Thomas Jefferson was born on 13 April 1743 at Shadwell plantation in Albemarle County, Virginia, the son of Peter Jefferson, a self-made planter and surveyor, and Jane Randolph, who connected him to one of Virginia's oldest families. Peter Jefferson died when Thomas was fourteen, leaving him 5,000 acres and thirty enslaved people. He entered the College of William and Mary at sixteen, studied law under George Wythe—the first American law professor—and was admitted to the bar in 1767. His Albemarle County plantation, which he named Monticello after an Italian hill, became a lifelong architectural obsession; he began construction in 1769, tearing it down and rebuilding it across four decades until the debt it generated would outlast him. Jefferson was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1769, married Martha Wayles Skelton in 1772, and in June 1776 was assigned to a five-man committee to draft a declaration of independence from Britain. He completed the draft in seventeen days, working from Locke, Scottish sources, and his own earlier Summary View of the Rights of British America. Congress accepted the document on 4 July 1776, striking his passage denouncing the slave trade—which Jefferson blamed on the British Crown—among other deletions. As Virginia's governor during 1779–81, Jefferson faced a British invasion that came within hours of capturing him at Monticello; he was later criticized for inadequate defense of the state. His Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), the only book he published, ranged across natural history, race, slavery, and government with a candor that haunted him. Appointed minister to France in 1784, he spent five years in Paris at the epicenter of culture, dispatching crates of books and seeds back to Virginia. He returned in September 1789—days after the storming of the —and Washington appointed him the first Secretary of State. His bitter conflict with Alexander Hamilton over the national bank, assumption of state debts, and American foreign policy produced the first organized party opposition and ultimately the Democratic-Republican party. Jefferson resigned from the cabinet in 1793. He defeated Adams for the presidency in 1800 in an election so close it went to the House of Representatives. As president, his greatest single achievement was the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, in which he doubled the nation's territory by acquiring 828,000 square miles from Napoleon for $15 million—stretching his own constitutional theories to the breaking point to do it. He commissioned Lewis and Clark to explore the new territory immediately. The Embargo Act of 1807, his attempt to use economic coercion against Britain and France, was a policy disaster. He retired to Monticello in 1809 and spent seventeen years reading, corresponding prodigiously, and founding the University of Virginia, whose Rotunda he designed and whose curriculum he planned down to the textbooks. He died on 4 July 1826—the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration, the same day as John Adams—broke, his debts so crushing that Monticello and most of its enslaved residents were sold at auction the following year. His 600 enslaved people, whom he never freed in his lifetime, constitute the central unresolved paradox of a career built on the proposition that all men are created equal.
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3rd President of the United States · Author of the Declaration of Independence
Thomas Jefferson
1,743 CE – 1,826 CE
The Virginia polymath who wrote the words that defined American democracy, tripled the nation's territory, and embodied the Enlightenment's promise and its profound contradictions.
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