefferson as his secretary of state.

Besides Jefferson, Washington's most trusted advisor was Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton . A dozen years younger than Jefferson, Hamilton was a New Yorker and war hero who, unlike Jefferson and Washington, had risen from humble beginnings.

Jefferson's Political Party

Rancorous partisan battles emerged to divide the new American government during Washington's presidency.

On one side, the Federalists , led by Hamilton, advocated for a strong national government, broad interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and neutrality in European affairs.

On the other side, the Republican political party, led by Jefferson, promoted the supremacy of state governments, a strict constructionist interpretation of the Constitution and support for the French Revolution .

Washington's two most trusted advisors thus provided nearly opposite advice on the most pressing issues of the day: the creation of a national bank, the appointment of federal judges and the official posture toward France.

On January 5, 1794, frustrated by the endless conflicts, Jefferson resigned as secretary of state, once again abandoning politics in favor of his family and farm at his beloved Monticello.

Jefferson as Vice President

In 1797, despite Jefferson's public ambivalence and previous claims that he was through with politics, the Republicans selected Jefferson as their candidate to succeed George Washington as president.

In those days, candidates did not campaign for office openly, so Jefferson did little more than remain at home on the way to finishing a close second to then-Vice President John Adams in the electoral college , which, by the rules of the time, made Jefferson the new vice president.

Besides presiding over the U.S. Senate , the vice president had essentially no substantive role in government. The long friendship between Adams and Jefferson had cooled due to political differences (Adams was a Federalist), and Adams did not consult his vice president on any important decisions.

To occupy his time during his four years as vice president, Jefferson authored A Manual of Parliamentary Practice , one of the most useful guides to legislative proceedings ever written, and served as the president of the American Philosophical Society .

John Adams' presidency revealed deep fissures in the Federalist Party between moderates such as Adams and Washington and more extreme Federalists like Alexander Hamilton.

In the presidential election of 1800, the Federalists refused to back Adams, clearing the way for the Republican candidates Jefferson and Aaron Burr to tie for first place with 73 electoral votes each. After a long and contentious debate, the House of Representatives selected Jefferson to serve as the third U.S. president, with Burr as his vice president.

The election of Jefferson in 1800 was a landmark of world history, the first peacetime transfer of power from one party to another in a modern republic.

Delivering his inaugural address on March 4, 1801, Jefferson spoke to the fundamental commonalities uniting all Americans despite their partisan differences. "Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle," he stated. "We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists."

Accomplishments

President Jefferson's accomplishments during his first term in office were numerous, remarkably successful and productive.

In keeping with his Republican values, Jefferson stripped the presidency of all the trappings of European royalty, reduced the size of the armed forces and government bureaucracy and lowered the national debt from $80 million to $57 million in his first two years in office.

Nevertheless, Jefferson's most important achievements as president all involved bold assertions of national government power and surprisingly liberal readings of the U.S. Constitution.

Louisiana Purchase

Jefferson's most significant accomplishment as president was the Louisiana Purchase. In 1803, he acquired land stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains from cash-strapped Napoleonic France for the bargain price of $15 million, thereby doubling the size of the nation in a single stroke.

He then devised the wonderfully informative Lewis and Clark Expedition to explore, map out and report back on the new American territories.

Tripoli Pirates

Jefferson also put an end to the centuries-old problem of Tripoli pirates from North Africa disrupting American shipping in the Mediterranean. During the Barbary War, Jefferson forced the pirates to capitulate by deploying new American warships.

Notably, both the Louisiana Purchase and the undeclared war against the Barbary pirates conflicted with Jefferson's much-avowed Republican values. Both actions represented unprecedented expansions of national government power, and neither was explicitly sanctioned by the Constitution.

Second Term as President

Although Jefferson easily won re-election in 1804, his second term in office proved much more difficult and less productive than his first. He largely failed in his efforts to impeach the many Federalist judges swept into government by the Judiciary Act of 1801.

However, the greatest challenges of Jefferson's second term were posed by the war between Napoleonic France and Great Britain. Both Britain and France attempted to prevent American commerce with the other power by harassing American shipping, and Britain in particular sought to impress American sailors into the British Navy.

In response, Jefferson passed the Embargo Act of 1807, suspending all trade with Europe. The move wrecked the American economy as exports crashed from $108 million to $22 million by the time he left office in 1809. The embargo also led to the War of 1812 with Great Britain after Jefferson left office.

Post Presidency

On March 4, 1809, after watching the inauguration of his close friend and successor James Madison , Jefferson returned to Virginia to live out the rest of his days as "The Sage of Monticello."

Jefferson's primary pastime was endlessly rebuilding, remodeling and improving his home and estate, at considerable expense.

A Frenchman, Marquis de Chastellux, quipped, "it may be said that Mr. Jefferson is the first American who has consulted the Fine Arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather."

University of Virginia

Jefferson also dedicated his later years to organizing the University of Virginia , the nation's first secular university. He personally designed the campus, envisioned as an "academical village," and hand-selected renowned European scholars to serve as its professors.

The University of Virginia opened its doors on March 7, 1825, one of the proudest days of Jefferson's life.

Jefferson also kept up an outpouring of correspondence at the end of his life. In particular, he rekindled a lively correspondence on politics, philosophy and literature with John Adams that stands out among the most extraordinary exchanges of letters in history.

Nevertheless, Jefferson's retirement was marred by financial woes. To pay off the substantial debts he incurred over decades of living beyond his means, Jefferson resorted to selling his cherished personal library to the national government to serve as the foundation of the Library of Congress .

Jefferson died on July 4, 1826 — the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence — only a few hours before John Adams passed away in Massachusetts.

In the moments before he passed, Adams spoke his last words, eternally true if not in the literal sense in which he meant them, "Thomas Jefferson survives."

As the author of the Declaration of Independence, the foundational text of American democracy and one of the most important documents in world history, Jefferson will be forever revered as one of the great American Founding Fathers. However, Jefferson was also a man of many contradictions.

Jefferson was the spokesman of liberty and a racist enslaved people owner, a champion of the common people and a man with luxurious and aristocratic tastes, a believer in limited government and a president who expanded governmental authority beyond the wildest visions of his predecessors, a quiet man who abhorred politics and arguably the most dominant political figure of his generation.

The tensions between Jefferson's principles and practices make him all the more apt a symbol for the nation he helped create, a nation whose shining ideals have always been complicated by a complex history.

Jefferson is buried in the family cemetery at his beloved Monticello, in a grave marked by a plain gray tombstone. The brief inscription it bears, written by Jefferson himself, is as noteworthy for what it excludes as what it includes.

The inscription suggests Jefferson's humility as well as his belief that his greatest gifts to posterity came in the realm of ideas rather than the realm of politics: "Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and father of the University Of Virginia."

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QUICK FACTS

  • Name: Thomas Jefferson
  • Birth Year: 1743
  • Birth date: April 13, 1743
  • Birth State: Virginia
  • Birth City: Shadwell
  • Birth Country: United States
  • Gender: Male
  • Best Known For: Thomas Jefferson was a Founding Father of the United States who wrote the Declaration of Independence. As U.S. president, he completed the Louisiana Purchase.
  • U.S. Politics
  • Astrological Sign: Aries
  • Death Year: 1826
  • Death date: July 4, 1826
  • Death State: Virginia
  • Death City: Monticello (near Charlottesville)
  • Death Country: United States

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CITATION INFORMATION

  • Article Title: Thomas Jefferson Biography
  • Author: Biography.com Editors
  • Website Name: The Biography.com website
  • Url: https://www.biography.com/political-figures/thomas-jefferson
  • Access Date:
  • Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
  • Last Updated: January 25, 2021
  • Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
  • We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.
  • All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
  • ...How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy.
  • Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.
  • The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
  • I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
  • I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man's milk and restorative cordial.
  • I cannot live without books; but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.
  • The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
  • All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
  • I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
  • [A] wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.
  • I know well that no man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it.

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Thomas Jefferson

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 22, 2022 | Original: October 29, 2009

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), author of the Declaration of Independence and the third U.S. president, was a leading figure in America’s early development. During the American Revolutionary War (1775-83), Jefferson served in the Virginia legislature and the Continental Congress and was governor of Virginia. He later served as U.S. minister to France and U.S. secretary of state and was vice president under John Adams (1735-1826). 

Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican who thought the national government should have a limited role in citizens’ lives, was elected president in 1800. During his two terms in office (1801-1809), the U.S. purchased the Louisiana Territory and Lewis and Clark explored the vast new acquisition. Although Jefferson promoted individual liberty, he also enslaved over six hundred people throughout his life. After leaving office, he retired to his Virginia plantation, Monticello, and helped found the University of Virginia.

Thomas Jefferson’s Early Years

Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743, at Shadwell, a plantation on a large tract of land near present-day Charlottesville, Virginia . His father, Peter Jefferson (1707/08-57), was a successful planter and surveyor and his mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson (1720-76), came from a prominent Virginia family. Thomas was their third child and eldest son; he had six sisters and one surviving brother.

Did you know? In 1815, Jefferson sold his 6,700-volume personal library to Congress for $23,950 to replace books lost when the British burned the U.S. Capitol, which housed the Library of Congress, during the War of 1812. Jefferson's books formed the foundation of the rebuilt Library of Congress's collections.

In 1762, Jefferson graduated from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he reportedly enjoyed studying for 15 hours, then practicing violin for several more hours on a daily basis. He went on to study law under the tutelage of respected Virginia attorney George Wythe (there were no official law schools in America at the time, and Wythe’s other pupils included future Chief Justice John Marshall and statesman Henry Clay ). 

Jefferson began working as a lawyer in 1767. As a member of colonial Virginia’s House of Burgesses from 1769 to 1775, Jefferson, who was known for his reserved manner, gained recognition for penning a pamphlet, “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” (1774), which declared that the British Parliament had no right to exercise authority over the American colonies .

Marriage and Monticello

After his father died when Jefferson was a teen, the future president inherited the Shadwell property. In 1768, Jefferson began clearing a mountaintop on the land in preparation for the elegant brick mansion he would construct there called Monticello (“little mountain” in Italian). Jefferson, who had a keen interest in architecture and gardening, designed the home and its elaborate gardens himself. 

Over the course of his life, he remodeled and expanded Monticello and filled it with art, fine furnishings and interesting gadgets and architectural details. He kept records of everything that happened at the 5,000-acre plantation, including daily weather reports, a gardening journal and notes about his slaves and animals.

On January 1, 1772, Jefferson married Martha Wayles Skelton (1748-82), a young widow. The couple moved to Monticello and eventually had six children; only two of their daughters—Martha (1772-1836) and Mary (1778-1804)—survived into adulthood. In 1782, Jefferson’s wife Martha died at age 33 following complications from childbirth. Jefferson was distraught and never remarried. However, it is believed he fathered more children with one of his enslaved women, Sally Hemings (1773-1835), who was also his wife’s half-sister .

Slavery was a contradictory issue in Jefferson’s life. Although he was an advocate for individual liberty and at one point promoted a plan for the gradual emancipation of slaves in America, he enslaved people throughout his life. Additionally, while he wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” he believed African Americans were biologically inferior to whites and thought the two races could not coexist peacefully in freedom. Jefferson inherited some 175 enslaved people from his father and father-in-law and owned an estimated 600 slaves over the course of his life. He freed only a small number of them in his will; the majority were sold following his death.

Thomas Jefferson and the American Revolution

In 1775, with the American Revolutionary War recently underway, Jefferson was selected as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress. Although not known as a great public speaker, he was a gifted writer and at age 33, was asked to draft the Declaration of Independence (before he began writing, Jefferson discussed the document’s contents with a five-member drafting committee that included John Adams and Benjamin Franklin ). The Declaration of Independence , which explained why the 13 colonies wanted to be free of British rule and also detailed the importance of individual rights and freedoms, was adopted on July 4, 1776.

In the fall of 1776, Jefferson resigned from the Continental Congress and was re-elected to the Virginia House of Delegates (formerly the House of Burgesses). He considered the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which he authored in the late 1770s and which Virginia lawmakers eventually passed in 1786, to be one of the significant achievements of his career. It was a forerunner to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution , which protects people’s right to worship as they choose.

From 1779 to 1781, Jefferson served as governor of Virginia, and from 1783 to 1784, did a second stint in Congress (then officially known, since 1781, as the Congress of the Confederation). In 1785, he succeeded Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) as U.S. minister to France. Jefferson’s duties in Europe meant he could not attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787; however, he was kept informed of the proceedings to draft a new national constitution and later advocated for including a bill of rights and presidential term limits.

Jefferson's Path to the Presidency

After returning to America in the fall of 1789, Jefferson accepted an appointment from President George Washington (1732-99) to become the new nation’s first secretary of state. In this post, Jefferson clashed with U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton (1755/57-1804) over foreign policy and their differing interpretations of the U.S. Constitution. In the early 1790s, Jefferson, who favored strong state and local government, co-founded the Democratic-Republican Party to oppose Hamilton’s Federalist Party , which advocated for a strong national government with broad powers over the economy.

In the presidential election of 1796, Jefferson ran against John Adams and received the second-highest amount of votes, which, according to the law at the time, made him vice president.

Jefferson ran against Adams again in the presidential election of 1800, which turned into a bitter battle between the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. Jefferson defeated Adams; however, due to a flaw in the electoral system, Jefferson tied with fellow Democratic-Republican Aaron Burr (1756-1836). The House of Representatives broke the tie and voted Jefferson into office. In order to avoid a repeat of this situation, Congress proposed the Twelfth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which required separate voting for president and vice president. The amendment was ratified in 1804.

Jefferson Becomes Third U.S. President

Jefferson was sworn into office on March 4, 1801; he was the first presidential inauguration held in Washington, D.C. ( George Washington was inaugurated in New York in 1789; in 1793, he was sworn into office in Philadelphia, as was his successor, John Adams, in 1797.) Instead of riding in a horse-drawn carriage, Jefferson broke with tradition and walked to and from the ceremony.

One of the most significant achievements of Jefferson’s first administration was the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France for $15 million in 1803. At more than 820,000 square miles, the Louisiana Purchase (which included lands extending between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains and the Gulf of Mexico to present-day Canada) effectively doubled the size of the United States. Jefferson then commissioned explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the uncharted land, plus the area beyond, out to the Pacific Ocean. (At the time, most Americans lived within 50 miles of the Atlantic Ocean.)  Lewis and Clark’s expedition , known today as the Corps of Discovery, lasted from 1804 to 1806 and provided valuable information about the geography, American Indian tribes and animal and plant life of the western part of the continent.

In 1804, Jefferson ran for re-election and defeated Federalist candidate Charles Pinckney (1746-1825) of South Carolina with more than 70 percent of the popular vote and an electoral count of 162-14. During his second term, Jefferson focused on trying to keep America out of Europe’s Napoleonic Wars (1803-15). However, after Great Britain and France, who were at war, both began harassing American merchant ships, Jefferson implemented the Embargo Act of 1807. 

The act, which closed U.S. ports to foreign trade, proved unpopular with Americans and hurt the U.S. economy. It was repealed in 1809 and, despite the president’s attempts to maintain neutrality, the U.S. ended up going to war against Britain in the War of 1812. Jefferson chose not to run for a third term in 1808 and was succeeded in office by James Madison (1751-1836), a fellow Virginian and former U.S. secretary of state.

Thomas Jefferson’s Later Years and Death

Jefferson spent his post-presidential years at Monticello, where he continued to pursue his many interests, including architecture, music, reading and gardening. He also helped found the University of Virginia, which held its first classes in 1825. Jefferson was involved with designing the school’s buildings and curriculum and ensured that unlike other American colleges at the time, the school had no religious affiliation or religious requirements for its students.

