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JEFFERSON, Thomas
(1743–1826), American revolutionary leader and political
philosopher, author of the Declaration of Independence, and third
president of the U.S. (1801–9).
Jefferson was among the most brilliant American exponents
of the Enlightenment, the movement of 18th-century thought that
emphasized the possibilities of human reason. A Virginia aristocrat,
he had the time and resources to educate himself in history, literature,
law, architecture, science, and philosophy; as a diplomat and friend
of French and British intellectuals, he had direct access to European
culture and thought; and as a provincial farmer and novice revolutionary
leader, he had the motivation and the opportunity to apply Enlightenment
political philosophy to the task of nation-building.
Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743, at Shadwell in Albemarle
Co., Va. His father was a plantation owner, and his mother belonged
to the Randolph family, which was prominent in colonial Virginia.
From his father and from his environment he acquired an intense
interest in botany, geology, cartography, and North American exploration,
and from a childhood teacher a love of Greek and Latin. As a student
at the College of William and Mary in the early 1760s, he studied
under William Small (1734–75), who knew in depth the Scottish
Enlightenment, with its highly integrated approach to law, history, philosophy,
and science. In George Wythe, he found an equally gifted teacher
of the law. Jefferson was admitted to the bar in 1767 and first
elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1769. His principal
passion during his late 20s was the design and building of his home,
Monticello. Despite several desultory courtships, he did not seriously
consider marriage until 1770, when he met Martha Wayles Skelton
(1747–82), a wealthy widow of 23. They were married in
1772.
During his 20s, Jefferson read voraciously in Enlightenment
philosophy, 17th-century English history, political theory, and
law. Drawing on this learning, he drafted in 1774 a Summary
View of the Rights of British America as instructions for
Virginia’s delegates to the First Continental Congress,
which met to consider the colonies’ grievances against
Great Britain. Virginia leaders instead adopted a more legalistic
set of instructions, and Summary View was published
anonymously as a pamphlet. As Jefferson’s authorship became
widely known, however, he moved suddenly into the front rank of
American political theorists.
In the pamphlet, Jefferson argued that the original settlers
of the colonies came as individuals rather than as agents of the
British government. The colonial governments they formed therefore
embodied the natural right of expatriates from one country to select
the terms of their subjection to a new ruler. Colonial legislatures and
the British Parliament, he asserted, shared power, and both were
responsible for protecting the “liberties and rights” of
the people.
The Declaration of Independence, drafted principally by Jefferson
in late June 1776 for the Second Continental Congress, drew the
implications of this historical view to their logical conclusion,
proclaiming that the tyrannical acts of the British government gave
the colonists the right to “dissolve the political bands” that
had connected them with the mother country.
As a legislator in Virginia (1776–79), Jefferson
sought to reform society along enlightened and republican lines.
After successfully proposing the disestablishment of the Anglican
church, he was responsible for legislation abolishing entail (inheritance
of land through a particular line of descent) and primogeniture
(inheritance only by the eldest son), thus eliminating two major governmental
restrictions on the use of private property.
The reform of the Virginia criminal code—in which
Jefferson was a leading participant—did not achieve the
humanitarian results to which he was dedicated but did eliminate
the most barbarous and repressive practices, such as public whippings,
dunkings, and bills of attainder (which condemned accused persons without
trial). The legislature refused outright to adopt Jefferson’s
bill for a public school system and library, but many years later,
he succeeded in establishing the University of Virginia (which opened
in 1825)—one of the three accomplishments that he memorialized
in the epitaph on his tombstone. The other two were his authorship
of the Declaration of Independence and of the Statute of Virginia
for Religious Freedom—the latter the most important of
his achievements as a Virginia legislator. The religious freedom
statute, originally introduced in 1779 but not actually passed by
the legislature until 1786, prohibited any state financing of religious
instruction. Almost entirely composed of an eloquent preface, it
brilliantly excoriated the baneful effects of state sponsorship
of worship and belief.
As governor of Virginia from 1779 to 1781, Jefferson failed
to prevent the British from invading the state. After leaving office
he retreated to Monticello to write his classic Notes on
the State of Virginia. The Notes, which
were written for the information of a French correspondent, deal
with social, political, and economic life in the 18th century.
