Thomas Jefferson

President of the United States (1801–9)

• Born: April 13, 1743
• Birthplace: Shadwell, Goochland (now Albemarle) County, Virginia
• Died: July 4, 1826
• Place of death: Monticello, Albemarle County, Virginia

A genuine revolutionary, Thomas Jefferson was one of the early and effective leaders of the movement to overthrow British rule in North America. After laboring to create a free, prosperous, enlightened, and agrarian republic, Jefferson served as the third president of the United States.

Early Life

The man generally considered the first thoroughgoing democrat in US history began life as a Virginia aristocrat. His father, Peter Jefferson, had indeed come from yeoman stock but commended himself to the upper class as an expert surveyor, reliable county officer, and energetic planter. The elder Jefferson then joined that upper class by marrying Jane Randolph. From his parents, Thomas Jefferson inherited wealth, status, and a tradition of public service.

Educated at first in private schools kept by Anglican clergymen William Douglas and James Maury, Jefferson descended to Williamsburg in 1760, to study at the College of William and Mary. A proficient student, he completed the requirements for his degree within two years but stayed on to read law with George Wythe, an uncommonly learned and humane jurist. In his student years, Jefferson, along with his favorite professor, William Small, and Wythe, was frequently a guest in the governor’s palace. Admitted to the bar in 1767, the young bachelor attorney became acquainted with all of Virginia by the strenuous but interesting practice of attending the quarter sessions of county courts. Jefferson soon stood among the leaders of his profession.

Entering the House of Burgesses in 1769, Jefferson already owned more than 2,500 acres inherited from his father, who had died in 1757. His marriage to the young widow Martha Wayles Skelton doubled his property in 1772, and the death of Martha’s father in 1774 doubled it again—while increasing the number of enslaved people held by Jefferson to more than two hundred. The Wayles inheritance also brought a large indebtedness, but Jefferson nevertheless found himself in good standing, with a wife and a robust baby daughter, a personal fortune, and a position near the top of Virginia’s society and politics. He was imposing in appearance, standing more than six feet tall, with plentiful red hair, strong features, and an attitude of vitality and interest. Yet he was also shy and avoided public appearances whenever he could; he was at his best in the cordial intimacy of the drawing room or the dining table.

Life’s Work

In 1774 Virginia chose to support Massachusetts against the assaults of the so-called Intolerable Acts (or Coercive Acts) levied by the British Parliament. To that support, Jefferson contributed the first of his major political writings, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774). In 1775, he was a delegate of Virginia in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, supporting George Washington’s newly formed Continental army in the defense of Massachusetts. Here, for a few months, Jefferson’s sentiments were too radical for the majority, but when independence seemed all but inevitable in June 1776, Congress placed him (with Benjamin Franklin and John Adams) on the special committee to draft a Declaration of Independence. Though slightly amended in committee and again on the floor of Congress, the Declaration of Independence is largely Jefferson’s work.

For the next several years Jefferson avoided continental service, preferring the considerable scene of action near his growing family and estate. With Wythe and Edmund Pendleton he drew up a new legal code for Virginia. He also prepared a plan for the gradual ending of slavery but declined to bring it before the House of Delegates. He also postponed his plans for a general scheme of education and for the separation of church and state. Elected governor in 1779, he found that office an ordeal. To the minor confusion of moving government from Williamsburg to Richmond was added the major trauma of a full-scale British military invasion of his state. Just before Jefferson’s second term ended in June 1781, he had to flee into the Blue Ridge Mountains to escape a raiding party sent to Monticello expressly to capture him.

Already discouraged by his last months as governor, Jefferson was cast into a deep depression by his wife’s death in 1782. He never remarried, but he did accept reappointment to Congress, where in 1783 and 1784 he worked on the monetary system of the United States, basing it on the plentiful Spanish dollar and applying the rational decimal system to fractional coins. He also drafted a comprehensive scheme for organizing the western territories of the United States. He introduced the idea of rectangular surveys and proposed local self-government from the start. His division of the terrain into eighteen jurisdictions, while convenient for the participatory democracy he had in view, would have long delayed statehood for any of them. A provision barring the introduction of slavery after 1800 failed to win the support of the nine states required under the Articles of Confederation, but Congress did adopt Jefferson’s plan, replacing it instead with the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Meanwhile, Jefferson had accepted a diplomatic mission to France, replacing Benjamin Franklin as minister in 1785.