Jefferson died at age 83 at Monticello on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Coincidentally, John Adams, Jefferson’s friend, former rival and fellow signer of the Declaration of Independence, died the same day . Jefferson was buried at Monticello. However, due to the significant debt the former president had accumulated during his life, his mansion, furnishing and enslaved people were sold at auction following his death. Monticello was eventually acquired by a nonprofit organization, which opened it to the public in 1954.

Jefferson remains an American icon. His face appears on the U.S. nickel and is carved into stone at Mount Rushmore . The Jefferson Memorial, near the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated on April 13, 1943, the 200th anniversary of Jefferson’s birth.

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best biography thomas jefferson

The 10 Best Books on President Thomas Jefferson

Essential books on thomas jefferson.

thomas jefferson books

There are countless books on Thomas Jefferson, and it comes with good reason, aside from serving as America’s third President (1801-1809), he was a founding father and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence.

“Determine never to be idle,” he remarked. “No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing.”

In order to get to the bottom of what inspired one of history’s most consequential figures to the heights of societal contribution, we’ve compiled a list of the 10 best books on Thomas Jefferson.

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham

best biography thomas jefferson

Thomas Jefferson hated confrontation, and yet his understanding of power and of human nature enabled him to move men and to marshal ideas, to learn from his mistakes, and to prevail. Passionate about many things – women, his family, books, science, architecture, gardens, friends, Monticello, and Paris – Jefferson loved America most, and he strove over and over again, despite fierce opposition, to realize his vision: the creation, survival, and success of popular government in America.

Jon Meacham lets us see Jefferson’s world as Jefferson himself saw it, and to appreciate how Jefferson found the means to endure and win in the face of rife partisan division, economic uncertainty, and external threat. Drawing on archives in the United States, England, and France, as well as unpublished Jefferson presidential papers, Meacham presents Jefferson as the most successful political leader of the early republic, and perhaps in all of American history.

The father of the ideal of individual liberty, of the Louisiana Purchase, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and of the settling of the West, Jefferson recognized that the genius of humanity – and the genius of the new nation – lay in the possibility of progress, of discovering the undiscovered and seeking the unknown.

Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates by Brian Kilmeade

best biography thomas jefferson

When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, America faced a crisis. The new nation was deeply in debt and needed its economy to grow quickly, but its merchant ships were under attack. Pirates from North Africa’s Barbary Coast routinely captured American sailors and held them as slaves, demanding ransom and tribute payments far beyond what the new country could afford.

Over the previous 15 years, as a diplomat and then as secretary of state, Jefferson had tried to work with the Barbary states (Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco). Unfortunately, he found it impossible to negotiate with people who believed their religion justified the plunder and enslavement of non-Muslims.

These rogue states would show no mercy – at least not while easy money could be made by extorting America, France, England, and other powers. So President Jefferson decided to move beyond diplomacy. He sent the US Navy’s new warships and a detachment of marines to blockade Tripoli – launching the Barbary Wars and beginning America’s journey toward future superpower status.

American Sphinx by Joseph J. Ellis

best biography thomas jefferson

For a man who insisted that life on the public stage was not what he had in mind, Thomas Jefferson certainly spent a great deal of time in the spotlight – and not only during his active political career. After 1809, his longed-for retirement was compromised by a steady stream of guests and tourists who made of his estate at Monticello a virtual hotel, as well as by more than one thousand letters per year, most from strangers, which he insisted on answering personally.

In his twilight years Jefferson was already taking on the luster of a national icon, which was polished off by his auspicious death (on July 4, 1826); and in the subsequent seventeen decades of his celebrity – now verging, thanks to virulent revisionists and television documentaries, on notoriety – has been inflated beyond recognition of the original person.

For the historian Joseph J. Ellis, the experience of writing about Jefferson was “as if a pathologist, just about to begin an autopsy, has discovered that the body on the operating table was still breathing.” In this gem among books on Thomas Jefferson, Ellis sifts the facts shrewdly from the legends and the rumors, treading a path between vilification and hero worship in order to formulate a plausible portrait of the man who still today “hover[s] over the political scene like one of those dirigibles cruising above a crowded football stadium, flashing words of inspiration to both teams.”

Jefferson and Hamilton by John Ferling

best biography thomas jefferson

The decade of the 1790s has been called the “age of passion.” Fervor ran high as rival factions battled over the course of the new republic – each side convinced that the other’s goals would betray the legacy of the Revolution so recently fought and so dearly won. All understood as well that what was at stake was not a moment’s political advantage, but the future course of the American experiment in democracy. In this epochal debate, no two figures loomed larger than Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.

Both men were visionaries, but their visions of what the United States should be were diametrically opposed. Jefferson, a true revolutionary, believed passionately in individual liberty and a more egalitarian society, with a weak central government and greater powers for the states. Hamilton, a brilliant organizer and tactician, feared chaos and social disorder. He sought to build a powerful national government that could ensure the young nation’s security and drive it toward economic greatness.

This is the story of the fierce struggle – both public and, ultimately, bitterly personal – between these two titans. It ended only with the death of Hamilton in a pistol duel, felled by Aaron Burr, Jefferson’s vice president.

Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty by John B. Boles

best biography thomas jefferson

John B. Boles plumbs every facet of Jefferson’s life, all while situating him amid the sweeping upheaval of his times. We meet Jefferson the politician and political thinker – as well as Jefferson the architect, scientist, bibliophile, paleontologist, musician, and gourmet. We witness him drafting the Declaration of Independence, negotiating the Louisiana Purchase, and inventing a politics that emphasized the states over the federal government – a political philosophy that shapes our national life to this day.

Boles offers new insight into Jefferson’s actions and thinking on race. His Jefferson is not a hypocrite, but a tragic figure – a man who could not hold simultaneously to his views on abolition, democracy, and patriarchal responsibility. Yet despite his flaws, Jefferson’s ideas would outlive him and make him into nothing less than the architect of American liberty.

Madison and Jefferson by Andrew Burstein

best biography thomas jefferson

The third and fourth presidents have long been considered proper gentlemen, with Thomas Jefferson’s genius overshadowing James Madison’s judgment and common sense. But in this revelatory book about their crucial partnership, both are seen as men of their times, hardboiled operatives in a gritty world of primal politics where they struggled for supremacy for more than fifty years.

With a thrilling and unprecedented account of early America as its backdrop, this gem among books on Thomas Jefferson reveals these founding fathers as privileged young men in a land marked by tribal identities rather than a united national personality. Esteemed historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg capture Madison’s hidden role – he acted in effect as a campaign manager – in Jefferson’s career. In riveting detail, the authors chart the courses of two very different presidencies: Jefferson’s driven by force of personality, Madison’s sustained by a militancy that history has been reluctant to ascribe to him.

Friends Divided by Gordon S. Wood

best biography thomas jefferson

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams could scarcely have come from more different worlds, or been more different in temperament. Jefferson, the optimist with enough faith in the innate goodness of his fellow man to be democracy’s champion, was an aristocratic Southern slaveowner, while Adams, the overachiever from New England’s rising middling classes, painfully aware he was no aristocrat, was a skeptic about popular rule and a defender of a more elitist view of government.

They worked closely in the crucible of revolution, crafting the Declaration of Independence and leading, with Franklin, the diplomatic effort that brought France into the fight. But ultimately, their profound differences would lead to a fundamental crisis, in their friendship and in the nation writ large, as they became the figureheads of two entirely new forces, the first American political parties. It was a bitter breach, lasting through the presidential administrations of both men, and beyond.

Jefferson and the Virginians by Peter Onuf

best biography thomas jefferson

In  Jefferson and the Virginians , renowned scholar Peter S. Onuf examines the ways in which Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Virginians – George Washington, James Madison, and Patrick Henry – both conceptualized their home state from a political and cultural perspective, and understood its position in the new American union. The conversations Onuf reconstructs offer glimpses into the struggle to define Virginia – and America – within the context of the upheaval of the Revolutionary War.

Onuf contends that Jefferson and his interlocutors sought to define Virginia’s character as a self-constituted commonwealth and to determine the state’s place in the American union during an era of constitutional change and political polarization. Thus, the outcome of the American Revolution led to ongoing controversies over the identity of Virginians and Americans as a “people” or “peoples;” over Virginia’s boundaries and jurisdiction within the union; and over the system of government in Virginia and for the states collectively.

“Those Who Labor For My Happiness” by Lucia Stanton

best biography thomas jefferson

Our perception of life at Monticello has changed dramatically over the past quarter-century. The image of an estate presided over by a benevolent Thomas Jefferson has given way to a more complex view of Monticello as a working plantation, the success of which was made possible by the work of slaves. At the center of this transition has been the work of Lucia “Cinder” Stanton, recognized as the leading interpreter of Jefferson’s life as a planter and master and of the lives of his slaves and their descendants.

Stanton’s pioneering work deepened our understanding of Jefferson without demonizing him. But perhaps even more important is the light her writings have shed on the lives of the slaves at Monticello. Her detailed reconstruction for modern readers of slaves’ lives vividly reveals their active roles in the creation of Monticello and a dynamic community previously unimagined.

The essays collected here address a rich variety of topics, from family histories (including the Hemingses) to the temporary slave community at Jefferson’s White House to stories of former slaves’ lives after Monticello. Each piece is characterized by Stanton’s deep knowledge of her subject and by her determination to do justice to both Jefferson and his slaves.

The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson

best biography thomas jefferson

During his remarkable lifetime, Thomas Jefferson served his country in many capacities – among them, as President of the United States. But ultimately, this great and talented man – an accomplished architect, naturalist, and linguist – wished to be remembered primarily as the author of the Declaration of Independence.

In his autobiography, begun in 1821 at the age of 77, Jefferson presents a detailed account of his young life and the period during which he wrote the Declaration. A first draft of the document is included in this edition, as are his comments on the Articles of Confederation, his experiences as a wartime governor of Virginia, minister to France and observations during the French Revolution.

Also featured here are rich remembrances and insights as Jefferson recalls his roles as Washington’s secretary of state and vice president under John Adams, and his life in retirement.

If you enjoyed this guide to books on Thomas Jefferson, be sure to check out our list of The 10 Best Books on President George Washington !

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Thomas Jefferson

Scholars in general have not taken seriously Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) as a philosopher, perhaps because he never wrote a formal philosophical treatise. Yet Jefferson was a prodigious writer, and his writings were suffuse with philosophical content. Well-acquainted with the philosophical literature of his day and of antiquity, he left behind a rich philosophical legacy in his declarations, presidential messages and addresses, public papers, numerous bills, letters to philosophically minded correspondents, and his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia . Scrutiny of those writings reveals a refined political philosophy as well as a systemic approach to a philosophy of education in partnership with it. Jefferson’s political philosophy and his views on education were undergirded and guided by a consistent and progressive vision of humans, their place in the cosmos, and the good life that owed much to ancient philosophers like Epictetus, Antoninus, and Cicero; to the ethical precepts of Jesus; to coetaneous Scottish empiricists like Francis Hutcheson and Lord Kames; and even to esteemed religionists and philosophically inclined literary figures of the period like Laurence Sterne, Jean Baptiste Massillon, and Miguel Cervantes. In one area, however, he was behindhand: his views on race, the subject of the final section.

1. Life and Writings

2.1 the cosmos, 2.2 nature and society, 3.1 religion and morality, 3.2 the moral sense, 4.1 the “mother principle”, 4.2 the “natural aristoi ”, 4.3 usufruct and constitutional renewal, 4.4 revolution, 5.1 a system of education, 5.2 education and human thriving, primary literature, secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

From 1752 to 1757, Jefferson studied under the Scottish clergyman, Rev. William Douglas, “a superficial Latinist” and “less instructed in Greek,” from whom he learned French and the rudiments of Latin and Greek. With the death of his father in 1757, Jefferson earned a substantial inheritance—some £2,400 and some 5,000 acres of land to be divided between him and younger brother, Randolph—and then began to study under Rev. James Maury, “a correct classical scholar” ([Au], p. 4).

From 1760 to 1762, Jefferson attended William and Mary College and there befriended Professor William Small. He wrote in his Autobiography, “It was my great good fortune, and what probably fixed the destinies of my life that Dr. Wm. Small of Scotland was then professor of Mathematics, a man profound in most of the useful branches of science, with a happy talent of communication, correct and gentlemanly manners, & an enlarged & liberal mind.” Small, Jefferson added, had become attached to Jefferson, who became his “daily companion when not engaged in the school.” From Small, Jefferson learned of the “expansion of science & of the system of things in which we are placed” ([Au], pp. 4–5). Small introduced Jefferson to lawyer George Wythe, who “continued to be my faithful and beloved Mentor in youth, and my most affectionate friend through life,” and under whom Jefferson would soon be apprenticed in law—and Wythe introduced Jefferson to Governor Francis Fauquier, governor of Virginia from 1758 till his death ([Au], pp. 4–5). Small and Wythe especially would prove to be cynosures to the young man.

Upon leaving William and Mary (1762) and to the time he began his legal practice (1767), Jefferson, under the tutelage of Wythe ([Au: 5), undertook a rigorous course of study of law, which comprised for him study of not just the standard legal texts of the day but also anything of potential practical significance to advance human affairs. For Jefferson, a lawyer, having a mastery of all things except metempirical subjects and fiction, would be a human encyclopedia of useful knowledge. Advisory letters to John Garland Jefferson (11 June 1790) and to Bernard Moore (30 Aug. 1814) show a lengthy and full course of study, involving physical studies, morality, religion, natural law, politics, history, belle lettres, criticism, rhetoric, and oratory. Thereby, a lawyer would be fully readied for any turn of events in a case. As lawyer, Jefferson’s focus, David Konig notes, was cases involving property—e.g., the legal acquisition of lands and the quieting of titles—and that, adds Konig, shaped his political thinking on the need of the relative equal distribution of property among all male citizens for sound Republican government.

As lawyer, Jefferson took up six pro bono cases of slaves, seeking freedom. In the case of slave Samuel Howell in Howell v. Netherland (Apr. 1770), Jefferson argued, in keeping with sentiments he would include years later in his Declaration of Independence, “Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will.” The case was awarded to Netherland, before his lawyer, George Wythe, could present his case (Catterall, 90–91).

Jefferson would practice law till August 11, 1774, when he passed his practice to Edmund Randolph at the start of the Revolutionary War.

In 1769, Jefferson gained admittance to the Virginian House of Burgesses. Delegates’ minds were, he said, “circumscribed within narrow limits by an habitual belief that it was our duty to be subordinate to the mother country in all matters of government” ([Au], p. 5). Jefferson’s thinking inclined otherwise. The experience in the House of Delegates substantially shaped his revolutionary spirit.

On February 1, 1770, Jefferson lost most of the books of his first library when a fire razed his house at Shadwell. Of the loss of his books, he wrote to boyhood friend John Page (21 Feb. 1770), “Would to god it had been the money [that the books cost and not the books]; then had it never cost me a sigh!” He was to have two other libraries at Monticello in his life, which, because of his passion for learning, centered on books. When he built his residence at Poplar Forest early in the nineteenth century, he kept there a number of books—focused on philosophy, history, and religion—for his own enjoyment.

Jefferson took as his wife Martha Wayles Skelton on January 1, 1772. In that same year, daughter Martha was born. In 1778, daughter Mary was born.

Upon retirement from law in 1774, Jefferson wrote Summary View of the Rights of British America—“an humble and dutiful address” of complaints addressed to King George III of England. The complaints concerned numerous American rights, contravened, and aimed at “some redress of their injured rights” ([S], 105). Due to its trenchant tone, it earned Jefferson considerable reputation among congressmen as a gifted writer and as a revolutionist.

