biography thomas jefferson

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.

(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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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."

Sally Hemmings

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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.

The Biography.com staff is a team of people-obsessed and news-hungry editors with decades of collective experience. We have worked as daily newspaper reporters, major national magazine editors, and as editors-in-chief of regional media publications. Among our ranks are book authors and award-winning journalists. Our staff also works with freelance writers, researchers, and other contributors to produce the smart, compelling profiles and articles you see on our site. To meet the team, visit our About Us page: https://www.biography.com/about/a43602329/about-us

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Thomas Jefferson

By: History.com Editors

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

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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Thomas Jefferson, A Brief Biography

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Jefferson's Three Greatest Achievements

The Declaration of Independence

Statute of Virgina for Religious Freedom

For Jefferson, whose unorthodox religious views were a matter of heated discussion, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was one of his greatest achievements.

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

Spurious Jefferson Quotations

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“Monticello is as close as any of us can ever get to having a conversation with Thomas Jefferson.”

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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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Biography Online

Biography Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743–July 4, 1826) was a leading  Founding Father of the United States, the author of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and he served as the third President of the US (1801–1809). Jefferson was a committed Republican – arguing passionately for liberty, democracy and devolved power. Jefferson also wrote the Statute for Religious Freedom in 1777 – it was adopted by the state of Virginia in 1786. Jefferson was also a noted polymath with wide-ranging interests from architecture to gardening, philosophy, literature and education. Although a slave owner himself, Jefferson sought to introduce a bill (1800) to end slavery in all Western territories. As President, he signed a bill to ban the importation of slaves into the US (1807).

Jefferson’s Childhood

“Still less let it be proposed that our properties within our own territories shall be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own. The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them. This, sire, is our last, our determined resolution;”

Thomas Jefferson – A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774). ( Wikisource )

Thomas Jefferson and The Declaration of Independence (1776)

Thomas Jefferson was the primary author in drafting the American Declaration of Independence. The act was adopted on July 4th, 1776 and was a symbolic statement of the aims of the American Revolution.

 “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…”

– Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence , July 4th, 1776. Jefferson received suggestions from others such as James Madison. He was also influenced by the writings of the British Empiricists, in particular, John Locke and Thomas Paine . The importance of the Declaration of Independence was summed up in The Gettysburg address of Abraham Lincoln in 1863.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

However, Jefferson was disappointed that a reference to the evil of slavery was removed at the request of delegates from the South. From 1785 to 1789 Jefferson served as minister to France, succeeding Benjamin Franklin . In France, Jefferson became immersed in Paris society. He was a noted host and came into contact with many of the great thinkers of the age. Jefferson also saw the social and political turmoil which resulted in the French Revolution. On 26 August 1789, the French Assembly published the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen , which was directly influenced by Jefferson’s US Declaration of Independence. On his return to America Jefferson served under George Washington as first Secretary of State. Here he began debating with the Hamilton factions over the size of government spending. Jefferson was an advocate of minimal government. At the end of his term 1783, he retired temporarily to Monticello, where he spent time amongst his gardens and with his family.

Jefferson – President in 1800

In 1796 Jefferson stood for President but lost narrowly to John Adams ; however, under the terms of the constitution, this was sufficient for him to become Vice President. In the run-up to the next election of 1800 Jefferson fought a bitter campaign. In particular, the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 led to the imprisonment of many newspaper editors who supported Jefferson and were critical of the existing government. However, Jefferson was narrowly elected and this allowed him to promote open and representative government. On being elected, he offered a hand of friendship to his former political enemies. He also allowed the Sedition Act to expire and promoted the practical existence of free speech. The Presidency of Jefferson was eventful, but importantly he was able to preside over a period of relative stability and generally kept America out of conflict.

“I love peace, and am anxious that we should give the world still another useful lesson, by showing to them other modes of punishing injuries than by war, which is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer.”

At the time American neutrality was imperilled by the British-French wars, which raged around Canada. In 1803 Jefferson was able to double the size of the US, through the Louisiana Purchase, which gave America many states to the west. He also commissioned the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which crossed America seeking to explore and create friendships with the Native American populations.

Jefferson’s Retirement in Monticello

Thomas Jefferson’s Personal Life

Thomas Jefferson married Martha Wayles Skelton in 1772. Together they had six children, including one stillborn son. Martha Jefferson Randolph (1772–1836), Jane Randolph (1774–1775), a stillborn or unnamed son (1777), Mary Wayles (1778–1804), Lucy Elizabeth (1780–1781), and Lucy Elizabeth (1782–1785). Martha died only 10 years later. Thomas Jefferson remained single for the rest of his life. It was alleged that Jefferson fathered some of Sally Hemings’ daughters. Jefferson never denied it in public, but he did deny it private correspondence. There has never been any conclusive proof that this occurred.