Jefferson spent five busy and happy years in Europe. A tour of France and northern Italy confirmed his architectural taste and enlarged his knowledge of agriculture. He flirted with an artistic Englishwoman, Maria Cosway, and enjoyed visiting John Adams in England, though he did not care for English society in general. By mail he kept up with the movement to disestablish religion in Virginia, where his own bill was finally passed under the expert guidance of James Madison. He also encouraged Madison and other correspondents in their drive toward a new federal constitution. In France, he sought help against the Barbary pirates and urged France to remove prohibitions or costly restrictions on such American commodities as tobacco and whale oil. His closest friends were liberal aristocrats such as the Marquis de Lafayette, whose leading role in the early stages of the French Revolution Jefferson followed with interest and encouragement.

Intending a brief visit only, Jefferson returned to the United States at the end of 1789, but he promptly accepted the post of secretary of state from President Washington. After settling his two daughters in Virginia, he took up his duties in the temporary capital, New York City. There he helped bring about the trade of votes that made possible Alexander Hamilton’s federal assumption of state Revolutionary War debts and the permanent location of the Federal District on the Potomac River. The government then moved, temporarily, to Philadelphia.

In 1791 Jefferson and Madison began to organize the first opposition party under the new Constitution. Their avowed object was to overturn not Washington but his secretary of the treasury, Hamilton. Washington almost always sided with Hamilton against his rivals, however, so it was really a case of going against a popular president by forcing him to fire a considerably less popular minister and change his policies. Vigorously protesting Hamilton’s Bank of the United States and his avowed intention to reach a friendly understanding with Great Britain, Jefferson and his growing party accused Hamilton of secret designs to reestablish aristocracy and monarchy, and even return the United States to the British Empire.

In the spring of 1793, Jefferson opposed Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation and initially supported the representative of the new French republic, Edmond Charles Genet. Genet, however, far overreached Jefferson’s idea of propriety by licensing privateers to prey on British shipping, setting up prize courts in American seaports and raising an army based in Kentucky to attack Spanish Louisiana. Jefferson had the unpleasant task of opposing all this, while trying to contain the zeal of the many new Democratic societies that were supporting Genet. This crisis passed when Genet’s group fell from power in France, and after a harrowing yellow fever epidemic paralyzed the American government in the late summer, Jefferson returned to present Congress with his report on the foreign commerce of the United States. He then resigned and spent three years improving his estate and carrying on a lively exchange of letters with his political friends.

The odd workings of the original electoral system made Jefferson vice president in 1797, after he had finished a close second behind his now-estranged rival, John Adams, in the contest for president. Discreet in public, he acted behind the scenes to stiffen resistance to Adams and his Federalist majorities in Congress during the undeclared naval war with France. Jefferson wrote the Kentucky Resolutions against the partisan Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798; his friend John Breckinridge steered them through the Kentucky legislature. The resolutions contained the extreme doctrine that a state might nullify an act of Congress; the effect, however, was to let off steam until the Federalists and their acts passed from the scene.

Fearful that Adams might sneak in for a second presidential term, every Jeffersonian elector cast one ballot for Jefferson and another for Aaron Burr of New York in the election of 1800. This produced a tie, unintended by the mass of voters, and threw the election into the lame-duck Congress that had been elected in 1798. Enough Federalist congressmen preferred Burr to Jefferson to produce a stalemate for several weeks, but Jefferson finally prevailed. Burr, as vice president, found Jefferson depriving him of federal patronage and Governor George Clinton depriving him of influence in New York; Burr thus began on the course that led to his seeking Federalist support for his political comeback, which in turn produced the famous duel in which Hamilton was killed, and finally the adventures in the West that led Jefferson to arrest Burr and try him for treason.

Jefferson’s first term in office was one of the most popular and successful in the history of the presidency. After many a bad turn, Washington and Adams had secured peace with all the major foreign powers and all the American Indian tribes capable of threatening America’s frontiers. By cordially maintaining these arrangements—even with Britain—Jefferson presided over four years of peaceful and prosperous expansion. Yet he proved to be different from his predecessors. With the expert help of Albert Gallatin, secretary of the treasury, and James Madison, secretary of state, he greatly reduced the army, the navy, and the foreign diplomatic corps. His congressional majorities reduced the federal judiciary and repealed the unpopular excises, including the tax on distillations that had set off the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794. The Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution ended forever the confusion of presidential and vice presidential votes.

