Tadeusz Kościuszko as painted by Karl Gottlieb Schweikart. Kościuszko is shown wearing the Eagle of the Society of Cincinnati awarded to him by General Washington
Declaration of Independence (Little Books of Wisdom)
(Drafted by Thomas Jefferson between June 11 and June 28, ...)
Drafted by Thomas Jefferson between June 11 and June 28, 1776, the Declaration of Independence summarizes America's founding political philosophy. At once a cherished symbol of liberty and an expression of Jefferson's monumental talents as a writer, the document captures in unforgettable phrases the ideals of individual liberty that formed the backbone of American's Revolutionary movement. In setting forth these "self-evident truths" alongside a list of grievances against King George's Britain, the Declaration of Independence justified the breaking of ties with "Mother England" and the formation of a new country.
A Summary View Of The Rights Of British America: Set Forth In Some Resolutions Intended For The Inspection Of The Present Delegates Of The People Of ... - Primary Source Edition (Afrikaans Edition)
Thomas Jefferson was an American philosopher, a leading Founding Father of the United States, the author of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and he served as the third President of the United States (1801–1809).
Background
Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743, at Shadwell, a plantation on a large tract of land near present-day Charlottesville, Virginia - near the western edge of Great Britain's American Empire, into one of the most prominent families of Virginia's planter elite. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a successful farmer as well as a skilled surveyor and cartographer who produced the first accurate map of the Province of Virginia. His mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, was a member of the proud Randolph clan, a family claiming descent from English and Scottish royalty. She raised two sons, of whom Jefferson was the eldest, and six daughters. There is a 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. 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. When his father later died in 1745, Jefferson inherited 5,000 acres, including Monticello.
As a young child, Thomas Jefferson was an enthusiastic student often spending up to 15 hours a day studying. He was to retain a lifelong interest in reading. He had both a keen intellect and also a wide range of interests. His interests ranged from philosophy and architecture to the natural sciences.
Education
Jefferson became one of the best-educated Americans of his time. He boarded with the local schoolmaster to learn his Latin and Greek until 1760, when he entered the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg at the age of 16, and two years later he graduated with the highest honours.
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.
Career
Jefferson was admitted to the bar, or an association for lawyers, in 1767 and established a successful practice. 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.
When the American Revolution (1795–1783) forced him to abandon his practice in 1774, he turned these legal skills to the rebel cause. Jefferson's public career began in 1769, when he served as a representative in the Virginia House of Burgesses, the nation's first elected body of government. About this time, he began building Monticello. Perched on a wooded summit, the lovely home would become a lifelong occupation. Monticello, like the many other buildings Jefferson designed over the years, was an original, personal creation.
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. In 1775, with the American Revolutionary War recently under way, Jefferson was selected as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress. Although not known as a great public speaker, he was a gifted writer and at age 33, was asked to draft the Declaration of Independence (before he began writing, Jefferson discussed the document’s contents with a five-member drafting committee that included John Adams and Benjamin Franklin). The Declaration of Independence, which explained why the 13 colonies wanted to be free of British rule and also detailed the importance of individual rights and freedoms, was adopted on July 4, 1776.
In the fall of 1776, Jefferson resigned from the Continental Congress and was re-elected to the Virginia House of Delegates (formerly the House of Burgesses). He considered the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which he authored in the late 1770s and which Virginia lawmakers eventually passed in 1786, to be one of the significant achievements of his career. It was a forerunner to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects people’s right to worship as they choose.
From 1779 to 1781, Jefferson served as governor of Virginia, and from 1783 to 1784, did a second stint in Congress (then officially known, since 1781, as the Congress of the Confederation). In 1785, he succeeded Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) as U.S. minister to France. Jefferson’s duties in Europe meant he could not attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787; however, he was kept informed of the proceedings to draft a new national constitution and later advocated for including a bill of rights and presidential term limits.