Personal qualities

Jefferson was over 6’2″; this was very tall for his age. He didn’t relish public speaking, he preferred to express his opinions through his writings. His friends and family remarked on Jefferson’s many fine qualities. He was sympathetic and engaging in conversation. Never bored, he always found different avenues of interest to explore. Thomas Jefferson left a profound mark on America, through his influential shaping of the American constitution and political practices. Jefferson died at the age of 84 on the afternoon of July 4; it was the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. A few hours later on the same day, his longtime friend and fellow Founding Father John Adams also passed away. On his tombstone, Jefferson had inscribed three achievements he was proudest of:

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.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of Thomas Jefferson ”, Oxford, UK – www.biographyonline.net . Published 22 June 2014 Last updated 22 October 2019.

Thomas Jefferson: A Life

Thomas Jefferson: A Life at Amazon

Light and Liberty – Quotes of Thomas Jefferson

Light and Liberty – Quotes of Thomas Jefferson at Amazon

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U.S. Presidents / Thomas Jefferson

1743 - 1826

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…some honest men fear that a republican government can not be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot…abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm…? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest Government on earth. First Inaugural Address

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, spent his childhood roaming the woods and studying his books on a remote plantation in the Virginia Piedmont. Thanks to the prosperity of his father, Jefferson had an excellent education. After years in boarding school, where he excelled in classical languages, Jefferson enrolled in William and Mary College in his home state of Virginia, taking classes in science, mathematics, rhetoric, philosophy, and literature. He also studied law, and by the time he was admitted to the Virginia bar in April 1767, many considered him to have one of the nation's best legal minds.

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Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia. “Thomas Jefferson.” Accessed April 09, 2024. https://millercenter.org/president/jefferson.

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Professor Peter Onuf is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia.

• -The Mind of Thomas Jefferson
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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.
• Risjord, N.K., 2002, Thomas Jefferson , Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Robertson, W., 1777/1855, The History of the Discovery and Settlement of America , New York: Harper & Brothers.
• Sanford, C.B., 1984, The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson , Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia.
• Scherr, A., 2016, Thomas Jefferson’s Image of New England: Nationalism versus Sectionalism in the Young Republic, Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers.
• Sheridan, E.R., 1983, “Introduction”, in Jefferson’s Extracts from the Gospels , Dickinson W. Adams (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press: 3–42.
• Shuffleton, F. (ed.), 2009, The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Jefferson , New York: University of Cambridge Press.
• Sloan, H., 1993, “‘The Earth belongs in Usufruct to the Living,’” in Onuf 1993: 281–315.
• Smith, A., 1759 [1982], The Theory of Moral Sentiments , Indianapolis: Liberty Classics.
• Smith, J.E., 1977, “Philosophical Ideas behind the ‘Declaration of Independence’”, Revue Internationale de Philosophia , 31(121/122): 360–76.
• 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.
• Turgot, A-R-J., 1750 [1973], A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind , in Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics , R.L. Meek (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
• Volney, C.F., 2010 [1802], The Ruins , Thomas Jefferson (trans.), Fairford, England: The Echo Library.
• Walton, C., 1984, “Hume and Jefferson on the Uses of History”, Philosophy and the Civilizing Arts , C. Walton and J. Anton (eds.), Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, pp. 389–403.
• Wiencek, H., 2012, “Thomas Jefferson: Slave Master”, American History , (October): 26–33.
• 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

T homas Jefferson was born in Shadwell in the colony of Virginia on April 13, 1743.  Jefferson's father, Peter Jefferson, was self-taught and decided his children would receive a formal education. Peter Jefferson provided private tutors for his son beginning at the age of 5. Though his father died when Jefferson was only fourteen, Jefferson continued his pursuit of education enrolling at the College of William and Mary at age sixteen. At William and Mary, Jefferson studied mathematics, metaphysics, and philosophy. Through these studies, Jefferson was introduced to the philosophers, John Locke and Francis Bacon, whose writings deeply impacted Jefferson's writing on natural rights and governance.

Jefferson began his role as a political activist and revolutionary at a relatively young age. In addition to practicing law, Jefferson was a representative in the Virginia House of Burgesses. During this first role in governance, Jefferson would reveal his revolutionary leanings. After Parliament's passing of the Intolerable Acts in 1774, Jefferson introduced a resolution actively protesting the British crown. Jefferson called for a day-long fast and a boycott of all British Goods. This resolution eventually became Jefferson's A Summary View of the Rights of Man . In which Jefferson raised grievances with King George and Parliaments increased role within the colonies. Jefferson even made an early plea for the sovereignty of the colonies, arguing, "Every society must at all times possess within itself the sovereign powers of legislation."