Jefferson did incur the expense of sending several ships to the Mediterranean, where various North African states were holding American sailors for ransom and demanding tribute that Federalist presidents (and various European governments) had customarily paid. Even in this military action, Jefferson hoped to save money in the long run, by putting a stop to criminal behavior that, he believed, should never have tolerated in the first place.

Among the accomplishments for which Jefferson is most remembered was his acquisition of the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of France, in 1803. Although initially seeking only access to West Florida and the Mississippi River via New Orleans, Jefferson agreed to purchase 828,000 square miles, a move that doubled the country's land area. The Lewis and Clark expedition was organized in order to explore and survey the new territory.

During Jefferson's second term, the supposedly neutral United States relied on its role supplying both France and Britain in the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), a strategy that failed when both belligerents decided to prohibit US trade with their enemy. Britain inflamed American passions by impressing American merchant sailors in its effort to reclaim British defectors. Seeking to pressure the combatants, Jefferson called for a wholesale ban on US exports to Europe, the Embargo Act of 1807, which backfired and had severe economic repercussions. It was replaced with the Non-Intercourse Act of 1809, which sanctioned only the belligerents.

In private life several years later, but hardly in retirement, Jefferson maintained an extensive political and philosophical correspondence, especially with John Adams, the two now fully reconciled. He also labored long and finally successfully to establish the University of Virginia in nearby Charlottesville. Jefferson and Adams both died on July 4, 1826, while their fellow citizens were celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Significance and Legacy

Thomas Jefferson is one of the most famous and respected American Founders, well known for his work on the Declaration of Independence, his role in the creation of the US political party system, and important presidential achievements such as the Louisiana Purchase. He is a central figure in US history and remains a cultural icon in many ways. The Jefferson Memorial is a prominent feature of Washington, DC, and Jefferson is one of four presidents honored on the landmark Mount Rushmore National Memorial. Jefferson has also been depicted on US currency and stamps, as well as in many works of popular culture, from paintings and novels to plays and films.

Politically, Jefferson's legacy is complex. He was brilliant, versatile, energetic, and creative, but some observers note that he was neither original nor systematic. He contributed no great books to the American tradition, but rather a number of ringing phrases about natural rights, the impositions of tyrants, the virtue of the people, and the beneficence of free inquiry. With Abraham Lincoln, he is arguably the most quotable American public figure, and virtually every conceivable political view has been bolstered by his maxims. Jefferson further helped this trend by being inconsistent in such important areas as the power of the national government, the proper treatment of dissenters, and the crucial question of slavery. Yet he was perfectly consistent on many other points. A true son of the Enlightenment, he believed that scientific study and education would cure the ills of humankind, and he rejected as superstitious all those parts of religion that dwelt on mysterious or miraculous interventions in human affairs. He detested the very idea of inherited power or status. He always believed that government should be kept to a minimum, that standing armies were not republican, and that the true strength of a people resided in the widest possible distribution of virtue, learning, and property; not in armies, national treasuries, or government agencies.

While most historians have considered Jefferson among the greatest US presidents, scholars have continued to study his life and career and in many cases give greater attention to controversial aspects. In particular, his popular image as a champion of freedom has often been scrutinized in light of his views and actions regarding minority groups. For example, his positions on women's rights and treatment of American Indians have drawn considerable criticism. However, it is Jefferson's contradictory relationship with slavery that has generated the most attention and debate. He famously wrote that "all men are created equal" and otherwise frequently registered his opposition to the institution of slavery, including by banning the international slave trade as president. Yet he also directly enslaved hundreds of people (more than any other US president), was critical of voluntarily granting freedom to the enslaved (he freed just two people during his life and five more through his will), and like many others of his day held the starkly racist view that Black and White people had fundamental biological differences. This kind of apparent hypocrisy was shared by many other Founders, and historians have traditionally focused on the fact that any degree of opposition to slavery was relatively progressive for the time. However, Jefferson's particular case is further complicated by strong evidence (including from DNA analysis) that he fathered children with an enslaved member of his household named Sally Hemings. Jefferson's alleged sexual relationship with Hemings—believed to have begun as early as 1787, when she was fourteen years old—has been the subject of great public interest and has variously been characterized as consensual and loving or as rape. As such, it continues to be a central element in ongoing debate over Jefferson's legacy in regards to slavery and in general.

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