Jefferson was elected to the Continental Congress in 1775 as its second youngest member. He was soon invited to participate in a committee with John Adams, Roger Sherman, Benjamin Franklin, and Robert Livingston to draft a declaration on American independence. It was decided that Jefferson himself should compose a draft. As John Adams writes to Timothy Pickering (6 Aug. 1822) concerning his reasons for Jefferson being the sole drafter of the document: “Reason 1st. You are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. Reason 2nd. I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular; You are very much otherwise. Reason 3rd. You can write ten times better than I can” (Adams). For over two weeks, Jefferson worked on the Declaration of Independence in an upper-floor apartment at Seventh Street and Market Street in Philadelphia.

The document was intended to be “an expression of the American mind” and was put forth to the “tribunal of the world.” Jefferson’s draft listed certain “sacred & undeniable” truths: that all men are created “equal & independent”; that “from that equal creation,” all have the rights “to the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness”; that governments, deriving their “just powers from the consent of the governed,” are instituted to secure such rights; and that the people have a right to abolish any government which “becomes destructive of these ends” and to institute a new government, by “laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness” ([D], 19).

Rigorous debate followed. Excisions and changes were made to reduce Jefferson’s draft to three-quarters of its original length, though the basic structure and the argument therein—a tightly structured argument that begins with rights, turns to duties of government, and moves to a justification for revolutionary behavior when citizens’ rights are consistently transgressed by government—was unaltered. Thus, the Declaration contained the rudiments of a political philosophy that would be fleshed out in the decades that followed. The document, not thought to be significant at the time, was approved on July 4, 1776, and it would become one of the most significant political writings ever composed.

Not long after Jefferson finished the Declaration on Independence, he was appointed to a committee to revise the outdated laws of Virginia, as a result of a bill introduced to the General Assembly of Virginia. That was a hefty task, which Jefferson—as part of a committee comprising also Thomas Ludwell Lee, George Mason, Edmund Pendleton, and George Wythe—began in 1776. Of the five, Lee and Mason excused themselves, and revision, comprising 126 bills, was undertaken by Jefferson, Wythe, and Pendleton. Revision was completed in 1779, a period of not quite three years. Notable among the bills Jefferson drafted, were Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge and Bill for Religious Freedom. The latter was passed while Jefferson was in France as Minister Plenipotentiary; the former, requiring educative reforms that demanded a system of public education, did not pass.

From 1779 to 1781, Jefferson began tenure as governor of Virginia. During his governorship, he reformed the curriculum of William and Mary College by “abolishing the Grammar school,” eliminating the professorships in Divinity and Oriental languages, and supplanting them with professorships in Law and Police; Anatomy, Medicine, and Chemistry; and Modern Languages ([Au], p. 5). He also began his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia , in which he described the geography, climate, and people of Virginia and their laws, religions, manners, and commerce, among other things. The book, in general, was well received by his Enlightenment friends and did even more to enhance his reputation as a gifted writer.

Jefferson’s wife Martha died on September 6, 1782. Overwhelmingly distraught, he found some consolation in an invitation to function as Minister to France—he needed to be away from Monticello—which he did from 1784 to 1789. He ended the post at the bidding of George Washington, who asked him to be his Secretary of State—a post he held till 1793. Political disagreements between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton on political issues resulted in formation of the Republican and Federalist parties—the former, championing small, unobtrusive government and strict constructionism; the latter, larger, strong government and a less strict interpretation of the Constitution. After a brief retirement, he was elected Vice-President of the United States for one term that ended in 1801, and then President of the United States, which lasted two terms. His presidency, which began triumphantly with his conciliatory First Inaugural Address, was highlighted by the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, which doubled the size of the country; the subsequent Lewis and Clark Expedition, which ended in 1806; and the failed Embargo Act of 1807, which aimed, among other things, to punish England during its war with France, by prohibiting exchange of goods. During his tenure as president, his daughter Maria died (1804).

In retirement, Jefferson resumed his domestic life at Monticello, continued as president of the American Philosophical Society (a position he held for nearly 20 years), and began activities that would lead to the birth of the University of Virginia, which opened one year before his death. Irretrievably saddled with debt throughout his retirement, he sold his library, approximately 6,700 books, to Congress in 1815 to pay off some of that debt. He died, as did John Adams, on July 4, 1826. On his obelisk, there was written, upon his request ([E]: 706):

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson Author of the Declaration of American Independence Of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of the University of Virginia.

Jefferson wrote prodigiously. He penned some 19,000 letters. He published Notes on the State of Virginia (English version) in 1787. He wrote key declarations such as Summary View of the Rights of British Americans (1774), Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms (1775), and the Declaration of Independence (1776); authored numerous bills; and wrote his Manual of Parliamentary Practice for the Use of the Senate of the United States, a modified copy of which was still in use till 1977. He put together two harmonies, The Philosophy of Jesus (1804)—no copies are known to survive—and The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (1820), by extracting passages from the New Testament. Last, Jefferson undertook late in life an autobiography (never completed), “for my own ready reference & for the information of my family” ([Au]: 3).

2. Deity, Nature, and Society

Like many other contemporaries he read—e.g., Hutcheson, Kames, Bolingbroke, Tracy, and Hume—Jefferson was an empiricist, and in keeping with Isaac Newton, a dyed-in-the-wool materialist. To John Adams (15 Aug. 1820), he writes, “A single sense may indeed be sometimes decieved, [ 1 ] but rarely: and never all our senses together, with their faculty of reasoning.” Jefferson continues: “‘I feel: therefore I exist.’ I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space.” Given matter and motion, everything else, even thinking, is explicable. As all loadstones are magnetic, matter too is merely “an action of a particular organization of matter, formed for that purpose by it’s creator.” Even mind and god are material. “To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings.”

To Massachusetts politician Edward Everett (24 Feb. 1823), Jefferson says that observed particulars are found to be nothing but concretizations of atoms. He cautions, “By analyzing too minutely we often reduce our subject to atoms, of which the mind loses hold.” That suggests a sort of pragmatic atomism— viz ., atoms being merely arbitrary epistemological stopping points in the analysis of matter to keep the mind from entertaining the dizzying thought of dividing without end.

Jefferson, however, was not a metaphysical atomist of the Epicurean sort, but a nominalist like philosopher John Locke (1690). To New Jersey politician Dr. John Manners (22 Feb. 1814), he says:

Nature has, in truth, produced units only through all her works. Classes, orders, genera, species, are not of her works. Her creation is of individuals. No two animals are exactly alike; no two plants, nor even two leaves or blades of grass; no two crystallizations. And if we may venture from what is within the cognizance of such organs as ours, to conclude on that beyond their powers, we must believe that no two particles of matter are of exact resemblance.

Humans categorize out of need, for the “infinitude of units or individuals” outstrips the capacity of memory. There is grouping and subgrouping until there are formed classes, orders, genera, and species. Yet such grouping is man’s doing, not nature’s. [ 2 ] Jefferson begins with biota—the system he questions is the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus’—and works his way down to “particles of matter.”

In Jefferson’s cosmos, which is Stoic-like in etiology, all events are linked. The hand of deity is manifestly behind the etiological arrangements. Jefferson writes to Adams (11 Apr. 1823):

I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the universe; in it’s parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to percieve and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of it’s composition. The movements of the heavenly bodies, so exactly held in their courses by the balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces; the structure of our earth itself, with its distribution of lands, waters, and atmosphere; animal and vegetable bodies, each perfectly organized whether as insect, man or mammoth; it is impossible not to believe, that there is in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a Fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms.

The language of perception is in keeping with his empiricism; the language of feel, with his appropriation of philosophers Destutt de Tracy’s (1818/1827: 164) and Lord Kames’ (1758: 250) epistemology. Appeal to an ultimate cause implies a demiurge, of whose nature little can be known other than its superior intelligence and overall beneficence. [ 3 ] There is nothing here or in any other cosmological letters to suggest that deity privileges human life any more than, in David Hume’s words, “that of an oyster” (1755 [1987]: 583).

Jefferson continues in his 1823 letter to Adams. Deity superintends the cosmos. Some stars disappear; others come to be. Comets, with their “incalculable courses”, deviate from regular orbits and demand “renovation under other laws.” Some species of animal have become extinct. “Were there no restoring power, all existences might extinguish successively, one by one, until all should be reduced to a shapeless chaos.”

What precisely does divine superintendence entail?

William Wilson argues that the “‘cut’ of Jefferson’s mind” demands theism—divine interpositionism. He writes:

Calling him a deist registers great misunderstanding of that mind. But the root of his thinking remained Newtonian, including its belief in an omnipresent divine activity in nature. The God of deism from this point of view would be a complete abstraction. As the statistician reduces a person of flesh and blood to a mere integer, so the deist reduces God to a functionary of no real description who abandons nature to a well-ordered dust. (Wilson 2017, 122)

Holowchak thinks that it is unlikely that divine superintendence—i.e., extinction and restoration—implies supernatural intervention in the natural course of events (e.g., TJ to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp, 25 Sept. 1816, and TJ to Daniel Salmon, 15 Feb. 1808). It is probable, thinks Holowchak, that a natural capacity for restoration exists in certain types of matter in the same way that mind, for Jefferson, is in certain types of matter (2013a). Deity’s superintendence is likely the capacity for pre-established cosmic self-regulation comparable in some sense to the work of a thermostat in regulating the temperature of a building. [ 4 ] Following Lord Bolingbroke whose views from Philosophical Works he “commonplaced” early in life ([LCB]: 40–55), Jefferson believed that to posit that God needed to intervene in cosmic events to keep aright them (e.g., by sending down Jesus to save humanity) was to belie the capacities of deity. God, thought Bolingbroke, and Jefferson’s god owed more to Bolingbroke than to any other thinker, got things right the first time.

How for Jefferson does man leave the state of nature and enter into society? Jefferson appeals to nature in what one scholar calls a “middle landscape” manner (Marx 1964: 104–5). The happiest state for humans is one that seeks a middle ground between what is savage and what is “refined.” Jefferson’s vision, thinks Marx, is Arcadian. Jefferson’s aim, early writings indicate (e.g., TJ to James Madison, 20 Dec. 1787 and [NV]: 290–91), was for America to be a pastoral society that had the freedom of primitivism, because it was neither materialist nor manufacturing and it had an abundancy of land. America, because it was neither primitive nor uncultured, could have the trimmings of cultured societies, without their degenerative excesses.

Jefferson’s natural-law theory is Stoical, not Hobbesian or Rousseauian. For Jefferson, the basal laws of nature that obtain when man is in the state of nature are roughly the self-same laws that obtain in civil society. They are also roughly the same basal laws that obtain between states.

The moral duties which exist between individual and individual in the state of nature, accompany them into a state of society, and the aggregate of the duties of all the individuals composing the society constitutes the duties of that society towards any other; so that between society and society the same moral duties exist as did between individuals composing them, while in an unassociated state, and their maker not having released them from those duties on their forming themselves into a nation ([F]: 423).

The ideological frame that allows for social stability is in the Declaration of Independence, in which Jefferson lists two self-evident truths: the equality of all men and their endowment of unalienable rights.

“Equality” for Jefferson comprises equality of opportunity and moral equality. Equality of opportunity recognizes the differences between persons—e.g., talents, prior social status, education, and wealth—and seeks to level the playing field through republican reforms such as introduction of a bill to secure human rights; elimination of primogeniture, entails, and state-sanctioned religion; periodic constitutional renewal; and and educational reform for the self-sufficiency of the general citizenry. To remedy the unequal distribution of property, Jefferson advocates in his Draft Constitution for Virginia that 50 acres of property go to every male Virginian [ 5 ] ([CV]: 343). Moral equality recognizes that each human deserves equal status in personhood and citizenship, hence again the need of republican reforms of the sort listed above.

Rights are held to obtain, whether or not holders recognize them, and they have a moral dimension apart from their obvious legal dimension. There are, for instance, the moral obligations to obey the law and to recognize and uphold the rights of others. [ 6 ]

Jefferson, mostly following Locke, mentions three unalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence: life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. The right to life constitutes a right to one’s own personhood. The rights to liberty and pursuit of happiness (Locke lists property instead of happiness) entail self-determination through labor, art, industry, and self-governance. Government has no right to control the lives of its citizens or dictate a course of happiness. Therein lies the foundation of Jeffersonian liberalism.

There is also the right to revolution, which entails the right to abolish any tyrannical form of government, given long abuses.

3. Morality

The right to the pursuit of happiness implies too that all persons are free to worship as they choose. Since religion is a matter between a man and his deity (e.g., TJ to Miles King, 26 Sept. 1814), no one owes any account of his faith to another. Moreover, legislature should make “no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between church and state ([DB]: 510). [ 7 ]

Being personal, religion ought not to be politicized. When the clergy engraft themselves into the “machine of government,” they prove a “very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man” (TJ to Jeremiah Moor, 14 Aug. 1800). All people, Jefferson asserts, should follow the example of the Quakers: live without priests, be guided their internal monitor of right and wrong, and eschew matters inaccessible to common sense, for belief can only rightly be shaped by “the assent of the mind to an intelligible proposition” (TJ to John Adams, 22 Aug. 1813).

The true principles of morality are the “mild and simple principles of the Christian philosophy” (TJ to Gerry Elbridge, 29 Mar. 1801)—the principles common to all right-intended religions. Jefferson writes to Thomas Leiper (21 Jan. 1809):

My religious reading has long been confined to the moral branch of religion, which is the same in all religions; while in that branch which consists of dogmas, all differ, all have a different set. The former instructs us how to live well and worthily in society; the latter are made to interest our minds in the support of the teachers who inculcate them. [ 8 ]

Thus, the principles common to all religions are few, exoteric, and the true principles of morality. [ 9 ]

Though chary of sectarian religion due to the empleomania of sectarian clerics and a sharp critic of Christianity in his youth ([NR]), “Christianity,” deterged of its political trappings and metaphysical twaddle, in time became special to Jefferson (e.g., TJ to John Adams, 12 Oct. 1813 and 24 Jan. 1814). He states to Dr. Benjamin Rush (21 Apr. 1803):

I am a Christian, in the only sense [Jesus] wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to him every human excellence; & believing he never claimed any other.

Jesus’ teachings make up the greatest moral system, and Jesus is “the greatest of all the [religious] reformers.” [ 10 ] To Benjamin Waterhouse (26 June 1822), Jefferson writes:

The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the happiness of man. 1. That there is one only God, and he all perfect. 2. That there is a future state of rewards and punishments. 3. That to love God with all thy heart and thy neighbor as thyself, is the sum of religion.

Consequently, Jesus’ message comprises love of god (being one, pace Calvin, not three), love of mankind, and belief in an afterlife of reward or punishment.

Yet much in the Bible, Jefferson thought, was redundant, hyperbolic, bathetic, absurd, and beyond the bounds of physical possibility (e.g., TJ to John Adams, 28 Oct. 1813). That was confirmed by inspection of a late-in-life “harmony” Jefferson constructed, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (1820), in which the virgin birth, miraculous cures, and resurrection were excised. Christ was neither the savior of mankind nor the son of God, but the great moral reformer of the Jewish religion([B]).

