Thomas Jefferson
(born April 2 [April 13, New Style], 1743, Shadwell, Virginia [U.S.]?died July 4, 1826, Monticello, Virginia, U.S.) was the draftsman of the
Declaration of Independence
of the
United States
and the nation’s first secretary of state (1789?94) and second
vice president
(1797?1801) and, as the third
president
(1801?09), the statesman responsible for the
Louisiana Purchase
. An early advocate of total separation of
church and state
, he also was the founder and architect of the
University of Virginia
and the most
eloquent
American proponent of individual freedom as the core meaning of the
American Revolution
.
Long regarded as America’s most distinguished “apostle of liberty,” Jefferson has come under increasingly critical scrutiny within the scholarly world. At the popular level, both in the United States and abroad, he remains an incandescent icon, an inspirational symbol for both major U.S. political parties, as well as for dissenters in communist China, liberal reformers in central and eastern Europe, and aspiring democrats in Africa and
Latin America
. His image has suffered, however, as the focus on racial equality has prompted a more negative reappraisal of his dependence upon
slavery
and his
conviction
that American society remain a white man’s domain. Especially disturbing to many were the DNA results of the 1998 study revealing that Jefferson had almost certainly fathered a child with his slave
Sally Hemings
, thirty years his junior. (For more on this story, see
“Tom and Sally”: The Jefferson - Hemings paternity debate
.) The huge gap between his lyrical expression of liberal ideals and the more
attenuated
reality of his own life has transformed Jefferson into America’s most problematic and paradoxical hero. The
Jefferson Memorial
in
Washington, D.C.
, was dedicated to him on April 13, 1943, the 200th anniversary of his birth.
(Read Joseph Ellis’s Britannica essay on the Sally Heming’s affair.)
Early years
Albermarle county, where Jefferson was born, lay in the foothills of the
Blue Ridge
Mountains in what was then regarded as a western province of the Old Dominion. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a self-educated surveyor who amassed a tidy estate that included 60 slaves. According to family lore, Jefferson’s earliest memory was as a three-year-old boy “being carried on a pillow by a
mounted
slave” when the family moved from Shadwell to Tuckahoe. His mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, was descended from one of the most prominent families in
Virginia
. She raised two sons, of whom Jefferson was the eldest, and six daughters. There is
reason
to believe that Jefferson’s relationship with his mother was strained, especially after his father died in 1757, because he did everything he could to escape her supervision and had almost nothing to say about her in his memoirs. He boarded with the local schoolmaster to learn his Latin and Greek until 1760, when he entered the
College of William & Mary
in
Williamsburg
.
Britannica Quiz
U.S. Presidents and Their Years in Office Quiz
By all accounts he was an obsessive student, often spending 15 hours of the day with his books, 3 hours practicing his violin, and the remaining 6 hours eating and sleeping. The two chief influences on his learning were
William Small, a Scottish-born teacher of mathematics and
science
, and
George Wythe
, the leading legal scholar in Virginia. From them Jefferson learned a keen appreciation of supportive mentors, a concept he later institutionalized at the University of Virginia. He read
law
with Wythe from 1762 to 1767, then left Williamsburg to practice, mostly representing small-scale planters from the western counties in cases involving land claims and titles. Although he handled no landmark cases and came across as a nervous and somewhat indifferent speaker before the bench, he earned a reputation as a
formidable
legal scholar. He was a shy and extremely serious young man.
Monticello
Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia.
In 1768 he made two important decisions: first, to build his own home atop an 867-foot- (264-metre-) high mountain near Shadwell that he eventually named
Monticello
and, second, to stand as a candidate for the
House of Burgesses
. These decisions nicely embodied the two competing impulses that would persist throughout his life?namely, to combine an active career in politics with periodic seclusion in his own private haven. His political timing was also
impeccable
, for he entered the Virginia legislature just as opposition to the taxation policies of the British
Parliament
was congealing. Although he made few speeches and tended to follow the lead of the Tidewater elite, his support for resolutions opposing Parliament’s authority over the colonies was resolute.
Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content.
Subscribe Now
In the early 1770s his own character was also congealing. In 1772 he married Martha Wayles Skelton (
Martha Jefferson
), an attractive and delicate young widow whose dowry more than doubled his holdings in land and slaves. In 1774 he wrote
A Summary View of the Rights of British America
, which was quickly published, though without his permission, and catapulted him into visibility beyond Virginia as an early advocate of American independence from Parliament’s authority; the
American colonies
were tied to Great Britain, he believed, only by wholly voluntary bonds of loyalty to the king.
His reputation thus
enhanced
, the Virginia legislature appointed him a delegate to the Second
Continental Congress
in the spring of 1775. He rode into Philadelphia?and into American history?on June 20, 1775, a tall (slightly above 6 feet 2 inches [1.88 metres]) and gangly young man with reddish blond hair, hazel eyes, a burnished complexion, and rock-ribbed certainty about the American cause. In retrospect, the central
paradox
of his life was also on display, for the man who the following year was to craft the most famous
manifesto
for human equality in
world history
arrived in an ornate carriage drawn by four handsome horses and accompanied by three slaves.