After returning to America in the fall of 1789, Jefferson accepted an appointment from President George Washington (1732-99) to become the new nation’s first secretary of state. In this post, Jefferson clashed with U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton (1755/57-1804) over foreign policy and their differing interpretations of the U.S. Constitution. In the early 1790s, Jefferson, who favored strong state and local government, co-founded the Democratic-Republican Party to oppose Hamilton’s Federalist Party, which advocated for a strong national government with broad powers over the economy.
In the presidential election of 1796, Jefferson ran against John Adams and received the second highest amount of votes, which according to the law at the time, made him vice president.
Jefferson ran against Adams again in the presidential election of 1800, which turned into a bitter battle between the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. Jefferson defeated Adams; however, due to a flaw in the electoral system, Jefferson tied with fellow Democratic-Republican Aaron Burr (1756-1836). The House of Representatives broke the tie and voted Jefferson into office. In order to avoid a repeat of this situation, Congress proposed the Twelfth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which required separate voting for president and vice president. The amendment was ratified in 1804.
Jefferson was sworn into office on March 4, 1801; his was the first presidential inauguration held in Washington, D.C. (George Washington was inaugurated in New York in 1789; in 1793, he was sworn into office in Philadelphia, as was his successor, John Adams, in 1797.) Instead of riding in a horse-drawn carriage, Jefferson broke with tradition and walked to and from the ceremony.
One of the most significant achievements of Jefferson’s first administration was the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France for $15 million in 1803. At more than 820,000 square miles, the acquisition (which included lands extending between the Mississippi River and Rocky Mountains and the Gulf of Mexico to present-day Canada) effectively doubled the size of the United States. Jefferson then commissioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the uncharted land, plus the area beyond, out to the Pacific Ocean. (At the time, most Americans lived within 50 miles of the Atlantic Ocean). The expedition, known today as the Corps of Discovery, lasted from 1804 to 1806 and provided valuable information about the geography, American Indian tribes and animal and plant life of the western part of the continent.
In 1804, Jefferson ran for re-election and defeated Federalist candidate Charles Pinckney (1746-1825) of South Carolina with more than 70 percent of the popular vote and an electoral count of 162-14. During his second term, Jefferson focused on trying to keep America out of Europe’s Napoleonic Wars (1803-15). However, after Great Britain and France, who were at war, both began harassing American merchant ships, Jefferson implemented the Embargo of 1807. The act, which closed U.S. ports to foreign trade, proved unpopular with Americans and hurt the U.S. economy. It was repealed in 1809 and, despite the president’s attempts to maintain neutrality, the U.S. ended up going to war against Britain in 1812.
Jefferson chose not to run for a third term in 1808 and was succeeded in office by James Madison (1751-1836), a fellow Virginian and former U.S. secretary of state.
Jefferson spent his post-presidential years at Monticello, where he continued to pursue his many interests, including architecture, music, reading and gardening. He also helped found the University of Virginia, which held its first classes in 1825. Jefferson was involved with designing the school’s buildings and curriculum, and ensured that unlike other American colleges at the time, the school had no religious affiliation or religious requirements for its students.
Jefferson died at age 83 at Monticello on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Coincidentally, John Adams, Jefferson’s friend, former rival and fellow signer of the Declaration of Independence, died the same day. Jefferson was buried at Monticello. However, due to the significant debt the former president had accumulated during his life, his mansion, furnishing and slaves were sold at auction following his death. Monticello was eventually acquired by a non-profit organization, which opened it to the public in 1954.
Thomas Jefferson was deeply but unconventionally religious. An empiricist, he believed that a rational and benevolent God was evident in the beauty and order of the universe. He professed "Christianism," a belief in the morals taught by Jesus of Nazareth, but he rejected Jesus's divinity, resurrection, the atonement, and biblical miracles. As such, Jefferson's beliefs resisted conventional labels, and in 1819 he suggested to a correspondent that "I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know." Jefferson meticulously cut up four copies of the Gospels (in English, French, Greek, and Latin), retaining only selected passages, without miracles, to create “The Jefferson Bible”, his own book for spiritual guidance and solace. Jefferson's career was also marked by religious controversy. He was denounced as an "arch-infidel" in the presidential election of 1800, and his efforts to prevent the appointment of a minister to teach religion at the University of Virginia, one of the first state-owned colleges in the United States, met strong resistance. Jefferson embraced god-given human rights and opposed their abridgment by government. He is known as one of the founders of American religious freedom, and his phrase "a wall of separation between Church & State" has been viewed as emblematic by historians and by the modern United States Supreme Court.