Even after he purged the Bible of its corruptions—in his own words, after he plucked, in an oft-used metaphor, the diamonds from the dungheap (TJ to John Adams, 12 Oct. 1813, and TJ to )—to try both to make plain Jesus’ true teachings and to give a credible account of the life of Jesus, Jefferson did not completely follow Jesus’ uncontaminated teachings. He did think love of God was needed for one to be of upstanding virtue, for each could see and feel the existence of deity in the cosmos. Thus, atheists, however ostensibly virtuous, suffered from a defect of moral sensibility. Yet when Jefferson expressed his own view on the branches of morality (true religion), he did not mention belief in an afterlife, as did Jesus. [ 11 ] His 1814 letter to Law (13 June) mentions belief in an afterlife merely as one of the correctives to lack of a moral sense, along with self-interest, the approbation of others upon doing good, and the rewards and punishments of laws. Given that, along with his out-and-out commitment to materialism and given the evidence of four letters that unequivocally express skepticism apropos of an afterlife, [ 12 ] and given that he and his wife wrote about the “eternal separation” they were about to make on her deathbed, it is probable, asserts one scholar, that he did not believe in an afterlife (Holowchak 2019a, pp. 128–2). So, belief in an afterlife, one of the chief teachings of Jesus, was likely not an essential part of morality for Jefferson. In contrast, Charles Sanford, noting that Jefferson appeals to the hereafter in several letters and addresses, offers a small-step argument in defense of belief in an afterlife. “‘The prospects of a future state of retribution for the evil as well as the good done while here’ [are] among the moral forces necessary to motivate individuals to live good lives in society.” He adds: “Jefferson had begun with the conviction that God had created in man a hunger for the rights of equality, freedom, and life and a desire to follow God’s moral law. It was only a small step further to believe that God had also created man with an immortal soul” (152). [ 13 ]

Finally, Jefferson later in life claimed to be a Unitarian. What did “Unitarianism” mean for him?

Jefferson finds the notion of three deities in one inscrutable, and therefore physically impossible. Here he falls back on his naturalism. He allows nothing inconsistent with the laws of nature, gleaned through experience. The sort of Unitarianism Jefferson promotes is not a religious sect, but instead a manner of approaching religion. Of his Unitarianism, Jefferson asserts to John Adams (22 Aug. 1813), “We should all then, like the Quakers, live without an order of priests, moralize for ourselves, follow the oracle of conscience, and say nothing about what no man can understand, nor therefore believe.” To Dr. Thomas Cooper (2 Nov. 1822), Jefferson contrasts Unitarians with sectarian preachers, so Unitarians can be grasped as persons living fully in accordance with the dictates of their moral sense faculty. To Benjamin Waterhouse (8 Jan. 1825), Jefferson states that Unitarianism is “primitive Christianity, in all the simplicity in which it came from the lips of Jesus.” Such letters show plainly that monotheism, incomplexity, and non-sectarianism are dependent issues. Jefferson made purchase of monotheism because it and benevolence were key tenets of Jesus’ uncorrupted teachings. Those two tenets, letters indicate, were the framework of his Unitarianism, or of any right religion.

For Jefferson, morality was not reason-guided, but dictated by a moral sense. Here he followed Scottish empiricists, [ 14 ] such as William Small (Hull 1997: 102–5 and [Au]: 4–5)—the only non-minister at William and Mary College—and Francis Hutcheson and especially Lord Kames. [ 15 ]

To nephew Peter Carr (19 Aug. 1785), Jefferson says that the god-given moral sense, innate and instinctual, is as much a part of a person’s nature as are the senses of hearing and seeing, or as is a leg or arm. Jefferson’s comparisons to hearing and sight invite depiction of the moral sense tied to a bodily organ, like the heart (TJ to Maria Cosway, 12 Oct. 1785). Like strength of limbs, it too is given to persons in a greater or lesser degree, and can be made better or worse through exercise or its neglect.

A letter to daughter Martha (11 Dec. 1783) suggests the moral sense works spontaneously, without any input of reason. The language of “feel” is critical.

If ever you are about to say any thing amiss or to do any thing wrong, consider before hand. You will feel something within you which will tell you it is wrong and ought not to be said or done: this is your conscience, and be sure to obey it. [ 16 ]

One ought to resist the temptation to act viciously in circumstances when vice will not be detected. He tells Carr (19 Aug. 1785) to act always and in all circumstances as if everyone in the world were looking at him. Jefferson bids grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph (24 Nov. 1808) to appeal to moral exemplars before acting, and he lists Small, Wythe, and Peyton Randolph. “I am certain that this mode of deciding on my conduct, tended more to correctness than any reasoning powers I possessed.” Thus, one can use the moral sense unerringly, or relatively so, if one disregards the intrusions of reason and assumes that all of one’s actions are under the scrutiny of cynosures—i.e., there will be no temptation to act from the pressure of peers. In another letter to Carr (10 Aug. 1787), Jefferson disadvises his nephew to attend lectures on moral philosophy and appeals counterfactually to a ham-handed creator. “He who made us would have been a pitiful bungler if he had made the rules of our moral conduct a matter of science.” Here and elsewhere, [ 17 ] Jefferson is explicit that reason is uninvolved in moral “judgments.”

Not everyone possesses a moral sense. Napoleon, he tells Adams (25 Feb. 1823), is an illustration. To Thomas Law (13 June 1814), Jefferson says that want of the moral sense can somewhat be rectified by education and employment of rational calculation, but such educative remedies are blandishments not aimed to encourage morally correct action, because that is impossible without a moral sense, but to discourage actions with pernicious consequences. In short, one without a moral sense can be induced or shaped to behave as if having a moral sense, though such actions would merely be consistent with morally correct actions, not be morally correct actions.

Finally, the function of reason, he says in his 1787 letter to Carr, is “in some degree” to oversee the exercise of the moral faculty, “but it is a small stock which is required for this”. Reason might function, thinks one scholar, (1) to encourage or reinforce morally correct action, [ 18 ] (2) to keep the moral sense vital and vigorous, (3) to instill the first elements of morality in children through exposure to history, (4) to allow for cultural sensitivity to morally retarded cultures, (5) to continue moral advance through reading history as adults, (6) to help make plain the rights (especially derivative rights) of humans, (7) to form general rules to serve as rough guides human action, [ 19 ] and (8) to encourage moral improvement through breeding for morality (Holowchak 2014b, 177–80). None of those functions, however, directly involves reason in moral “judgments.”

Jefferson also believed, following the lead of many thinkers of his day—e.g., Francis Ferguson, John Millar, Lord Kames (1798 and 1774), William Robertson, Claude Adrien Helvétius, the Marquis de Condorcet, and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot—that humans were morally progressing over time (e.g., TJ to John Adams, 11 Jan. 1816, and TJ to P.S. Dupont de Nemours, 24 Apr. 1816). There were, however, periodic glitches—periods of moral stagnation or decline. The belligerence between England and France in Jefferson’s later years was to him evidence of such decline. Still, such moral declinations, considered overall, were temporary setbacks or “retrogradations,” not genuine declinations. In a letter to Adams (1 Aug. 1816), he writes that the Americas will show Europe the path to moral advance.

We are destined to be a barrier against the returns of ignorance and barbarism. Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders, and to hobble along by our side, under the monkish trammels of priest and kings, as she can.

Thus, moral progress is movement, prompted by embrace of liberty and respect for humans’ rights, toward the ideals of love of deity and love of humanity through beneficence—the ideals taught best by Jesus. [ 20 ]

4. Political Philosophy

In his First Inaugural Address (1801), Jefferson lists the “essential principles of our Government” in 15 doctrines—perhaps his first attempt at a definition of republicanism ([I 1 ]: 494–95).

  • Equal and exact justice to all men, irrespective of political or religious persuasion;
  • peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, without entangling alliances to any;
  • Federal support in the rights of states’ government;
  • preservation of constitutional vigor of the Federal government;
  • election by the people;
  • absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority;
  • a well-disciplined militia;
  • supremacy of the civil over the military authority;
  • light taxation;
  • ready payment of debts;
  • encouragement of agriculture and commerce;
  • the diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason;
  • freedom of the press;
  • protection by habeas corpus and trial by juries impartially selected; and
  • freedom of religion.

Fifteen years later in a series of letters, Jefferson again grapples with a definition of “republicanism.” To P.S. Dupont de Nemours (24 Apr. 1816), Jefferson lists nine “moral principles” upon which republican government is grounded.

I believe with you that morality, compassion, generosity, are innate elements of the human constitution; that there exists a right independent of force; that a right to property is founded in our natural wants, in the means with which we are endowed to satisfy these wants, and the right to what we acquire by those means without violating the similar rights of other sensible beings; that no one has a right to obstruct another, exercising his faculties innocently for the relief of sensibilities made a part of his nature; that justice is the fundamental law of society; that the majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society; that action by the citizens in person, in affairs within their reach and competence, and in all others by representatives, chosen immediately, and removable by themselves, constitutes the essence of a republic; that all governments are more or less republican in proportion as this principle enters more or less into their composition; and that a government by representation is capable of extension over a greater surface of country than one of any other form.

Among the nine principles, the seventh

Action by the citizens in person, in affairs within their reach and competence, and in all others by representatives, chosen immediately, and removable by themselves, constitutes the essence of a republic.

comes closest to the essence of republicanism. To John Taylor (28 May 1816), Jefferson attempts a “precise and definite idea” of republicanism:

A government by its citizens in mass, acting directly and personally, according to rules established by the majority.
Every other government is more or less republican, in proportion as it has in this composition more or less of this ingredient of the direct action of the citizens.

To Samuel Kercheval (12 July 1816), Jefferson gives his “mother principle”:

Governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it.
A government is republican in proportion as every member composing it has his equal voice in the direction of its concerns (not indeed in person, which would be impracticable beyond the limits of a city, or small township, but) by representatives chosen by himself, and responsible to him at short periods).

Such writings suggest the following “barebones” definition of “republic” for Jefferson, or a “Jeffersonian republic”:

A government is a Jeffersonian republic if and only if it allows all citizens ample opportunity to participate politically in affairs within their reach and competency; it employs representatives, chosen and recallable by the citizenry and functioning for short periods, for affairs outside citizens’ reach and competency; it functions according to the rules (periodically revisable) established by the majority of the citizens; and it guarantees the equal rights, in person and property, of all citizens.

The definition is barebones for several reasons. First, it does not fully capture the normative essence of Jefferson’s description of what is “proper for all conditions of society” in his letter to Dupont de Nemours. Yet it is not normatively neutral, as it speaks of equality of opportunity for each citizen to participate in government and it guarantees equal rights. Second, the definition ignores the partnership of politics and science, which is part of Jefferson’s conception of a republic. Jefferson insisted on periodic revisions of the Constitution at conventions to accommodate changes in the peoples’ will, when suitably informed. Such changes were not arbitrary, but dictated mostly by advances in science. [ 21 ] Jefferson writes to Samuel Kercheval (12 July 1816), “The laws and constitutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.” Thus, a republic for Jefferson is essentially progressive and scientific, not static and conservative.

Thus, Jeffersonian republicanism is a schema for government by the people, not any particular system of governing. It is not wedded to any particular constitution—constitutions, Jefferson is clear, are merely provisional representations of the will of the people at the time of their drafting (TJ to George Washington, 7 Nov. 1792)—but to the principle of government representing the will of the people, suitably informed. That is why Jefferson says in his First Inaugural Address that for the will of the majority to be reasonable, it must be rightful ([I 1 ]: 493). [ 22 ] Thus, Jeffersonian republicanism is essentially in partnership with science.

Jefferson’s attempts at defining “republic” and his nine moral principles “proper for all conditions of society” shows that republicanism is a political philosophy. For Jefferson, republican governing is essentially progressive, and being government of and for the people, it aims at involving all citizens to their fullest capacity. Over the centuries, he recognized, human potentiality had been stifled by coercive governments. Instantiation of republican governing, thus, was an attempt to impose the minimal political structure needed to maximize human liberty, free human potentiality, and ensure the political ascendency of the “natural aristoi, ” the talented and virtuous, and not the “artificial aristoi, ” the wealthy and wellborn.

Jefferson’s republicanism was both democratic and meritocratic. It was democratic in that it aimed roughly to have no person disadvantaged at the start of life. That would be the same for Blacks, who were the equals of all others in moral sensibility—hence, their desert of equal rights and equal opportunities. Democratic republicanism demanded recognition of moral equality and equality of opportunity. Yet Jefferson realized that each person’s dreams, intelligence, and talents varied greatly. Thus, Jeffersonian republicanism was also meritocratic in that all persons were allowed to do with their life what they saw fit to do with it, so long as in doing so they did not disallow others the opportunity of doing what they saw fit to do. The most talented and virtuous, he assumed, would naturally strive to exercise fully their talents and virtue through politics and science.

Jefferson recognized two classes of people: laborers and learned (TJ to Peter Carr, 7 Sept. 1814). His distinction, however, was not determined by birth or wealth, as it was by most others of his day, but by merit. To John Adams (28 Oct. 1813), Jefferson writes:

There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.
There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents; for with these it would belong to the first class.

What Jefferson claimed here was that the traditional, centuries-old class distinction, founded on birth or wealth, was in effect politically obsolete. What made men “best” was talent (i.e., skill, ambition, and genius) and virtue.

Jefferson then tells Adams that the natural aristoi comprise “the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trust, and government of society.” He adds that that government is best which allows for “a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government.” Through “instruction, trust, and government,” the natural aristoi will be not only political officials, but also teachers, trustees, and practitioners or patrons of science. [ 23 ]

To ensure that political offices will be held by the natural aristoi , there must be, inter alia , public access to general education and free presses for dissemination of information to the citizenry. With the citizenry generally educated, one has, Jefferson continues to Adams, merely “to leave to the citizens the free election and separation of the aristoi from the pseudo- aristoi, ” and “in general they will elect the real good and wise.” [ 24 ] That is much preferable to the centuries-old method of allowing the wealthy and wellborn to govern at the expense of the people.

For Jefferson, constitutions, unlike the rights of men, are alterable, in conformance to the level of progress of a state. Thus, constitutions are to be replaced, altered, or renewed pursuant to humans’ intellectual, political, and moral progress.

To James Madison (6 Sept. 1789), Jefferson writes:

The question Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another … is a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also, among the fundamental principles of every government. [ 25 ]

Beginning with the evident proposition—“the earth belongs in usufruct to the living”—Jefferson aims to prove that the deeds of each generation, defined by a nineteen-year period, [ 26 ] ought to be independent (or relatively so) of each other. Moreover, “usufruct” implies that each generation has an obligation to leave behind their property to the subsequent generation at least in the same condition in which it was received. For instance, any debts one incurs while owning some land are not to be inherited by another who obtains possession of that land after the former passes. What applies to individuals applies to any collection of individuals.

To instantiate the principle, there must be a period of adjustment. Present debts will be a matter of honor and expediency; future debts will be constrained by the principle. To constrain future debts, a constitution ought to stipulate that a nation can borrow no more than it can repay in the span of a generation. Temperate borrowing would “bridle the spirit of war,” inflamed much by the neglect of repayment of debts.

Usufruct theoretically fits neatly with Jefferson’s notions of political progress and of periodic constitutional renewal. Concerning the latter, he writes to C.F.W. Dumas (10 Sept. 1787):

No society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. … Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19. years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right.

At the end of nineteen years, there will be a constitutional convention, at which defects in laws can be addressed and changes can be made. [ 27 ] Should the principle of usufruct be adopted, republican government would have a built-in mechanism for obviating revolutions. [ 28 ] Without the debts and wars of one generation passed on to the next in a Jeffersonian republic and with that republic’s constitution being renewed each generation to accommodate the needs and advances of the next generation, Jefferson thinks, the stage is set for political progress.

James Madison wrote a lengthy letter several months later (4 Feb. 1790) in reply to Jefferson’s usufruct letter, and politely proffered “some very powerful objections.” Jefferson never answered that letter, though he never renounced generational sovereignty.

Even well-intended governments can still go astray. Jefferson writes in his Declaration of Independence,

Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, & to institute new government, laying it’s foundation on such principles, & organizing it’s powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness ([D]: 19).

However, long-standing governments ought not to be changed “for light & transient causes,” otherwise one risks supplantation of a corrupt government with another that is equally or more corrupt. Yet

when a long train of abuses & usurpations pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is [citizens’] right, it is their duty to throw off such government, & to provide new guards for their future security ([D]: 19).

