Thomas Jefferson

About this figure

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was a Virginia lawyer, planter, and statesman whose long public career spanned the whole founding period of the United States, and whose private life has come to be understood, over the past several decades of scholarship, as inseparable from the system of slavery he publicly criticized and privately depended on. Born at Shadwell in Albemarle County and trained in law under George Wythe, he entered the Virginia House of Burgesses in his twenties and was still writing letters on law, science, and politics in the weeks before his death.

In June 1776, at thirty-three, Jefferson was asked by a five-man committee of the Continental Congress to draft the document that became the Declaration of Independence; Congress revised his text before adopting it on July 4. He went on to serve as Governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War, as the United States Minister to France succeeding Benjamin Franklin, as the first Secretary of State under George Washington, as Vice President under John Adams, and as the third President of the United States from 1801 to 1809. As president he negotiated the Louisiana Purchase and sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the continent beyond it. Jefferson's multivolume Writings, drawn from his own manuscripts and correspondence, show a man who treated nearly every subject - agriculture, architecture, classical languages, the design of a plow - as worth a careful letter, and whose 1821 Autobiography narrates the drafting of the Declaration and the debates surrounding it in his own retrospective account.

Jefferson also wrote Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), his one full-length book, mixing natural history with reflections on government and, in a passage much debated since, on slavery and race. Late in life he founded the University of Virginia, sited it, largely designed its buildings himself, and shaped its early curriculum - a project he considered among his proudest achievements, alongside the Declaration and Virginia's statute for religious freedom, which he asked to have named on his tombstone.

Jefferson enslaved several hundred people over his lifetime at Monticello and elsewhere, and historians and geneticists have concluded, based on a 1998 DNA study and the surrounding documentary record, that he fathered children with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman at Monticello; some of those children he later allowed to leave slavery, while the rest of Hemings's descendants he did not free outright. That Jefferson could write, in the Declaration, that all men are created equal and hold unalienable rights, while building his fortune and his household on enslaved labor and on a relationship with a woman who could not consent as a free person, is not a footnote to his career but a documented fact historians continue to weigh alongside his political achievements. He died at Monticello on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration's adoption, hours before John Adams died in Massachusetts; he had spent his final years deeply in debt, and Monticello and most of its enslaved workforce were sold after his death to satisfy his creditors.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.