After his wife’s death in 1782, Jefferson again became
a delegate to the Congress, and in 1784 he drafted the report that
was the basis for the Ordinances of 1784, 1785, and 1787. As minister
to France, from 1784 to 1789, he steeped himself in French learning
and witnessed, with excitement and approval, the early stages of the
French Revolution.
As secretary of state in George Washington’s first
administration (1789–93), Jefferson revived a proposal
he had originated as a member of Congress in 1783 to establish reciprocal
trade agreements with continental European nations and, in the face of
British restrictions on American commerce, to deny such benefits
to the British. The proposal died in Congress. His hopes for at
least an even-handed American approach to Britain and France evaporated
when the French envoy, Edmond Genêt, appealed to the public
for a military alliance with revolutionary France—an indiscretion
that made Washington decide to remain neutral in the war between
Britain and France.
After leaving office, Jefferson was disturbed by the administration’s
increasing friendliness to Great Britain and by other policies promoted
by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. In 1796, he reluctantly
allowed his name to be put forward as a candidate for the presidency
by the opposition Republican party. He received the second largest
number of votes among four candidates and therefore, according to
the electoral system then in use, became vice-president under the
Federalist president John Adams in 1797.
During his term in that office he watched with growing indignation
as the Federalists capitalized on anti-French feeling to create
a standing army under the control of his enemy, Alexander Hamilton,
and to pass the Alien Acts, restricting the liberty of supposedly
pro-Republican foreigners, and the Sedition Act, which allowed the
prosecution of anyone who printed false statements critical of government
officials. In resolutions drafted for the Kentucky and Virginia
legislatures, Jefferson and James Madison denounced the constitutionality
of these laws and assigned to the states the role of bulwark against
infringements on individual liberties.
In the election of 1800, Jefferson and his fellow Republican Aaron
Burr received an equal number of electoral votes, thus creating
a tie and throwing the presidential election into the House of Representatives.
After 36 ballots, the House declared Jefferson elected. (The Constitution
was then amended to require a separate electoral vote for president
and vice-president.)
As had Adams before him, Jefferson faced opposition from an
uncompromising faction within his own party as well as from the
Federalists. He steered a steady course between these two extremes,
appointing some qualified Federalists to office and refusing a wholesale
purge of officeholders inherited from the Adams administration.
He supported repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801, which had created
a costly tier of federal appeals courts and would have encouraged
appeals from state courts, but he opposed any assault on the independence
of the Federalist-dominated judiciary; Jefferson’s three
appointments to the Supreme Court, made between 1804 and 1807, were
all strong nationalists and upholders of judicial independence.
During Jefferson’s first term his lifelong interest
in the American West and in American-French relations prompted his
major presidential achievement, the purchase from France of Louisiana—all
the western land drained by the Missouri and Mississippi rivers—and
the organization of an expedition by the American explorers William
Clark and Meriwether Lewis to explore this territory. Foreign policy
during his second term was less successful. Seeking to force the
British to respect U.S. neutrality on the high seas during the Napoleonic
Wars, he persuaded Congress in 1807 to embargo all trade with Britain—a
move that failed to elicit any concessions, devastated the nation’s
economy for a generation, and alienated New England, which lived
by foreign trade.
After leaving office in 1809 Jefferson retired to Monticello,
where he lived until his death on July 4, 1826, corresponding with
Adams about the great issues of revolution and constitutionalism,
trying to preserve his declining estate for his daughters instead
of his creditors, and brooding over the baneful effects of slavery.
He was unwilling, for financial reasons, to free his own slaves, and
he disagreed with abolitionist friends who held that blacks were
equal to whites. Jefferson’s paradoxical beliefs in human
dignity and in racial inferiority typified the dilemma of the country
he had helped to create.
More than 20 years before his death, reports had begun circulating
of a long-term relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings
(1773–1835), one of his slaves; at least two of her children
claimed that they believed the former president was their father.
For nearly two centuries, the issue remained a matter of intense debate,
with Jefferson’s family and many historians casting doubt
on the Hemings’s claims. In January 2000, however, following
analysis of DNA taken from descendants of Jefferson and Hemings,
the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which administers Monticello,
acknowledged that in all likelihood Jefferson was the father of
at least one and perhaps all of her six known children.