In his Summary View of the Rights of British America, Jefferson states that for revolution to occur, there needs to be “many unwarrantable encroachments and usurpations” ([S]: 105). He adds,

Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery ([S]: 110).

Therefore, a government becomes destructive when its abuses and usurpations are (1) many and long, (2) directed to the same end, and (3) clearly indicative of despotism.

For Jefferson, some amount of turbulence is one of the consequences of liberty. The manure of blood is needed for healthy governing because those governing will tend over time, Jefferson says to William S. Smith (13 Nov. 1787), to govern in their own interests, if not carefully watched. Moreover, those governed will assume mistakenly that rights once granted will be rights always granted. So, rebellion is the mechanism whereby those governing, Jefferson tells James Madison (30 Jan. 1787), are periodically reminded that government in a Jeffersonian republic is of and for the people—that is, that the will of the majority, fittingly educated, is the standard of justice.

The turbulence of which Jefferson speaks in the letters to Smith and Madison are illustrations of rebellion, says Holowchak (2019a, 73–76), not revolution. In contrast, revolution for Jefferson, following his Declaration, is a complex phenomenon. Unlike a rebellion, it is never to be undertaken for slight reasons or because of singular cases of governmental abuse. The difference, for Holowchak, is one of scope, size, and persistency. Rebellions, often violent, are generally quick signals to government concerning abuses, usually parochial. Revolutions, essentially violent, are long-term, well-planned, complex attempts at overthrowing a government, deemed habitually abusive.

One thing is clear. Revolutions or elitist rebellions, for Jefferson, are larger, more persistent, and more complex than rebellions or populist rebellions. To John Adams (4 Sept. 1823), Jefferson writes of the beginning, sustainment, and resolution of revolutions. “The generation which commences a revolution can rarely compleat it. Habituated from their infancy to passive submission of body and mind to their kings and priests, they are not qualified, when called on, to think and provide for themselves, and their inexperience, their ignorance and bigotry make them instruments often, in the hands of the Bonapartes and Iturbides to defeat their own rights and purposes.” Revolutions cannot be expected to establish a sustainable, free government in the first effort.

Moreover, the revolutionary generation is generally suited to begin and sustain the revolution, Jefferson continues in the letter to Adams, but not to resolve it. It is, for Jefferson, incapable of fixing a viable republican constitution. There are, thus, generational responsibilities for a Jeffersonian revolution to succeed. The role of the first generation is inchoation. Subsequent generations must sustain and complete the initial effort to usurp the coercive government. In the final stage, there is implementation of a constitution, reflective of and beholden to the will of the people.

It is because of the complexity and cost, in terms of human lives, that Jefferson maintained that revolutions ought only to be undertaken in cases of extreme, consistent despotism. As he writes in his Declaration ([D]: 19), “When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them [the people] under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” Still, he thought that they were “mechanisms” needed in republican governments, for there is a human tendency for those in power to be seduced by that power (TJ to Spencer Roane, 9 Mar. 1821).

5. Philosophy of Education

Jefferson’s views on education fit hand in glove with his political philosophy. [ 29 ] To facilitate a government of and for the people, there must be educational reform to allow for the general education of the citizenry for fullest political participation, to enable citizens to carry on daily affairs without governmental intervention, and to funnel the most talented and virtuous to a first-tier institution like the University of Virginia.

The sources of Jefferson’s views on education were many. From the French, Jefferson learned that education ought to be equalitarian, secular, and philosophically grounded (Arrowood 1930 [1970]: 49–50). He likely studied the works of Condorcet, La Chalotais, Diderot, Charon, and Turgot, and was influenced by men such as Lafayette, Correa de Serra, Cuvier, Buffon, Humboldt, and Say. Moreover, Jefferson corresponded with or read the works of Britons and Americans such as John Adams, Priestley, Locke, Thomas Cooper, Pictet, Stewart, Tichnor, Richard Price, William Small, Wythe, Fauquier, Peyton Randolph, and Patrick Henry (Holowchak 2014a, 69). That education ought to be scientific and useful was emphasized by William Small at William and Mary College as well as his uptake of the empirical philosophers of his day and their disdain of metempirical squabbling.

Jefferson’s educational views are spelled out neatly in four bills proposed to the General Assembly of Virginia (1779), in his Bill for Establishing a System of Public Education (1817), in his Rockfish Gap Report (1818), and in key letters to correspondents—e.g., Carr, Banister, Munford, Adams, Cabell, Burwell, Brazier, and Breckinridge.

When Jefferson, Pendleton, and Wythe undertook the task of revising the laws of Virginia in 1776, Jefferson drafted four significant bills—Bills 79 to 82.

I consider 4 of these bills … as forming a system by which every fibre would be eradicated of ancient or future aristocracy; and a foundation laid for a government truly republican. [ 30 ] ([WTJ5]: 44)

Bill 79 proposed to create wards or hundreds, each of which would have a school for general education in which “reading, writing, and common arithmetic should be taught” ([BG]). Virginia was to be subdivided in twenty-four districts, each of which would have a school for “classical learning, grammar, geography, and the higher branches of numerical arithmetic” ([BG]). Bill 80 proposed to secularize William and Mary College and add to its curriculum by enlarging its “sphere of science” ([BWM]). [ 31 ] Bill 81 proposed to create a public library for Virginia for scholars, elected officials, and inquisitive citizens ([BL]). Bill 82, the only bill that would eventually pass (1786), proposed to disallow state patronage of any particular religion ([BR]; [Au]: 31–44).

Jefferson made it clear (TJ to George Wythe, 13 Aug. 1786) that Bill 79—concerning implementation of wards and ward schools—was “the most important bill of our whole code”, as it was the “foundation … for the preservation of freedom and happiness” in a true republic. It was the key to engendering the sort of reforms needed for Jeffersonian republicanism—reforms aimed at an educated and thriving citizenry.

It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves, and that too of the people with a certain degree of education,

he says to George Washington (4 Jan. 1786). “Wherever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” he writes to philosopher Richard Price (8 Jan. 1789). [ 32 ]

Yet Jefferson’s trust in the people was not unconditional. He never asserted categorically that government for and of the people must, or even can, work. Experience had shown him that governments in which officials were not elected by and beholden to the people did not work—i.e., they were ultimately unresponsive to the needs of the people—and so he often called republicanism an “experiment” or “great experiment” (TJ to John Adams, 28 Feb. 1796, and WTJ5: 484). If citizens’ rights were to be respected and defended and if governors were not to govern in their own best interest but as stewards f the citizenry, all citizens needed a basic education—hence, the indispensability of ward-school education.

Given two classes of citizens, the laborers and the learned, Jefferson recognized two levels of education ([R]: 459–60). The laborers—divided roughly into husbandmen, manufacturers, and craftsmen—needed to conduct business to sustain and improve their domestic affairs. Thus, they needed access to primary education. The learned needed access to college-level (Jefferson’s intermediary grammar schools) and university-level education. To Peter Carr (7 Sept. 1814), Jefferson writes,

It is the duty of [our country’s] functionaries, to provide that every citizen in it should receive an education proportioned to the conditions and pursuits of his life.

Needs are not all personal. People are, for Jefferson, social creatures, republics are progressive, and thus, citizens have political duties. Education is critical. “If the condition of man is to be progressively ameliorated, as we fondly hope and believe,” writes Jefferson to the French revolutionary Marc Antoine Jullien (6 Oct. 1818), “education is to be the chief instrument in effecting it.” To fit and function in a stable, thriving democracy, all citizens are expected to know and assume a participatory role to the best of their capacities.

To promote both fullest political participation and moral progress, Jefferson realized that educational reform had to be systemic. In a letter to Senator Joseph C. Cabell (9 Sept. 1817), Jefferson outlines six features of that system.

  • Basic education should be available to all.
  • Education should be tax-supported.
  • Education should be free from religious dictation.
  • The educational system should be controlled at the local level.
  • The upper levels of education should feature free inquiry.
  • The mentally proficient should be enabled to pursue education to the highest levels at public expense.

Only a system could offer all citizens an education proportioned to their needs: the laborers, a broad, general education; the learned, an education suited to their idiosyncratic needs (Bowers 1943: 243 and Walton 1984: 119). Jefferson gets across that point to academician George Ticknor (25 Nov. 1817) in the manner of Bacon by limning the important truths—“that knowledge is power, that knowledge is safety, and that knowledge is happiness.” That knowledge is useful, data-driven.

Overall, observation showed that human capacities were greatly underdeveloped (TJ to William Green Munford, 17 June 1799). Consequently, education needed to tap into untapped human potential in morally responsible ways.

As well might it be urged that the wild and uncultivated tree, hitherto yielding sour and bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield better; yet we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the savage stock, producing what is most estimable both in kind and degree. Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth ([R]: 461).

Human perfectibility, for Jefferson, was a matter of improved efficiency of living, which implied not merely progress in the fields of human health and human productivity through discoveries and labor-saving inventions, but also and especially moral improvement. Moral improvement was much more important than exercise of rationality (e.g., TJ to Maria Cosway, 12 Oct. 1786). Pure rationality was a matter of humans abstracting from reality; moral sensibility was a matter of humans immersed in reality.

Still Jefferson thought courses in morality were unneeded, if not injurious. “I think it lost time to attend lectures in this branch,” Jefferson writes to Carr (10 Aug. 1787), for moral conduct is not a matter of reason. That of course was consistent with the empiricism of his day—e.g., Lord Kames and David Hume. Nonetheless, Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia has a role for education in moral development. The first stage of education is not the time to encourage critical engagement with material like the Bible, for human rationality is not sufficiently developed, but instead a time when children should store historical facts to be used critically later in life. While doing so, the “elements of morality” can be instilled. Such elements teach children, says Jefferson in Aristotelian fashion, that

their own greatest happiness … does not depend on their condition in life in which chance has placed them, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation [i.e., industry], and freedom in all just pursuits ([NV]: 147).

Moral “learning” is, thus, less a matter of ingesting and digesting moral principles to apply to circumstances—there were no inviolable principles for Jefferson, as morality was a matter of sensing the right thing to do in circumstances—but of placing faith in the capacity of one’s moral sense to “decide” the right course of action without the corruptive influence of reason or peer pressure (TJ to Martha Jefferson, 11 Dec. 1783, TJ to Peter Carr, 19 Aug. 1785 and 10 Aug. 1787).

Because of the subordination of rationality to morality, education must be useful. It must engender effective, participatory citizenry and political stability. Jefferson always insisted on the practicality of education, because his take on knowledge was Baconian. [ 33 ] Consider what Jefferson says to scientist and physician Edward Jenner (14 May 1806) on behalf of the “whole human family” for his discovery of a vaccine for small pox.

Medecine has never before produced any single improvement of such ability. Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood was a beautiful addition to our knowledge of the animal economy, but on a review of the practice of medicine before & since that epoch, I do not see any great amelioration which has been derived from that discovery, you have erased from the Calendar of human afflictions one of it’s greatest. Yours is the comfortable reflection that mankind can never forget that you have lived.

Yet every scientific discovery is potentially fruitful. “No discovery is barren; it always serves as a step to something else” (TJ to Robert Patterson, 17 Apr. 1803).

“Useful” for Jefferson was broad and with normative implications. [ 34 ] A complete education for Jefferson would produce men who were

in all ways useful to society—useful because intelligent, cultured, well-informed, technically competent, moral (this particularly), capable of earning a living, happy, and fitted for political and social leadership (Martin: 37).

Useful implied socially and politically active. Male citizens of greatest virtue and greatest genius would contribute by participation in science and in the most politically prominent positions. Lesser citizens would contribute more modestly and mostly at local levels through, for illustration, jury duty, participation in militia, and voting for and overseeing elected representatives.

Finally, education for Jefferson was a way of living. Its aim was to give persons the tools they would need to make them socially and politically involved, free, self-sufficient, and happy. As Karl Lehmann (201–2) notes:

To Thomas Jefferson, school would never be a ‘finishing’ agency. From each stage, man would have to move on in a never ending process of self-education…. The narrow professional who had but a technical knowledge of his little vocational area was a curse to him. Education had to be broad in order to assure the freedom and happiness of man.

Jefferson’s views on race have been the focus of considerable discussion in the secondary literature. [ 35 ] Those views, which would be considered today as racist, were likely influenced by the views of the leading naturalists of his day. In that regard, he was the product, not ahead, of his time.

Most of the discussion of Jefferson’s views on Blacks concerns his Notes on the State of Virginia. In Query XIV, Jefferson writes, “In memory [Blacks] are equal to the whites” ([NV]: 139). “In reason,” Jefferson says, “[Blacks are] much inferior [to Whites], as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid” ([NV]: 139). He adds, “Never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration” ([NV]: 140). “In imagination [Blacks] are dull, tasteless, and anomalous,” and that is evident in their art. In music, Blacks have accurate ears “for tune and time,” are generally more gifted than Whites, and are capable of a “small catch,” as illustrated by their talent with the “Banjar,” a guitar-like instrument “brought … from Africa.” “Whether they will be equal to the composition of a more extensive run of melody, or of complicated harmony, is yet to be proved.” Despite their misery, which “is often the parent of the most affecting touches of poetry,” they have “no poetry” ([NV]: 40–41 and 288n10).

Inferiority of mind and imagination, he adds, is also confirmed, in Jefferson’s estimation, by “the improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites,” and that “has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life” ([NV]: 141). Here he may be referencing “observations” in scientific texts of his day in his library.

In morality, Jefferson admits, Blacks are the equals of all others.

We find among them numerous instances of the most rigid integrity, and as many as among their better instructed masters, of benevolence, gratitude, and unshaken fidelity.

What he takes to be their “disposition to theft,” Jefferson explains thus: “The man, in whose favour no laws of property exist, probably feels himself less bound to respect those made in favour of others.” Might not a slave “justifiably take a little from one, who has taken all from him” ([NV]: 142).

All such conclusions, Jefferson says, are provisional: They have the confirmation of observation, but Blacks as well as “red men” hitherto have not been the subjects of natural history.

The opinion, that they are inferior in the faculties of reason and imagination, must be hazarded with great diffidence. To justify a general conclusion, requires many observations, even where the subject may be submitted to the Anatomical knife, to Optical glasses, to analysis by fire or by solvents. How much more then where it is a faculty, not a substance, we are examining; where it eludes the research of all the senses; where the conditions of its existence are various and variously combined; where the effects of those which are present or absent bid defiance to calculation; let me add too, as a circumstance of great tenderness, where our conclusion would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings which their Creator may perhaps have given them. To our reproach it must be said, that though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and of red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks … are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind ([NV]: 143).

Though he stated that Blacks and Native Americans had not been the subjects of natural history, there was a large body of literature by leading naturalists of his day—e.g., Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus ([1758] 1808), Oliver Goldsmith ([1774] 1823), and “Georges” Cuvier ([1817] 1831)—to which Jefferson had access and which he doubtless assimilated. That literature viewed Blacks and Native Americans as inferior to white Europeans, and the overall tendency was to associate darker skin with increased inferiority. [ 36 ] Prominent philosophers like David Hume (1755 [1987]: 208n10), Adam Smith (1759 [1982]: 208), and C.F. de Volney in (1802 [2010]: 68) also asserted the inferiority of Blacks and Native Americans.

This smattering of the “science” of Jefferson’s time shows that some of the most esteemed scientists held that Blacks and Native Americans, considering each as a race or subspecies of humans, were regarded as inferior or defective. [ 37 ] Jefferson owned and was informed by most of that literature, since he tended to be aware of recent developments in all of the sciences. Thus Jefferson’s “observations” were tainted by the “observations” or prejudgments of the authorities of his day. Despite his view of them as inferior, he recognized Blacks, as moral equals of all others, had the same rights as all other men. He writes to Bishop Grégoire (25 Feb. 1809):

Whatever be [Blacks’] degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.