Politics
Jefferson supported political ideals expounded by John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton, whom he considered the three greatest men who ever lived. He was also influenced by the writings of Gibbon, Hume, Robertson, Bolingbroke, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. Jefferson thought that the independent yeoman and agrarian life were ideals of republican virtues. He distrusted cities and financiers, favored decentralized government power, and believed that the tyranny that had plagued the common man in Europe was due to corrupt political establishments and monarchies. He supported efforts to disestablish the Church of England wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and he pressed for a wall of separation between church and state. The Republicans under Jefferson were strongly influenced by the 18th-century British Whig Party, who believed in limited government. His Democratic-Republican Party became dominant in early American politics, and his views became known as Jeffersonian democracy.
Jefferson rose to fame as an effective spokesman during the American Revolution, and his political thought would become the centerpiece of liberalism, or a movement to develop freedoms, in America. In challenging the British Empire, Americans like Jefferson came to recognize their claims to an independent nation. Insofar as the Revolution was a philosophical event, he was its most articulate spokesman, having absorbed the thought of the 18th-century Enlightenment.
Jefferson's political thought would become the quintessence of Enlightenment liberalism, though it had roots in English law and government. The tradition of the English constitution gave concreteness to American patriot claims, even a color of legality to revolution itself, that no other modern revolutionaries have possessed. Jefferson used the libertarian elements of the English legal tradition for ideological combat with the mother country. He also separated the principles of English liberty from their corrupted forms in the empire of George III and identified these principles with nascent American ideals. In challenging the oppressions of the empire, Americans like Jefferson came to recognize their claims to an independent nationality.
He considered democracy to be the expression of society, and promoted national self-determination, cultural uniformity, and education of all males of the commonwealth. Jefferson supported public education and a free press as essential components of a democratic nation.
Jefferson's most important contribution to the revolutionary debate was “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” (1774). He argued that Americans, as sons of expatriate Englishmen, possessed the same natural rights to govern themselves as their Saxon ancestors had exercised when they migrated to England from Germany. Only with the reign of George III had the violations of American rights proved to be "a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery." Though the logic of his argument pointed to independence, Jefferson instead set forth the theory of an empire of equal self-governing states under a common king and appealed to George III to rule accordingly. Jefferson represented the Revolution as a clean break with the past, the rejection of all European versions of political discipline as feudal vestiges, the ingrained hostility toward all mechanisms of governmental authority that originated in faraway places.
In Congress from November 1783 to the following May, Jefferson laid the foundations of national policy in several areas. His proposed decimal system of coinage was adopted. He drafted the first ordinance of government for the western territory, wherein free and equal republican states would be created out of the wilderness; and his land ordinance, adopted with certain changes in 1785, projected the rectilinear survey system of the American West.
Jefferson also took a leading part in formulating foreign policy. The American economy rested on foreign commerce and navigation. Cut adrift from the British mercantile system, Congress had pursued free trade to open foreign markets, but only France had been receptive. The matter became urgent in 1783-1784. Jefferson helped reformulate a liberal commercial policy, and in 1784 he was appointed to a three-man commission (with Adams and Franklin) to negotiate treaties of commerce with the European powers.
When he became a president the reform was the order of the day. Working effectively with Congress, Jefferson restored freedom of the press; lowered the residency period of the law of naturalization to 5 years; scaled down the Army and Navy (despite a war against Barbary piracy); repealed the partisan Judiciary Act of 1801; abolished all internal taxes, together with a host of revenue offices; and began the planned retirement of the debt. The Jeffersonian reformation was bottomed on fiscal policy; by reducing the means and powers of government, it sought to further peace, equality, and individual freedom.