As Jefferson became prominent in Virginia politics, he also amassed status along with his power. Jefferson inherited the land that would become Monticello after his father’s death, and at twenty-one gained complete control over the 5,000 acres of land and forty slaves. Jefferson later inherited 135 slaves from his father in law, he would own approximately six hundred slaves by his death. This would become the biggest moral and philosophical dissonance of Jefferson’s life, his passion for liberty and enlightenment values while being an active participant in the institution of slavery. Jefferson’s participation in slavery remains controversial today, especially because of the six-hundred slaves Jefferson owned, he only freed seven.

Jefferson’s growing reputation for politics earned him a chance to represent Virginia at the Second Continental Congress in 1776. Jefferson was the youngest member of the Continental Congress at only thirty-three years old. Despite Jefferson's younger age, John Adams wrote that Jefferson brought with him "a reputation for literature, science and a happy talent for composition." Jefferson’s fellow representatives called upon this “happy talent” selecting him to compose the Declaration of Independence . Jefferson brought together his knowledge of literature and philosophy drawing from the works of George Mason and John Locke to compose what Jefferson called an "expression of the American mind." Jefferson submitted a rough draft of his Declaration on June 28. The Declaration was debated and edited extensively by the Continental Congress until on July 2 Congress adopted a resolution of Independence and on July 4 adopted the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration was published widely and spread through word of mouth—gaining support for resistance against Great Britain across the collection of colonies.

However, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence did not just help inspire the initial refusal of British rule, the Declaration of Independence helped to construct an American identity. The Declaration was more than just an elaboration on independence but rather a treatise on the American identity. The Declaration identified the colonies, not as individual entities but rather a unified “united states.” Jefferson constructed an American political identity based on democracy rather than monarchism, arguing that to secure natural rights required a government that derived its power from “powers from the consent of the governed.” And perhaps most important to American identity is Jefferson’s bold claim that “all men are created equal.”

During the revolution, Jefferson continued his role as a prominent politician. Jefferson served in the Virginia state government, greatly assisting with the formulation of the state constitution. In 1778 Jefferson completely revised Virginia's laws, drafting 126 bills in three years. During this time, Jefferson focused on providing general education and ending feudal land-owning laws. In 1779 and 1780 Jefferson was elected governor of Virginia. During his two one-year terms as governor, Jefferson introduced public education and religious freedom to Virginia.

In 1784 Jefferson succeeded Benjamin Franklin as the minister to France. During this time Jefferson significantly, advanced United States diplomacy. In 1785 Jefferson negotiated the Treaty of Amity and Commerce between the Kingdom of Prussia and the United States of America. The treaty established the first commercial alliance between a European power and the United States. As minister to France, Jefferson also greatly influenced the inauguration of the French Revolution. Jefferson lived in Paris during the early stages of the French Revolution. Jefferson consulted to Abbé Sieyès and the Marquis de Lafayette as they composed The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen, the founding text of the French Revolution.

Thomas Jefferson returned to America in 1789, George Washington appointed Jefferson the first Secretary of State. Jefferson's time in the first presidential cabinet would be characterized by infighting and conflict among his fellow cabinet members. Jefferson strongly opposed the creation of national debt and favored a capital closer to the agrarian south. In contrast, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton proposed the federal government assume the liability of the states and desired for the capital to be near the industrial north-eastern cities. These disagreements between federal and states’ rights and commerciality versus agrarian culture would become the core differences between Jefferson's Democratic-Republican and Hamilton and Adam's Federalist parties.

Jefferson’s first major political defeat came in the presidential election of 1796. After Washington's September 17 Farewell Address, Congressman Fisher Ames predicted, the speech served "as a signal, like dropping a hat, for party racers to start." Ames correctly saw what the 1796 election would become, a battle for the morality and identity of a new nation. The Democratic-Republicans argued for an America following France's experiments with democratic liberty, while the Federalists looked to Britain's aristocratic order. The campaigning of both sides was vitriolic—Federalists compared Republicans to the Reign of Terror and Republicans compared Federalists to the monarchy. On election day the results were close, Adams marginally defeated Jefferson 71 electoral votes to 68 electoral votes. Because of constitutional law at the time, as Jefferson placed second in electoral voting, Jefferson became Adams's vice-president.

Jefferson's term as vice president was characterized by conflict between the president and Jefferson. Jefferson directly undermined Adams as president. When Adams and the Federalist administration passed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison responded by anonymously publishing the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Jefferson argued in favor of nullification; states could invalidate federal law. George Washington saw Jefferson as acting only to undermine Adams, telling Patrick Henry , the resolutions would "dissolve the union" if pursued.