Nonetheless, Jefferson’s view of Native Americans was inconsistent with those naturalists who viewed them too as a race inferior to Europeans, and that requires some explanation. In Query XIV of his Notes on the State of Virginia , Jefferson offers a brief analysis of Native Americans as a race. Not having had the “advantages” of exposure to European culture that Blacks have had, still Native Americans “often carve figures on their pipes not destitute of design and merit” ([NV]: 140). Their carvings and drawings “prove the existence of a germ in their minds which only wants cultivation.” [ 38 ] He continues,

They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory; such as prove their reason and sentiment strong, their imagination glowing and elevated. ([NV]: 140)

One may wonder how much “advantage” Jefferson imagines Blacks should demonstrate on account of their exposure to the “culture” of their oppressors while enslaved. But Jefferson maintains that though “most of [the Blacks in America] have been confined to tillage, to their own homes, and their own society” and have had little direct exposure to sciences and the arts,

many have been so situated, that they might have availed themselves of the conversation of their masters; many have been brought up to the handicraft arts, and from that circumstance have always been associated with the whites. Some have been liberally educated, and all have lived in countries where the arts and sciences are cultivated to a considerable degree, and have had before their eyes samples of the best works from abroad ([NV]: 139–40).

Thus, Jefferson’s assessment of Blacks differs from his assessment of Native Americans. It is unclear whether that difference is natural or nurtural. The intimation in Notes on the State of Virginia and in a letter to Edmund Coles (25 Aug. 1814) is natural, though in other letters (e.g., TJ tp Benjamin Banneker, 30 Aug. 1791, and TJ to Bishop Grégoire, 25 Feb. 1809), the suggestion is nurtural, though deficiencies are so pronounced that there can be no rapid change of situation. With Native Americans, the scenario is otherwise.

There is also a sentiment commonly expressed in the secondary literature (e.g., Risjord 2002: 50–1, and Holowchak 2012, 243–48) that Jefferson had a personal, or political, interest in defending Native Americans that he did not have for Blacks. Buffon—perhaps the greatest naturalist of his day—argued that since the continent of North America was colder and wetter than that of Europe, [ 39 ] its biota, Native Americans included, were inferior ([NV]: 48). Consequently, “the savage” was feeble, glabrous, passionless, and compared to Europeans, was sexually less potent, less sensitive, and more timid, among other things ([NV]: 58). Abbé Raynal said more. What was true of Native Americans would eventually prove true of any Europeans transplanted in America ([NV]: 64). Jefferson put considerable effort into refuting Buffon and Raynal ([NV]: 60–64), which he did, as most scholars concede (e.g., Peden 1954: xxiii), with remarkable success, though his aim was further, open discussion more than it was refutation ([NV]: 54).

One thing seems clear, however. His mistaken views of Blacks and his views of Native Americans shaped his political thinking. Jefferson’s political vision was of an American nation that was wedded to liberty, happiness, and mostly agrarian living, that instantiated irenic republican governance, and that would in time serve as a model for other parts of the globe (Holowchak 2017b, 131–51). That vision, for success, required in his eyes the fullest cultivation of genius and morality in the youthful nation (McCoy 1980: 136). Native Americans, it seems, passed on both accounts. Blacks, however, were to him wanting in genius. Thus, only Native Americans could be integrated into the fledgling nation, which held the prospect of covering, as an “empire for liberty,” the North American continent (TJ to James Madison, 27 Apr. 1809) and perhaps even the South American continent (TJ to James Madison, 24 Nov. 1801). In Jefferson’s view, Blacks could not be integrated, for any admixture of black blood with white blood would taint the offspring, and thereby threaten the success of Jefferson’s republican experiment. So, every slave would eventually have to be “removed beyond the reach of mixture” ([NV]: 137–38 and 143). Thus, he thought everyone would be best served if Blacks were educated, emancipated, and expatriated; so too would Whites.

Jefferson’s views on race of course have been roundly refuted by modern science, which shows that race biologically is an empty category.

What, however, of Jefferson’s views and actions on the elimination of slavery?

We do know that Jefferson consistently spoke out loudly against the institution of slavery and that, as lawyer and politician, he worked hard toward its eradication. He, for instance, undertook six pro bono cases on behalf of slaves, seeking freedom, and never defended the rights of a slaveholder. He crafted spirited declamations of slavery in his Summary View ([S] 115–16), initial draft of the Declaration of Independence ([Au] 22), his Notes on the State of Virginia ([NV]: 162–63), and in several letters.

Nonetheless, he did little in retirement, when he could have tried to do more.

Yet as he matured, Jefferson did little to advance the issue, because he believed that that effort might be more harmful than beneficial. The time, he consistently said, was not right. As early as 1805 (TJ to William Burwell, Jan. 28), he expresses skepticism concerning the eradication of slavery.

There are many virtuous men who would make any sacrifices to effect it, many equally virtuous who persuade themselves either that the thing is not wrong, or that it cannot be remedied, and very many with whom interest is morality [i.e., those who recognize its immorality, but think sympathy is equivalent to action]. The older we grow, the larger we are disposed to believe the last part to be.

To Edward Coles (25 Aug. 1814), he writes of the “general silence” on slavery as indicative of public apathy among younger generations.

I have overlived the generation with which mutual labors & perils begat mutual confidence and influence. This enterprise [abolition of slavery] is for the young; for those who can follow it up, and bear it through to its consummation.

He even castigates Coles when the latter considers emancipation of his own slaves—a precipitous act.

The laws do not permit us to turn them loose, if that were for their good: and to commute them for other property is to commit them to those whose usage of them we cannot control. I hope then, my dear sir, you will reconcile yourself to your country and its unfortunate condition.

Jefferson’s mistaken views on Blacks and his refusal upon retirement to do more to eliminate the institution of slavery have prompted considerable critical discussion in the secondary literature (see fn. 38). On the one hand, most see Jefferson as racist. McColley (1964), Cohen (1969), Miller (1977), and Dawidoff (1993) argue that Jefferson’s racial views were hypocritical rationalizations for his slaveholding and large living. Finkelman (1994), O’Brien (1996), and Magnis (1999) state that Jefferson was driven by a profound hatred of Blacks. On the other hand, Levy (1963), Mayer (2001), Burstein (2005), and Holowchak (2013b and 2020a) argue that though Jefferson held false views concerning Blacks, it is anachronistic to call him a racist, as ignorance concerning racial differences by commoners and scientists was at the time rife. Jefferson, ultimately, was a product of the ignorance and prejudgments of his time.

  • WTJ1: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being his Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private: Published by the Order of the Joint Committee of Congress on the Library, from the Original Manuscripts, Deposited in the Department of State , 9 vols., H.A. Washington (ed.), Washington: Taylor & Maury, 1853–54.
  • WTJ2: The Works of Thomas Jefferson , 12 vols., P.L. Ford (ed.), New York: Putnam, 1902.
  • WTJ3: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson , Definitive Edition , 20 vols., A.A. Lipscomb and A.E. Bergh (ed.), Washington: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1907.
  • WTJ4: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson , 42 Vols. (to date), J. Boyd et al. (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–present.
  • WTJ5: Thomas Jefferson: Writings , M.D. Peterson (ed.), New York: Library of America, 1984.
  • WTJ6: Early History of the University of Virginia , J.W. Randolph (ed.), Richmond, VA: C.H. Wynne, 1856.

Specific Works

  • [An] The Anas, in Thomas Jefferson, The Complete Anas of Thomas Jefferson , Franklin B. Sawvel (ed.), New York: The Round Table Press, 1903.
  • [Au] Autobiography, in WTJ5: 1–101.
  • [BG] Bill 79: Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, 1779, in WTJ5: 365–73. [ BG available online ]
  • [BL] Bill 81: A Bill for Establishing a Public Library, 1779, WTJ4: 544–45. [ BL available online ]
  • [BP] Bill for Establishing a System of Public Education, 1817, in WTJ6: 413–27.
  • [BR] Bill 82: Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, 1779, in WTJ5: 346–48. [ BR available online ]
  • [BWM] Bill 80: A Bill for Amending the Constitution of the College of William and Mary, and Substituting More Certain Revenues for Its Support, 1779, WTJ4: 535–43. [ BWM available online ]
  • [CV] Draft Constitution for Virginia, 1776, in WTJ5: 336–45.
  • [D] Declaration of Independence, 1776, in WTJ5: 19–24.
  • [DB] Letter to Danbury Baptist Association, 1802, in WTJ5: 510.
  • [DP] Draft Declaration and Protest of the Commonwealth of Virginia, in WTJ5: 482–86.
  • [E] Epitaph, in WTJ5: 706.
  • [F] Opinion on the French Treaties, 1793, in WTJ5: 442–43. [ [F] available online ]
  • [I 1 ] Inaugural Address, 1801, in WTJ5: 492–96. [ I 1 available online ]
  • [I 2 ] Second Inaugural Address, 1805, in WTJ5: 518–23.
  • [J] Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth , 1820, in WTJ4, Second Series, vol. 1, pp. 125–314.
  • [K] Draft of the Kentucky Resolutions, in WTJ5: 449–56.
  • [L] Letters, in WTJ1, WTJ2, WTJ3, WTJ4 or WTJ5: 711–1517.
  • [M] Memorandum: Services to My Country, in WTJ5: 702–4.
  • [NV] Notes on the State of Virginia , 1785, in Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia , William Peden (ed.), Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954.
  • [R] Rockfish Gap Report, 1818, in WTJ5: 457–73. [ [R] available online ]
  • [S] Summary View of the Rights of British America, 1774, in WTJ5: 103–22.
  • [TJ] Travel Journals, in WTJ5: 623–58.
  • Adams, J., “John Adams to Timothy Pickering, 6 August 1822,” Founders Online, National Archives, accessed September 29, 2019, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-7674.
  • Arrowood, C.F., 1930 [1970], Thomas Jefferson and Education in a Republic , New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc..
  • Binger, C., 1970, Thomas Jefferson: A Well-Tempered Mind , New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
  • Bolingbroke, H., 1752, Reflections concerning Innate Moral Principles , London: S. Blandon.
  • Bowers, C., 1943, “Jefferson and the Freedom of the Human Spirit”, Ethics , 53(4): 237–45.
  • Burstein, A., 2005, Jefferson’s Secrets , New York: Basic Books.
  • Catterall, Helen Tunnicliff, ed., 1968, Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro, Vol. 1, New York: Octagon Books, Inc.
  • Chinard, G., 1929, Thomas Jefferson: The Apostle of Americanism , Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1962.
  • Cohen, W., 1969, “Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Slavery”, Journal of American History , 3: 503–26.
  • Cunningham, N.E., 1987, In Pursuit of Reason: The Life of Thomas Jefferson , Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
  • Cuvier, G., 1817, The Animal Kingdom, Arranged in Conformity with Its Organization , vol. 1, H. M’Murtrie (trans.), New York: G & C & H Carvill, 1831.
  • Dawidoff, R., 1993, “The Jeffersonian Option”, Political Theory , 21(3): 434–52.
  • Destutt de Tracy, A.L.C., 1818/1827, Éléments d’Ideologie , vol. 5, Bruxelles: Courcier.
  • Dixon, R., 2013, “Thomas Jefferson: A Lawyer’s Path to a Legal Philosophy”, in Holowchak 2013d: 15–39.
  • Erikson, E., 1974, Dimensions of a New Reality: Jefferson Lectures 1973, New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
  • Ferguson, A., 1767, An Essay on the History of Civil Society , London.
  • Finkelman, P., 1994, “Thomas Jefferson and Antislavery: The Myth Goes On”, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography , 102(2): 193–228.
  • Gaustad, E.S., 1984, “Religion”, in Peterson 1984: 277–93.
  • Gish, D., and D. Klinghard, 2017, Thomas Jefferson and the Science of Republican Government: A Political Biography of Notes on the State of Virginia , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Goldsmith, O., 1774, An History of the Earth, and Animated Nature , 8 vols., Philadelphia: Edward Poole, 1823.
  • Greene, J.C., 1958, “Science and the Public in the Age of Jefferson”, Isis , 49(1): 13–25.
  • Gutzman, K.R.C., 2017, Thomas Jefferson, Revolutionary: A Radical’s Struggle to Remake America , New York: St. Martin’s Press
  • Helo, A., 2013, Thomas Jefferson’s Ethics and the Politics of Human Progress , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Helvétius, C.A., 1810, Treatise on Man: His Intellectual Faculties and his Education , W. Hooper, M.D. (trans.), London: Albion Press.
  • Holowchak, M.A., 2012, Dutiful Correspondent: Philosophical Essays on Thomas Jefferson, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
  • –––, 2013, Framing a Legend: Uncovering the Distorted History of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings , Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
  • –––, 2014a, Thomas Jefferson’s Philosophy of Education: A Utopian Dream , London: Taylor & Francis.
  • –––, 2014b, Thomas Jefferson: Uncovering His Unique Philosophy and Vision , Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
  • –––, 2017a, Thomas Jefferson, Moralist , McFarland & Co., Inc., Jefferson, NC.
  • –––, 2017b, Jefferson’s Political Philosophy and the Metaphysics of Utopia , Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
  • –––, 2019a, The Cavernous Mind of Thomas Jefferson, An American Savant , Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
  • –––, 2019b, Thomas Jefferson: Psychobiography of an American Lion , Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers.
  • –––, 2019c, Jefferson’s Bible: Text with Introduction and Critical Commentary , Berlin: DeGruyter, 2019.
  • –––, 2020a, Rethinking Thomas Jefferson’s Views on Race and Slavery: “God’s justice can not sleep forever,” Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
  • Hull, G., 1997, “William Small 1734–1775: No Publications, Much Influence”, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine , 90(2): 102–5.
  • Hume, D., 1755 [1987], Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary , Eugene F. Miller (ed.), New York: Liberty Fund, 1987.
  • Hutcheson, F., 1726, Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue , Wolfgang Leidhold (ed.), Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004. [ Hutcheson 1758 available on line ]
  • James, M., 2012, “Race”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/race/ >.
  • Jordan, W., 1969, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 , Baltimore: Penguin Books.
  • Kames, Lord (Henry Home), 1758, Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion , London, 2 nd edition.
  • –––, 1774, Sketches of the History of Man , vol. 3, Edinburgh, 1813.
  • –––, 1798, The Gentleman Farmer, being an Attempt to Improve Agriculture by Subjecting It to the Test of Rational Principles , Edinburgh, 4 th edition.
  • Kukla, John, 2007, Mr. Jefferson’s Women, New York: Vintage Books.
  • Lehmann, K., 1965, Thomas Jefferson: American Humanist , Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1994.
  • Levy, L., 1963, Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side , Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  • Linné, C. (Linnaeus), 1808, A General System of Nature , vol. 1, William Turton (trans.), London: Lackington, Allen, and Co., 1858.
  • Locke, J., 1690 [1964], Essay concerning Human Understanding , A.D. Woozley (ed.), New York: New American Library.
  • Magnis, N., 1999, “Thomas Jefferson and Slavery: An Analysis of His Racist Thinking as Revealed by His Writings and Political Behavior”, Journal of Black Studies , 29(4): 491–509.
  • Malone, Dumas, 1948, Jefferson the Virginian , Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
  • –––, 1951, Jefferson and the Rights of Man , Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
  • –––, 1962, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty , Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
  • –––, 1970, Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801–1805 , Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
  • –––, 1974, Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805–1809 , Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
  • –––, 1981, The Sage of Monticello , Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
  • Martin, E.T., 1952, Thomas Jefferson: Scientist , New York: H. Schuman.
  • Marx, L., 1964, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America , New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Mayer, D.N., 2001, “The Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings Myth and the Politicization of American History: Individual Views of David N. Mayer concurring with the Majority Report of the Scholars Commission on the Jefferson-Hemings Matter”, < available online >.
  • McColley, R., 1964, Slavery in Jeffersonian Virginia , Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
  • McCoy, D., 1980, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America , Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
  • Merkel, W.G., 2012, “A Founding Father on Trial: Jefferson’s Rights Talk and the Problem of Slavery during the Revolutionary Period”, Rutgers Law Review , 64(3): 595–663.
  • Millar, J., 1806, The Origins of the Distinction of Ranks: Or, An Inquiry into the Circumstances which Give Riser to Influence and Authority, in the Different Members of Society , Edinburgh, 4 th edition.
  • Miller, J.C., 1977, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery , Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
  • Montesquieu, 1758, The Spirit of Laws , Thomas Nugent (trans.), London, 3 rd edition.
  • Neem, J., 2013, “Developing Freedom: Thomas Jefferson, the State, and Human Capability”, Studies in American Political Development , 27(1): 36–50.
  • O’Brien, C.C., 1996, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785–1800 , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Onuf, P.S. (ed.), 1993, Jeffersonian Legacies , Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
  • –––, 2007, Mind of Thomas Jefferson , Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
  • Peden, W., 1954, “Introduction”, Notes on the State of Virginia , in Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia , William Peden (ed.), Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press: xi–xxv.
  • Peterson, M.D., 1960, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind, London: Oxford University Press.
  • –––, 1965, “Thomas Jefferson and the National Purpose”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society , 105(6): 517–20.
  • –––, 1970, Thomas Jefferson & the New Nation:A Biography, London: Oxford University Press.
  • ––– (ed.), 1984, Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography , New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
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  • Sanford, C.B., 1984, The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson , Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia.
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  • Stanton, L., 2009, “Jefferson’s People: Slavery at Monticello”, in Shuffleton 2009: 83–100.
  • Temperly, H., 1997, “Jefferson and Slavery: A Study in Moral Perplexity”, Reason and Republicanism: Thomas Jefferson’s Legacy of Liberty , G.L. McDowell and S.L. Noble (ed.), Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 85–99.
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  • Wilson, William, 2017, “The Myth of Jefferson’s Deism,” The Elusive Thomas Jefferson: Essays on the Man Behind the Myths, ed. M. Andrew Holowchak and Brian W. Dotts, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 118–129.
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Thomas Jefferson's Monticello