Views
He believed in a beneficent natural order in the moral as in the physical world, freedom of inquiry in all things, and man's inherent capacity for justice and happiness, and he had faith in reason, improvement, and progress.
According to Jefferson's philosophy, citizens have "certain inalienable rights" and "rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will, within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others". Jeffersonian government not only prohibited individuals in society from infringing on the liberty of others, but also restrained itself from diminishing individual liberty as a protection against tyranny from the majority. Initially, Jefferson favored restricted voting to those who could actually have free exercise of their reason by escaping any corrupting dependence on others. He advocated enfranchising a majority of Virginians, seeking to expand suffrage to include "yeoman farmers" who owned their own land while excluding tenant farmers, city day laborers, vagrants, most Amerindians, and women.
He was convinced that individual liberties were the fruit of political equality, which were threatened by arbitrary government. Excesses of democracy in his view were caused by institutional corruptions rather than human nature. He was less suspicious of a working democracy than many contemporaries. As president, Jefferson feared that the Federalist system enacted by Washington and Adams had encouraged corrupting patronage and dependence. He tried to restore a balance between the state and federal governments more nearly reflecting the Articles of Confederation, seeking to reinforce state prerogatives where his party was in a majority.
The only ever published Jefferson’s book “Notes on the State of Virginia” contained an extensive discussion of slavery, including a graphic description of its horrific effects on both blacks and whites, a strong assertion that it violated the principles on which the American Revolution was based, and an apocalyptic prediction that failure to end slavery would lead to “convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race.” It also contained the most explicit assessment that Jefferson ever wrote of what he believed were the biological differences between blacks and whites, an assessment that exposed the deep-rooted racism that he, like most Americans and almost all Virginians of his day, harboured throughout his life. To his critics in later generations, Jefferson’s views on race seemed particularly virulent because of his purported relationship with Sally Hemings, who bore several children obviously fathered by a white man and some of whom had features resembling those of Jefferson.
The publication of Notes affords the opportunity to review Jefferson’s previous and subsequent positions on the most volatile and therefore most forbidden topic in the revolutionary era. Early in his career Jefferson had taken a leadership role in pushing slavery onto the political agenda in the Virginia assembly and the federal Congress. In the 1760s and ’70s, like most Virginia planters, he endorsed the end of the slave trade. (Virginia’s plantations were already well stocked with slaves, so ending the slave trade posed no economic threat and even enhanced the value of the existent slave population.) In his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, he included a passage, subsequently deleted by the Continental Congress, blaming both the slave trade and slavery itself on George III. Unlike most of his fellow Virginians, Jefferson was prepared to acknowledge that slavery was an anomaly in the American republic established in 1776. His two most practical proposals came in the early 1780s: a gradual emancipation scheme by which all slaves born after 1800 would be freed and their owners compensated, and a prohibition of slavery in all the territories of the West as a condition for admission to the Union. By the time of the publication of Notes, then, Jefferson’s record on slavery placed him among the most progressive elements of southern society. Rather than ask how he could possibly tolerate the persistence of slavery, it is more historically correct to wonder how this member of Virginia’s planter class had managed to develop such liberal convictions.
Dating the onset of a long silence is inevitably an imprecise business, but by the time of his return to the United States in 1789 Jefferson had backed away from a leadership position on slavery. The ringing denunciations of slavery presented in Notes had generated controversy, especially within the planter class of Virginia, and Jefferson’s deep aversion to controversy made him withdraw from the cutting edge of the antislavery movement once he experienced the sharp feelings it aroused. Moreover, the very logic of his argument in Notes exposed the inherent intractability of his position. Although he believed that slavery was a gross violation of the principles celebrated in the Declaration of Independence, he also believed that people of African descent were biologically inferior to whites and could never live alongside whites in peace and harmony. They would have to be transported elsewhere, back to Africa or perhaps the Caribbean, after emancipation. Because such a massive deportation was a logistical and economic impossibility, the unavoidable conclusion was that, though slavery was wrong, ending it, at least at present, was inconceivable. That became Jefferson’s public position throughout the remainder of his life.
