📜Thomas Jefferson

Third President · 1801–1809

Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence at age 33, served as the first U.S. Secretary of State under Washington, and became the third president of the United States. His tenure doubled the size of the country through the Louisiana Purchase and opened the American West to Lewis and Clark. He was also, like his friend Washington, a slaveholder — a tension that shadows his legacy to this day.

A Virginia Intellectual

Jefferson grew up on a plantation in the Virginia Piedmont, studied at the College of William and Mary, and trained as a lawyer before entering the House of Burgesses. By his early thirties he was already regarded as one of the most learned men in the colonies — fluent in Latin, Greek, French, and Italian, and deeply read in philosophy, architecture, music, and natural science. He designed his own home, Monticello, and later the Virginia State Capitol and the University of Virginia.

The Declaration of Independence

In June 1776, Jefferson was appointed to a five-man committee charged with drafting a formal declaration of independence from Britain. He wrote the first draft largely alone in a rented room in Philadelphia. The preamble — beginning "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" — is among the most influential political passages ever written in English. The Continental Congress adopted the document on July 4, 1776.

Secretary of State and Vice President

Jefferson served as the first U.S. Minister to France (1785–1789), where he witnessed the early months of the French Revolution. He returned to join Washington's first Cabinet as Secretary of State, where he clashed repeatedly with Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton over the size and role of the federal government. These disputes gave rise to the first American political parties — Hamilton's Federalists and Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans. Jefferson served one term as Vice President under John Adams (1797–1801) before defeating Adams in the bitterly contested election of 1800.

The Louisiana Purchase

In 1803, French ruler Napoleon Bonaparte offered to sell the entire Louisiana Territory — roughly 828,000 square miles stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains — for $15 million. Jefferson, who had long believed the Constitution did not authorize the federal government to acquire territory, set aside his scruples and closed the deal. The purchase doubled the size of the United States at a cost of about four cents an acre. He immediately dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the new territory.

The Slavery Contradiction

Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, yet he owned more than 600 enslaved people during his lifetime — including, almost certainly, Sally Hemings, with whom DNA and historical evidence strongly indicate he fathered at least six children. He opposed the slave trade and wrote privately that slavery was a moral evil, yet freed only a handful of enslaved people. The gap between his words and his actions is the defining difficulty of his biography.

Jefferson Trivia

• Jefferson and John Adams — bitter political rivals who later reconciled through a decade of correspondence — died within hours of each other on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration.
• He founded the University of Virginia in 1819, designed the campus himself, and hired the faculty personally.
• His personal library of 6,487 books formed the nucleus of the rebuilt Library of Congress after the British burned the original during the War of 1812.
• He was left-handed and kept a polygraph machine — an early mechanical copying device — at his desk to duplicate his outgoing letters.
• Jefferson's tombstone lists only three accomplishments — none of them the presidency.

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