Thomas jefferson, thomas jefferson biography.

(Born April 13, 1743, at Shadwell, Virginia; died July 4, 1826, Monticello)

Lawyer. Father. Scientist. Writer. Revolutionary. Governor. Vice-president. President. Philosopher. Architect. Slave Owner.

Thomas Jefferson by Gilbert Stuart

Many words describe Thomas Jefferson. He is best remembered as the person who wrote the Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States.

Early Life and Monticello

Jefferson was born April 13, 1743, on his father’s plantation of  Shadwell  located along the Rivanna River in the Piedmont region of central Virginia at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. 1  His father Peter Jefferson was a successful planter and surveyor and his mother Jane Randolph a member of one of Virginia’s most distinguished families. When Jefferson was fourteen, his father died, and he inherited a sizeable estate of approximately 5,000 acres. That inheritance included the house at Shadwell, but Jefferson dreamed of living on a mountain. 2

best biography thomas jefferson

Shadwell, where it all began

Have you ever wondered where our third president was born? Learn about his early life, as presented by Research Archaeologist Derek Wheeler.

In 1768 he contracted for the clearing of a 250 feet square site on the topmost point of the 868-foot mountain that rose above Shadwell and where he played as a boy. 3   He would name this mountain Monticello, and the house that he would build and rebuild over a forty-year period took on this name as well. He would later refer to this ongoing project, the home that he loved, as “my essay in Architecture.” 4  The following year, after preparing the site, he began construction of a small brick structure that would consist of a single room with a walk-out basement kitchen and workroom below. This would eventually be referred to as the South Pavilion and was where he lived first alone and then with his bride, Martha Wayles Skelton, following their marriage in January 1772.

Unfortunately, Martha would never see the completion of Monticello; she died in the tenth year of their marriage, and Jefferson lost “the cherished companion of my life.” Their marriage produced six children but only two survived into adulthood,  Martha  (known as Patsy) and  Mary  (known as Maria or Polly). 5

best biography thomas jefferson

Martha Wayles Jefferson, A Vivid Personality

In this short video, hear how Martha W.S. Jefferson stands out as a vivid personality in the recollections of those who knew and remembered her.

Along with the land Jefferson inherited slaves from his father and even more slaves from his father-in-law,  John Wayles ; he also bought and sold enslaved people. In a typical year, he owned about 200, almost half of them under the age of sixteen. About eighty of these enslaved individuals lived at Monticello; the others lived on his adjacent Albemarle County farms, and on his Poplar Forest estate in Bedford County, Virginia. Over the course of his life, he owned over 600 enslaved people. These men, women and children were integral to the running of his farms and building and maintaining his home at Monticello. Some were given training in various trades, others worked the fields, and some worked inside the main house.

Many of the enslaved house servants were members of the Hemings family.  Elizabeth Hemings  and her children were a part of the Wayles estate and tradition says that John Wayles was the father of six of Hemings’s children and, thus, they were the half-brothers and sisters of Jefferson’s wife Martha. Jefferson gave the Hemingses special positions, and the only slaves Jefferson freed in his lifetime and in his will were all Hemingses, giving credence to the oral history. Years after his wife’s death, Jefferson fathered at least six of Sally Hemings’s children. Four survived to adulthood and are mentioned in Jefferson’s plantation records. Their daughter  Harriet  and eldest son  Beverly  were allowed to leave Monticello during Jefferson’s lifetime and the two youngest sons,  Madison  and  Eston , were freed in Jefferson’s will.

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Videos and podcasts about Jefferson

Learn more about Jefferson's life, career, and legacy in this gallery of recorded livestreams, podcasts, and videos.

Education and Professional Life

After a two-year course of study at the College of William and Mary that he began at age seventeen, Jefferson read the law for five years with Virginia’s prominent jurist, George Wythe, and recorded his first legal case in 1767. In two years he was elected to Virginia’s House of Burgesses (the legislature in colonial Virginia).

Thomas Jefferson by John Trumbull, 1788

His first political work to gain broad acclaim was a 1774 draft of directions for Virginia’s delegation to the First Continental Congress, reprinted as a  “Summary View of the Rights of British America.”  Here he boldly reminded George III that, “he is no more than the chief officer of the people, appointed by the laws, and circumscribed with definite powers, to assist in working the great machine of government. . . .”  Nevertheless, in his “Summary View” he maintained that it was not the wish of Virginia to separate from the mother country. 6  But two years later as a member of the Second Continental Congress and chosen to draft the  Declaration of Independence , he put forward the colonies’ arguments for declaring themselves free and independent states. The Declaration has been regarded as a charter of American and universal liberties. The document proclaims that all men are equal in rights, regardless of birth, wealth, or status; that those rights are inherent in each human, a gift of the creator, not a gift of government, and that government is the servant and not the master of the people.

Jefferson recognized that the principles he included in the Declaration had not been fully realized and would remain a challenge across time, but his poetic vision continues to have a profound influence in the United States and around the world. Abraham Lincoln made just this point when he declared:

All honor to Jefferson – to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, and so to embalm it there, that to-day and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression. 7

After Jefferson left Congress in 1776, he returned to Virginia and served in the legislature. In late 1776, as a member of the new House of Delegates of Virginia, he worked closely with James Madison. Their first collaboration, to end the religious establishment in Virginia, became a legislative battle which would culminate with the passage of Jefferson’s  Statute for Religious Freedom  in 1786.

Elected governor from 1779 to 1781, he suffered an inquiry into his conduct during the British invasion of Virginia in his last year in office that, although the investigation was finally repudiated by the General Assembly, left him with a life-long pricklishness in the face of criticism and generated a life-long enmity toward Patrick Henry whom Jefferson blamed for the investigation. The investigation “inflicted a wound on my spirit which will only be cured by the all-healing grave” Jefferson told James Monroe. 8

Thomas Jefferson by Mather Brown, 1786

During the brief private interval in his life following his governorship, Jefferson completed the one book which he authored,  Notes on the State of Virginia . Several aspects of this work were highly controversial. With respect to slavery, in  Notes  Jefferson recognized the gross injustice of the institution – warning that because of slavery “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his Justice cannot sleep for ever.” But he also expressed racist views of blacks’ abilities; albeit he recognized that his views of their limitations might result from the degrading conditions to which they had been subjected for many years. With respect to religion, Jefferson’s  Notes  emphatically supported a broad religious freedom and opposed any establishment or linkage between church and state, famously insisting that “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” 9

In 1784, he entered public service again, in France, first as trade commissioner and then as Benjamin Franklin's successor as U.S. minister. During this period, he avidly studied European culture, sending home to Monticello, books, seeds and plants, along with architectural drawings, artwork, furniture, scientific instruments, and information.

In 1790 he agreed to be the first secretary of state under the new Constitution in the administration of the first president,  George Washington . His tenure was marked by his opposition to the policies of  Alexander Hamilton  which Jefferson believed both encouraged a larger and more powerful national government and were too pro-British.

In 1796, as the presidential candidate of the nascent Democratic-Republican Party, he became vice-president after losing to  John Adams  by three electoral votes. Four years later, he defeated Adams in another  hotly contested election  and became president, the first peaceful transfer of authority from one party to another in the history of the young nation.

Perhaps the most notable achievements of his first term were the purchase of the  Louisiana Territory  in 1803 and his support of the  Lewis and Clark expedition . His second term, a time when he encountered more difficulties on both the domestic and foreign fronts, is most remembered for his efforts to maintain neutrality in the midst of the conflict between Britain and France. Unfortunately, his efforts did not avert a war with Britain in 1812 after he had left office and his friend and colleague, James Madison, had assumed the presidency.

best biography thomas jefferson

Jefferson as President

More on Jefferson's two terms as America's third president.

During the last seventeen years of his life, Jefferson generally remained at Monticello, welcoming the many visitors who came to call upon the Sage. During this period, he sold his collection of books (almost 6500 volumes) to the government to form the nucleus of the Library of Congress before promptly beginning to purchase more volumes for his final library. Noting the irony, Jefferson famously told John Adams that “I cannot live without books.” 10

Jefferson embarked on his last great public service at the age of seventy-six with the founding of the  University of Virginia . He spearheaded the legislative campaign for its charter, secured its location, designed its buildings, planned its curriculum, and served as the first rector.

Unfortunately, Jefferson’s retirement was clouded by debt. Like so many Virginia planters, he had contended with debts most of his adult life, but along with the constant fluctuations in the agricultural markets, he was never able to totally liquidate the sizeable debt attached to the inheritance from his father-in-law John Wayles. His finances worsened in retirement with the War of 1812 and the subsequent recession, headed by the Panic of 1819. He had felt compelled to sign on notes for a friend in 1818, who died insolvent two years later, leaving Jefferson with two $10,000 notes. This he labeled his  coup de grâce,  as his extensive land holdings in Virginia, with the deflated land prices, could no longer cover what he owed. He complained to James Madison that the economic crisis had “peopled the Western States” and “drew off bidders” for lands in Virginia and along the Atlantic seaboard. 11   Ironically, Jefferson’s greatest accomplishment during his presidency, the purchase of the port of New Orleans and the Louisiana Territory that opened the western migration, would contribute to his financial discomfort in his final years. 12

best biography thomas jefferson

Jefferson's Three Greatest Achievements

A Monticello guide looks at the three contributions that Jefferson considered his greatest achievements.

Despite his debts, when he died just a few hours before his friend John Adams on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1826, he was optimistic as to the future of the republican experiment. Just ten days before his death, he had declined an invitation to the planned celebration in Washington but offered his assurance, “All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.” 13

Jefferson wrote his own epitaph and designed the obelisk grave marker that was to bear three of his accomplishments and “not a word more:”

HERE WAS BURIED THOMAS JEFFERSON AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE OF THE STATUTE OF VIRGINIA FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND FATHER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA BORN APRIL 2, 1743 O.S. DIED JULY 4. 1826

He could have filled several markers had he chosen to list his other public offices: third president of the new United States, vice president, secretary of state, diplomatic minister, and congressman. For his home state of Virginia he served as governor and member of the House of Delegates and the House of Burgesses as well as filling various local offices — all tallied into almost five decades of public service. He also omitted his work as a lawyer, architect, writer, farmer, gentleman scientist, and life as patriarch of an extended family at Monticello, both white and black. He offered no particular explanation as to why only these three accomplishments should be recorded, but they were unique to Jefferson.

Other men would serve as U.S. president and hold the public offices he had filled, but only he was the primary draftsman of the Declaration of Independence and of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom , nor could others claim the position as the Father of the University of Virginia . More importantly, through these three accomplishments he had made an enormous contribution to the aspirations of a new America and to the dawning hopes of repressed people around the world. He had dedicated his life to meeting the challenges of his age: political freedom, religious freedom, and educational opportunity. While he knew that we would continue to face these challenges through time, he believed that America’s democratic values would become a beacon for the rest of the world. He never wavered from his belief in the American experiment.

I have no fear that the result of our experiment will be that men may be trusted to govern themselves. . . . Thomas Jefferson, 2 July 1787

He spent much of his life laying the groundwork to insure that the great experiment would continue.

Jefferson, Politics, and Citizenship

Timeline of jefferson's public service.

From pro bono law work to founding the University of Virginia, Jefferson's career was one of public service.

The Art of Citizenship

A hub of stories, quotes, videos, biographies, podcasts, and timelines on Jefferson and civics in America.

Articles in our Jefferson Encyclopedia

Jefferson's personal life, interests, and habits.

Jefferson's Community

The people in Jefferson's life.

Articles about Jefferson's political career and accomplishments.

Science and Exploration

Learn more about Jefferson's "tranquil pursuits of science" which he called his "supreme delight."

Information about Jefferson's religious beliefs and his promotion of religious freedom.

Reports some of Jefferson's documents, his correspondence, and his writing habits.

Jefferson in Legend

Anecdotes and stories, generally inaccurate, about Jefferson's life.

1. Jefferson was born April 2nd according to the Julian calendar then in use (“ old style ”), but when the Georgian calendar was adopted in 1752, his birthday became April 13th (“new style”).

2. Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time , 6 vols. (Boston: 1948-77). I:3-33; Appendix I, I:435-46.

3. Jefferson’s Memorandum Books , James A. Bear and Lucia Stanton, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). I: 76.

4. TJ to Benjamin Latrobe, 10 Oct. 1809, PTJR:RS, 1:595.

5. “Autobiography” in Jefferson’s Writings, PTJ 6:210.

6. PTJ 1:121.

7. Letter from Abraham Lincoln to Henry L. Pierce, et al ., April 6, 1859, John G. Nicolay and John Hay, eds., Abraham Lincoln: Complete Works (New York: Century Co., 1894): 533.

8. Jefferson to James Monroe, May 20, 1782, PTJ 6:185 (ftnt omitted).

9. Notes on the State of Virginia . Ed. by William Peden. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.

10. Jefferson to John Adams, 15 June 1815, PTJR 8:522.

11. For coup de grâce and following quote, see TJ to James Madison 17 February 1826, Jefferson Writing, Merrill Peterson, ed. (Library of America, 1984), 1512-15.

12. For Jefferson’s retirement debt see, Herbert Sloan, Principle & Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 202-237; for notes signed in 1818, see p. 219.

13. TJ to Roger Weightman, 24 June 1826, Jefferson Writings , 1516-17.

ADDRESS: 931 Thomas Jefferson Parkway Charlottesville, VA 22902 GENERAL INFORMATION: (434) 984-9800

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Portrait of Thomas Jefferson, the 3rd President of the United States

Thomas Jefferson

The 3rd President of the United States

The biography for President Jefferson and past presidents is courtesy of the White House Historical Association.