Quotations:
“Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.”
“I’m a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”
“If you want something you’ve never had you must be willing to do something you’ve never done.”
“Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”
“Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.”
“For a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well organized and armed militia is their best security.”
“Nobody wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men.”
“But whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.”
“When angry count to ten before you speak. If very angry, count to one hundred.”
“I believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.”
“A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”
“Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”
“No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as of duty. Good men will obey the last, but bad ones the former only.”
“Lay down true principles, and adhere to them inflexibly. Do not be frightened into their surrender by the alarms of the timid, or the croakings of wealth against the ascendency of the people.”
“I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom. And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude.”
“That Jesus did not mean to impose himself on mankind as the son of God, physically speaking, I have been convinced by the writings of men more learned than myself in that lore. But that he might conscientiously believehimself inspired from above, is very possible.”
“We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”
Declaration of Independence, July 4th, 1776: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness…”
A staunch advocate of the jury system to protect people's liberties, he proclaimed in 1801, "I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."
From “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” (1774): “Still less let it be proposed that our properties within our own territories shall be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own. The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them. This, sire, is our last, our determined resolution;”
Before that ignominious end, which Jefferson never lived to see, he managed to sound one last triumphant note that projected his most enduring and attractive message to posterity. In late June 1826 Jefferson was asked to join the Independence Day celebrations in Washington, D.C., on the 50th anniversary of the defining event in his and the nation’s life. He declined, explaining that he was in no condition to leave his mountaintop. But he mustered up one final surge of energy to draft a statement that would be read in his absence at the ceremony. He clearly intended it as his final testament. Though some of the language, like the language of the Declaration itself, was borrowed from others, here was the vintage Jeffersonian vision: “May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.… All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of men. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others; for ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”
“I love peace, and am anxious that we should give the world still another useful lesson, by showing to them other modes of punishing injuries than by war, which is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer.”
Membership
Jefferson was a member of the American Philosophical Society for 35 years, beginning in 1780.
American Philosophical Society
,
United States
1780 - 1815
Personality
Thomas Jefferson was a man of paradoxes: a man who craved friendship, yet was intensely private; an aristocrat who detested privilege; an urban intellectual who feared cities; a slave holder who preached equality; a peaceful man who sanctioned violent rebellion; a dreamer and philosopher who served as a hard-nosed and cunning diplomat. He didn’t relish public speaking, he preferred to express his opinions through his writings. His friends and family remarked on Jefferson’s many fine qualities. He was sympathetic and engaging in conversation. Never bored, he always found different avenues of interest to explore. He was interested in birds and wine, and was a noted gourmet. As a naturalist, he was fascinated by the Natural Bridge geological formation, and in 1774 successfully acquired the Bridge by grant from George III. Jefferson was a farmer, obsessed with new crops, soil conditions, garden designs, and scientific agricultural techniques. His main cash crop was tobacco, but its price was usually low and it was rarely profitable. He tried to achieve self-sufficiency with wheat, vegetables, flax, corn, hogs, sheep, poultry, and cattle to supply his family, slaves, and employees, but he had cash flow problems and was always in debt.
Jefferson mastered many disciplines, which ranged from surveying and mathematics to horticulture and mechanics. He was a proven architect in the classical tradition. Jefferson's keen interest in religion and philosophy earned him the presidency of the American Philosophical Society. He was well versed in linguistics and spoke several languages. He founded the University of Virginia after retiring from public office. He was a prolific letter writer and corresponded with many prominent and important people throughout his adult life.
The Paris years were important to Jefferson for personal reasons and are important to biographers and historians for the new light they shed on his famously elusive personality. The dominant pattern would seem to be the capacity to live comfortably with contradiction. For example, he immersed himself wholeheartedly in the art, architecture, wine, and food of Parisian society but warned all prospective American tourists to remain in America so as to avoid the avarice, luxury, and sheer sinfulness of European fleshpots. He made a point of bringing along his elder daughter, Martha (called Patsy as a girl), and later sent for his younger daughter, Maria (called Polly), all as part of his genuine devotion as a single parent. But he then placed both daughters in a convent, wrote them stern lecturelike letters about proper female etiquette, and enforced a patriarchal distance that was in practice completely at odds with his theoretical commitment to intimacy.