During the election of 1800 Jefferson again ran for president. However, the public discourse was much different in this election. Federalists attacked Jefferson's character—explicitly targeting Jefferson's religion. Federalists argued that Jefferson's support for religious freedom came from a lack of faith within Jefferson. Republicans argued the opposite, that Jefferson knew that "coercion never will be of service to Christianity." Jefferson's support of religious freedom also garnered him the votes of Catholics, Baptists, Jews, and other religious minorities. Vice President Jefferson won the presidential election of 1800 73 electoral votes to 65 electoral votes. After twelve years of Federalist governance, the United States had its first democratic “revolution,” peacefully shifting power to the Democratic-Republicans.

Jefferson’s eight years as president saw successes but often at the cost of his Republican ideology. During Jefferson's first term he promised a Republican government, ensuring a free and democratic society. A major way Jefferson sought to impose his vision of policy on the United States was by lowering the national debt while also repealing excise taxes greatly. Jefferson described his budget as, “rigorously frugal and simple.” Through this rigorously frugal and simple budget, Jefferson shrunk the federal debt from 83 million dollars in 1801 to 57 million dollars in 1809.

However, Jefferson's actions did not always align with his ideology. In 1803 Jefferson sent James Monroe to purchase the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon. Monroe’s mission succeeded with the Louisiana purchase , purchasing 828,000 square miles for only 15 million dollars. Jefferson realized this move would be hypocritical—there was no provision in the constitution for land acquisition. Jefferson attempted to make an amendment to the constitution allowing the purchase, however, Napoleon threatened to pull out of the deal if not done expeditiously. Jefferson made the deal immediately and without clear Constitutional authority to do so. Jefferson long criticized the Federalists for their loose interpretation of the constitution, but for the largest success of his presidency, Jefferson had to stray from his strict interpretation of the constitution. Jefferson would send explorers Meriweather Lewis and William Clark to map and explore the new territory in 1804.

After Jefferson's presidency concluded, Jefferson retreated from life in the government, turning his goals back to education. In 1819, at 76 years old Jefferson founded the University of Virginia, a university free of all church influence. Jefferson also turned away from past political conflict. Reconciling his friendship with John Adams through correspondence letters starting in 1812 and continuing until both figures passed away on the same day, July 4, 1826.

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Thomas jefferson.

Third president of the United States

Thomas Jefferson was born near the Blue Ridge Mountains of the British-ruled colony of Virginia on April 13, 1743. From the age of nine, Jefferson studied away from home and lived with his tutor. His father—a landowner, surveyor, and government official—died when his son was 14. Later Jefferson enrolled at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. His education included science, mathematics, philosophy, law, English language and literature, Latin, Greek, French, and dancing.

"LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS"

After college, Jefferson became a lawyer. By age 26 he was a member of Virginia’s colonial legislature, or government. Like George Washington , Jefferson spoke out against Great Britain’s rule over the 13 North American colonies. When the colonists decided to demand their independence from Great Britain , Jefferson was chosen to write a document explaining why the colonies should be free. The document became known as the Declaration of Independence. It’s still admired today for its call for freedom, equality, and its demand that all citizens deserve "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Before he became president, Jefferson was governor of Virginia before the Revolutionary War. After the war, he served as U.S. minister to France , secretary of state for President George Washington , and vice president for President John Adams, the country’s second president.

GO WEST, YOUNG NATION

When Jefferson became the third president of the United States in 1801, the country basically ended at the Mississippi River; France controlled much of what was west. That included the Port of New Orleans, in what is now Louisiana . It’s coastal location made it a key spot for trade—and Jefferson wanted it. In 1803, he made what’s known as one of the greatest real estate deals in history: the Louisiana Purchase .

France agreed to sell the entire city of New Orleans, which included the port, to the United States for $10 million; they threw in the rest of the territory they owned for an additional $5 million. The agreement—which gave the United States about 828,000 square miles of land—almost doubled the size of the nearly 30-year-old nation. Jefferson selected his personal secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to join William Clark in leading an expedition to the West Coast to explore the country’s new land. The Louisiana Purchase is thought by many to be Jefferson’s greatest accomplishment as president.

LASTING LEGACY

Jefferson retired to Monticello, his home in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the end of his second term. He designed and founded the University of Virginia in Charlottesville during his retirement.

Jefferson left a complicated legacy: The man who wrote the Declaration of Independence—which states that "all men are created equal"—also enslaved more than 600 people during his lifetime. But according to his writings, Jefferson knew that future generations would have to end the enslavement of people, and that it would be a long, terrible process.

Like his friend John Adams, Jefferson died 50 years to the day after the approval of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1826.

• Jefferson is credited with first introducing french fries to the United States.

• As secretary of state, Jefferson organized a contest to design the White House. Historians think he secretly entered—and lost.

• Jefferson loved cheese so much, a Massachusetts farmer once gifted him with a 1,300-pound piece.

From the Nat Geo Kids books Our Country's Presidents by Ann Bausum and Weird But True Know-It-All: U.S. Presidents by Brianna Dumont, revised for digital by Avery Hurt

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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

Senior Editor

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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