Thomas Jefferson, a spokesman for democracy, was an American Founding Father, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and the third President of the United States (1801–1809).

In the thick of party conflict in 1800, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a private letter, “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

This powerful advocate of liberty was born in 1743 in Albemarle County, Virginia, inheriting from his father, a planter and surveyor, some 5,000 acres of land, and from his mother, a Randolph, high social standing. He studied at the College of William and Mary, then read law. In 1772 he married Martha Wayles Skelton, a widow, and took her to live in his partly constructed mountaintop home, Monticello.

Freckled and sandy-haired, rather tall and awkward, Jefferson was eloquent as a correspondent, but he was no public speaker. In the Virginia House of Burgesses and the Continental Congress, he contributed his pen rather than his voice to the patriot cause. As the “silent member” of the Congress, Jefferson, at 33, drafted the Declaration of Independence. In years following he labored to make its words a reality in Virginia. Most notably, he wrote a bill establishing religious freedom, enacted in 1786.

Jefferson succeeded Benjamin Franklin as minister to France in 1785. His sympathy for the French Revolution led him into conflict with Alexander Hamilton when Jefferson was Secretary of State in President Washington’s Cabinet. He resigned in 1793.

Sharp political conflict developed, and two separate parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, began to form. Jefferson gradually assumed leadership of the Republicans, who sympathized with the revolutionary cause in France. Attacking Federalist policies, he opposed a strong centralized Government and championed the rights of states.

As a reluctant candidate for President in 1796, Jefferson came within three votes of election. Through a flaw in the Constitution, he became Vice President, although an opponent of President Adams. In 1800 the defect caused a more serious problem. Republican electors, attempting to name both a President and a Vice President from their own party, cast a tie vote between Jefferson and Aaron Burr. The House of Representatives settled the tie. Hamilton, disliking both Jefferson and Burr, nevertheless urged Jefferson’s election.

When Jefferson assumed the Presidency, the crisis in France had passed. He slashed Army and Navy expenditures, cut the budget, eliminated the tax on whiskey so unpopular in the West, yet reduced the national debt by a third. He also sent a naval squadron to fight the Barbary pirates, who were harassing American commerce in the Mediterranean. Further, although the Constitution made no provision for the acquisition of new land, Jefferson suppressed his qualms over constitutionality when he had the opportunity to acquire the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon in 1803.

During Jefferson’s second term, he was increasingly preoccupied with keeping the Nation from involvement in the Napoleonic wars, though both England and France interfered with the neutral rights of American merchantmen. Jefferson’s attempted solution, an embargo upon American shipping, worked badly and was unpopular.

Jefferson retired to Monticello to ponder such projects as his grand designs for the University of Virginia. A French nobleman observed that he had placed his house and his mind “on an elevated situation, from which he might contemplate the universe.”

He died on July 4, 1826.

Learn more about Thomas Jefferson’s spouse, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson .

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Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

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Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power Paperback – October 29, 2013

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  • Print length 800 pages
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  • Publisher Random House Trade Paperbacks
  • Publication date October 29, 2013
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  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Trade Paperbacks; First Edition (October 29, 2013)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 800 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0812979486
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0812979480
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.25 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.05 x 1.4 x 9.18 inches
  • #21 in American Revolution Biographies (Books)
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Jon meacham.

Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer. The author of the New York Times bestsellers Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, Franklin and Winston, and Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, he is a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, a contributing writer for The New York Times Book Review, and a fellow of the Society of American Historians. Meacham lives in Nashville with his wife and children.

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Books | new thomas jefferson biography captures complex president in his place and time.

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That was April 1962, and that was how Jefferson was then viewed: as a man of astonishingly varied and sophisticated knowledge and accomplishments, a Founding Father to rank beside Washington and Franklin. Then, a dozen years later, came Fawn Brodie’s “Jefferson: An Intimate History,” an inquiry into Jefferson’s relations with his slaves, most specifically the possibility of sexual relations with the house servant Sally Hemings. It sold well for a work of ostensibly serious history, though it aroused passionate indignation among Jefferson loyalists in Virginia and elsewhere, and it set Jefferson on the downhill course he has followed ever since. As John B. Boles says at the outset of this magisterial biography:

“Jefferson’s complexity renders him easy to caricature in popular culture. Particularly in recent years, Jefferson, long the hero of small d as well as capital D democrats, has seen his reputation wane due to his views on race, the revelation of his relationship with Sally Hemings, and his failure to free his own slaves. Once lauded as the champion of the little man, today he is vilified as a hypocritical slave owner, professing a love of liberty while quietly driving his own slaves to labor harder in his pursuit of luxury. Surely an interpretive middle ground is possible, if not necessary. If we hope to understand the enigma that is Thomas Jefferson, we must view him holistically and within the rich context of his time and place. This biography aims to provide that perspective.”

To say that it does so is massive understatement. “Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty” is perhaps the finest one-volume biography of an American president. Boles, a professor of history at Rice University, has spent many years studying Jefferson’s native American South in all its mysteries, contradictions, follies and outrages, as well as its unique contributions to the national culture and literature. This biography is the culmination of a long, distinguished career. I admire it so passionately that, almost 2 1/2 years into a happy retirement, I had no choice except to violate my pledge never again to write another book review.

To his study of this deeply controversial man, Boles brings an ample supply of what has been so lamentably missing in the discussion over the past half-century: a calm insistence on separating truth (so far as we can know it) from rumor and invective, and a refusal to judge a man who lived more than two centuries ago by the moral, ethical and political standards of today. Boles admires Jefferson and maintains a sympathetic attitude toward him through this long, immensely satisfying narrative, but he does not flinch when Jefferson’s behavior and attitudes seem, according to 21st-century standards, offensive at worst, inexplicable at best.

Because the focus in recent years has been almost entirely on Jefferson’s attitudes toward slavery and his actions regarding the several hundred slaves who fell under his ownership, it is important to recall that there was vastly more to his long life than this. In Boles’ “full-scale biography,” Jefferson is presented to us “in all his guises: politician, diplomat, party leader, executive; architect, musician, oenophile, gourmand, traveler; inventor, historian, political theorist; land owner, farmer, slaveholder; and son, father, grandfather.” Without smothering the reader under mountains of detail, Boles briskly but authoritatively takes Jefferson from his birth in Virginia in 1743 to his death, at home in his beloved Monticello, on the Fourth of July, 1826, several hours before the death in Massachusetts of his old friend and occasional rival, John Adams, that other great Founding Father.

As Boles notes, the world into which Jefferson was born was so different from our own that we are hard-pressed to imagine it, yet it was out of this distant world that our own eventually emerged, and Jefferson was at the very center as the transformation from colony to nation got under way. He wrote the immortal Declaration of Independence, which gave voice to the convictions and hopes that impelled his fellow colonists into revolution. At the end of his life, he said the Declaration was one of his three singular accomplishments, the others being the enactment of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786) and the establishment of the University of Virginia a couple of years before his death.

He represented the new nation in Paris from 1784 to 1790, and while he was there delighted in and learned from the varied aspects of that city, whether musical or literary or architectural. In Philadelphia and New York, from 1790 to 1801, he participated in the formation of the new government and served a term as John Adams’ vice president, spending much of that term at Monticello, just as Adams spent much of his term at his Massachusetts home. He then sought and won the presidency in February 1801 in a breathtakingly close vote in the House of Representatives.

The accomplishments of his presidency are well known, most notably the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the Lewis and Clark expedition to the far West, though his second term was less successful than his first. He lived for more than a decade and a half after it ended, and while he continued to be active in the public lives of his nation and state, he found his greatest pleasures in Monticello and within the bonds of the family to which he was utterly devoted. His wife, Martha, had died in 1782, pleading with him on her deathbed not to marry again, a request that he honored willingly but one that probably had much to do with his later escape into the arms of Hemings.

Thanks largely to the diligent research of Annette Gordon-Reed and the two books that emerged from it, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings” (1997) and “The Hemingses of Monticello” (2008), we now know almost certainly as much as we ever will about this essentially mysterious connection. We do know that Hemings “gave birth to five children,” that Jefferson “was demonstrably present at Monticello nine months prior to each of these births” and that one of her children bore an almost uncanny resemblance to Jefferson. Gordon-Reed “argues that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, as unlikely as it might seem, probably had genuine mutual affection,” which if true can only leave us all the more puzzled by “his failure to emancipate his own slaves or work actively to end slavery completely.” Boles writes:

“Activists in Jefferson’s time … much less the abolitionists who emerged soon after his death, could not accept such a patient approach; nor can modern readers. Jefferson’s willingness to wait tells us a great deal about his character and also about his era, his race, and his class. As a wealthy white man, he saw little need for urgency; he believed, rather, that in God’s good time, emancipation would somehow be effected. In no other aspect of his life does Jefferson seem more distant from us or more disappointing.”

Disappointing, to be sure, but also understandable. He was a creature of his own time, not of ours, and at the end of this superb, utterly riveting biography, Boles strikes exactly the right note. He describes the “simple obelisk” erected over Jefferson’s grave at Monticello and then says: “It was a simple marker for a man of vast accomplishments and complexities, the supreme spokesman of America’s promise. Ironically, today he is often found wanting for not practicing the principles he articulated best. Yet Jefferson, despite his limitations, more than anyone else was the intellectual architect of the nation’s highest ideals. He will always belong in the American pantheon.”

Yardley was the book critic of The Washington Post from 1981 to 2014.

“Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty” b y John B. Boles

Basic. 626 pp. $35

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‘Sally & Tom’ Frees Sally Hemings From Being a Mere Footnote

Suzan-Lori Parks’s play is the latest work by a Black writer seeking to prioritize Hemings’s life and perspective to make her fully dimensional.

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In a production image, a woman and a man in period attire are standing next to each other, with some distance between them,  and holding hands.

By Salamishah Tillet

Sally Hemings might be a household name these days, but we still know so little about the relationship between Hemings and Thomas Jefferson . Yet, Hemings endures as a figure of endless fascination: American writers aspire to tell her story, and there remains a yearning for a deeper understanding of the enslaved woman who left no firsthand accounts of her inner thoughts.

In “Sally & Tom,” Suzan Lori-Parks is the latest writer trying to fill in the gaps in order to present Hemings as a multidimensional character — and, in the process, rescue her personhood onstage. “We don’t know what happened,” Sheria Irving, who portrays Hemings in the play, told me, adding that Parks is “building on this factual account.” (The play has been a hit for the Public Theater and runs there through June 2.)

She continued: “We do not have to reimagine, we can really imagine what it is for a 14-year-old to be looked at by a 41-year-old, and not just looked at but to engage in sexual exploitation with this man.”

Parks’s fidelity to the history means she doesn’t alter Hemings’s fate. Instead, she experiments with the storytelling by plotting “Sally & Tom” as a backstager, or a play within a play, in which the main character, Luce (also played by Irving), is an African American dramatist who is writing a play about the relationship between Hemings and Jefferson. Luce is playing Hemings in her own play, which is called “The Pursuit of Happiness.”

In fact, each cast member plays two parts: Luce’s partner, Mike (Gabriel Ebert), is playing Tom in the production, and Alano Miller plays both Hemings’s older brother, James, and Kwame, a Hollywood actor who has returned to his old theater company. When the historical story and the present-day one collide, they often reveal the sometimes comical and often complicated reality that can arise when mounting a show dealing with race relations in the American theater today.

This doubling allows for Parks’s two-part critique. First, Luce’s focus on Hemings counters those Jefferson historians who have tried to erase her legacy. Also, Luce’s battle to control the ending of her play highlights the pressures that Black playwrights sometimes face in commercial theater: the white gatekeepers, producers and actors, who are less interested in a Black writer’s artistic freedom and more interested in controlling the narrative, claiming it will make the work more palatable to a white audience. (Something that Alice Childress experienced and wrote about .)

While meta-narratives are part of Parks’s avant-garde aesthetic, “Sally & Tom” reminded me of something I had noticed when doing research for my book “Sites of Slavery” : Parks’s new play is part of a canon by Black writers that subverts genre conventions to prioritize Hemings’s life and perspective. By doing so, these authors free Hemings and the other enslaved members of her family from being mere footnotes in Jefferson’s biography.

Barbara Chase-Riboud, after reading a chapter on Hemings in Fawn Brodie’s 1974 psychological study of Thomas Jefferson , decided to write her own novel. Published in 1979 as historical fiction, “Sally Hemings” uses a nonlinear structure that jumps from Hemings and Jefferson’s earliest encounters, in 1787, when a 14-year-old Hemings accompanied the family to Paris to care for Jefferson’s daughters while he was stationed there as a senior minister; to their living together in Albemarle County in Virginia, in the early 19th century; and to her life in Virginia as a free woman after his death. These flashbacks and flash-forwards reveal how Hemings navigated enslavement and emancipation while imagining how she might have evolved into a woman who questioned Jefferson’s authority and secured freedom for their four children who survived to adulthood.

In 1997, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” by the historian Annette Gordon-Reed, took Jefferson’s earlier biographers and historians to task for their insistence that Jefferson’s fathering of his six children with Hemings was improbable , including some who claimed he was celibate for almost four decades, while others attributed parentage to his nephews Peter and Samuel Carr .

Gordon-Reed’s style is akin to a meta-historiography in which she compares these earlier biographies while also, as a law professor, cross-examining the motives of the Jefferson scholars, their missing evidence, and their deliberate misreadings of firsthand witness accounts of Hemings and Jefferson’s long-term relationship in the published narratives of their son Madison Hemings, and the formerly enslaved Isaac Jefferson.

But it is Robbie McCauley’s play “Sally’s Rape,” which won an Obie Award in 1992, to which Parks’s “Sally & Tom” is the most indebted. McCauley was the most experimental in her rendering of Hemings’s story and the most explicit in her condemnation of Jefferson. She played herself, her own great-great-grandmother (named Sally) and Hemings. In contrast, her artistic collaborator Jeannie Hutchins, who is white, played her liberal friend, a Smith College graduate and a slave auctioneer.

Hutchins’s character refuses to believe McCauley’s assertions that both Sallys — her ancestor and the historical one — were raped by their slave owners. The play continually broke the fourth wall by inviting the audience to participate in these uncomfortable exchanges, including the bidding, and consider how their own racial bias might stem from such founding violence.

Even though Hemings and Jefferson were not actual characters in James Ijames’s 2020 play, “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever,” their relationship serves as the historical backdrop for his contemporary satire set on a Southern campus in which TJ, a white middle-aged college dean, sexually harasses Sally, an African American undergraduate.

In “Sally & Tom,” Parks found a way to add to the current conversations about the white gaze in American theater that are taking place among a younger generation of authors whose unorthodox storytelling Parks most likely inspired. These include Jackie Sibblies Drury, whose “Fairview” follows a Black family in an increasingly surreal setting, and Jeremy O. Harris, whose “Slave Play” takes an outrageous look at a sex therapy program for interracial couples.

“Luce is trying to give voice to a marginalized Black woman,” Irving told me about her character. “She’s trying to get it right. And that was my objective for her, to get it right, how to uplift a voice that has never really been heard on a stage in this way.”

“I think she’s architecting this way to free herself,” she added. “She’s architecting a way to free Sally, and by freeing Sally, she is able to free herself.”

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the professional status of the historian Annette Gordon-Reed. She is a law professor at Harvard Law School, not a former law professor.

How we handle corrections

Salamishah Tillet is a contributing critic at large for The Times and a professor at Rutgers University. She won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2022, for columns examining race and Black perspectives as the arts and entertainment world responded to the Black Lives Matter moment with new works. More about Salamishah Tillet

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