With women in general his letters convey a message of conspicuous gallantry, playfully flirtatious in the manner of a male coquette. The most self-revealing letter he ever wrote, “a dialogue between the head and the heart,” was sent to Maria Cosway, an Anglo-Italian beauty who left him utterly infatuated. Jefferson and Cosway, who was married to a prominent if somewhat degenerate English miniaturist, spent several months in a romantic haze, touring Parisian gardens, museums, and art shows together, but whether Jefferson’s head or heart prevailed, either in the letter or in life, is impossible to know.
Jefferson owned, on average, about 200 slaves at any point in time, and slightly over 600 over his lifetime. To protect himself from facing the reality of his problematic status as plantation master, he constructed a paternalistic self-image as a benevolent father caring for what he called “my family.” Believing that he and his slaves were the victims of history’s failure to proceed along the enlightened path, he saw himself as the steward for those entrusted to his care until a better future arrived for them all. In the meantime, his own lavish lifestyle and all the incessant and expensive renovations of his Monticello mansion were wholly dependent on slave labour. Whatever silent thoughts he might have harboured about freeing his slaves never found their way into the record. (He freed only five slaves, all members of the Hemings family.) His mounting indebtedness rendered all such thoughts superfluous toward the end, because his slaves, like all his possessions, were mortgaged to his creditors and therefore not really his to free.
Three architectural projects claimed a considerable share of his attention. Throughout his life Monticello remained a work-in-progress that had the appearance of a construction site. Even during his retirement years, Jefferson’s intensive efforts at completing the renovations never quite produced the masterpiece of neoclassical design he wanted to achieve and that modern-day visitors to Monticello find so compelling. A smaller but more architecturally distinctive mansion at Bedford, called Poplar Forest, was completed on schedule. It too embodied neoclassical principles but was shaped as a perfect octagon. Finally there was the campus of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, which Jefferson called his “academical village.” Jefferson surveyed the site, which he could view in the distance from his mountaintop, and chose the Pantheon of Rome as the model for the rotunda, the centrepiece flanked by two rows of living quarters for students and faculty. In 1976 the American Institute of Architects voted it “the proudest achievement of American architecture in the past 200 years.” Even the “interior” design of the University of Virginia embodied Jeffersonian principles, in that he selected all the books for the library, defined the curriculum, picked the faculty, and chaired the Board of Visitors. Unlike every other American college at the time, “Mr. Jefferson’s university” had no religious affiliation and imposed no religious requirement on its students. As befitted an institution shaped by a believer in wholly voluntary and consensual networks of governance, there were no curricular requirements, no mandatory code of conduct except the self-enforced honour system, no president or administration. Every aspect of life at the University of Virginia reflected Jefferson’s belief that the only legitimate form of governance was self-governance.
Physical Characteristics:
Jefferson was over 6’2″; this was very tall for his age.
Isaac Granger Jefferson, enslaved blacksmith at Monticello described Thomas Jefferson in 1781-1824: "Mr Jefferson was a tall straight-bodied man as ever you see, right square-shouldered: nary man in this town [Petersburg] walked so straight as my Old Master: neat a built man as ever was seen in Vaginny .... a straight-up man: long face, high nose.”
William Maclay described Thomas Jefferson in 1790: "Jefferson is a slender man; has rather the air of stiffness in his manner; his clothes seem too small for him; he sits in a lounging manner, on one hip commonly, and with one of his shoulders elevated much above the other; his face has a sunny aspect; his whole figure has a loose, shackling air."
Edmund Bacon, overseer at Monticello in 1806-1822: "Mr. Jefferson was six feet two and a half inches high, well proportioned, and straight as a gun barrel. He was like a fine horse — he had no surplus flesh. ... His countenance was always mild and pleasant."
Sir Augustus John Foster in 1807: "... appearance being very much like that of a tall large-boned farmer."
(Frances Few in 1808: "... he is a tall thin man not very dignified in his appearance ... his face is short and his nose and chin approach each other — his teeth are good he shews but little of them when he laughs — he stoops very much but holds his head high ...."
Francis Calley Gray in 1815: "His figure bony, long and with broad shoulders, a true Virginian."
George Flower in 1816: "Mr. Jefferson's figure was rather majestic: tall (over six feet), thin, and rather high-shouldered; manners, simple, kind, and courteous. His dress, in color and form, was quaint and old-fashioned, plain and neat — a dark pepper-and-salt coat, cut in the old quaker fashion, with a single row of large metal buttons, knee-breeches, gray-worsted stockings, shoes fastened by large metal buckles — such was the appearance of Jefferson when I first made his acquaintance, in 1816."
Isaac Briggs in 1820: "His 77th year finds him strong, active, and in full possession of a sound mind. He rides a trotting horse and sits on him as straight as a young man."
Daniel Webster in 1824: "Mr. Jefferson is now between eighty-one and eighty-two, above six feet high, of an ample, long frame, rather thin and spare. His head, which is not peculiar in its shape, is set rather forward on his shoulders; and his neck being long, there is, when he is walking or conversing, an habitual protrusion of it. It is still well covered with hair, which having been once red, and now turning gray, is of an indistinct sandy color. His eyes are small, very light, and now neither brilliant nor striking. His chin is rather long, but not pointed. His nose small, regular in its outline, and the nostrils a little elevated. His mouth is well formed and still filled with teeth; it is strongly compressed, bearing an expression of contentment and benevolence. His complexion, formerly light and freckled, now bears the marks of age and cutaneous affection. His limbs are uncommonly long; his hands and feet very large, and his wrists of an extraordinary size. His walk is not precise and military, but easy and swinging. He stoops a little, not so much from age as from natural formation. When sitting, he appears short, partly from a rather lounging habit of sitting, and partly from the disproportionate length of his limbs. ... His general appearance indicates an extraordinary degree of health, vivacity, and spirit."
Quotes from others about the person
"Jefferson was not ashamed to call the black man his brother and to address him as a gentleman." - Frederick Douglass, "Self-Made Men" (1872)
"We deny, without regard to color, that 'all men are created equal'; it is not true now, and was not true when Jefferson wrote it." - Benjamin Tillman, as quoted in Pitchfork Ben Tillman, South Carolinian (1967), by Francis Butler Simkins. Louisiana State University Press.
"Jefferson was kind to his servants to the point of indulgence, and within the framework of an institution he disliked he saw that they were well provided for. His ‘people’ were devoted to him." - Historian Dumas Malone as quoted in The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson, by Henry Wiencek, Smithsonian Magazine, (October 2012).
Thomas Jefferson married Martha Wayles Skelton in 1772. Together they had six children, including one stillborn son. Martha Jefferson Randolph (1772–1836), Jane Randolph (1774–1775), a stillborn or unnamed son (1777), Mary Wayles (1778–1804), Lucy Elizabeth (1780–1781), and Lucy Elizabeth (1782–1785). Martha died only 10 years later. Thomas Jefferson remained single for the rest of his life. After his wife died, historians believe he began a relationship with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves. It was alleged that Jefferson fathered some of Sally Hemings’ daughters. Jefferson never denied it in public, but he did deny it private correspondence. There has never been any conclusive proof that this occurred. After his death, Jefferson’s daughter allowed Hemings to live as a free woman in Charlottesville until she died in 1835. DNA tests in 2000 show a familial gene common between their descendants. Throughout his life, Jefferson had twelve grandchildren; several of them having lived with him at Monticello. Jefferson loved to play with his grandchildren, teaching them how to play chess and a game called Goose. (Goose was one of the first board games in the United States, rather similar to our modern version of Chutes and Ladders.)