Thomas Jefferson

This article is about the United States president. For other uses, see Thomas Jefferson (disambiguation).

Thomas Jefferson
3rd President of the United States
In office March 4, 1801 – March 4, 1809
Vice President	Aaron Burr George Clinton
Preceded by	John Adams
Succeeded by	James Madison
2nd Vice President of the United States
In office March 4, 1797 – March 4, 1801
President	John Adams
Preceded by	John Adams
Succeeded by	Aaron Burr
1st United States Secretary of State
In office March 22, 1790 – December 31, 1793
President	George Washington
Preceded by	John Jay (Acting)
Succeeded by	Edmund Randolph
United States Ambassador to France
In office May 17, 1785 – September 26, 1789
Appointed by	Congress of the Confederation
Preceded by	Benjamin Franklin
Succeeded by	William Short
Delegate from Virginia to the Congress of the Confederation
In office November 1, 1783 – May 7, 1784
Preceded by	James Madison
Succeeded by	Richard Henry Lee
2nd Governor of Virginia
In office June 1, 1779 – June 3, 1781
Preceded by	Patrick Henry
Succeeded by	William Fleming
Delegate from Virginia to the Second Continental Congress
In office June 20, 1775 – September 26, 1776
Preceded by	George Washington
Succeeded by	John Harvie
Personal details
Born	(1743-04-13)April 13, 1743 Shadwell, Colony of Virginia
Died	July 4, 1826(1826-07-04) (aged 83) Charlottesville, Virginia
Political party	Democratic-Republican Party
Spouse	Martha Wayles Skelton
Children	Martha Jane Mary Lucy Lucy Elizabeth
Alma mater	College of William and Mary
Profession	Planter Lawyer Teacher
Signature

Classic engraving of Jefferson1st Presidential Commemorative of 1904.

Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was the third President of the United States (1801–1809) and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776). An influential Founding Father, Jefferson envisioned America as a great "Empire of Liberty" that would promote republicanism.

Jefferson served as the wartime Governor of Virginia (1779–1781), barely escaping capture by the British in 1781. Many people were not pleased with his tenure and in the next election he did not win office again in Virginia. From mid-1784 through late 1789 Jefferson lived outside the United States. He served in Paris initially as a commissioner to help negotiate commercial treaties. In May 1785 he succeeded Benjamin Franklin as the U.S. Minister to France.

He was the first United States Secretary of State (1789–1793) under George Washington and advised him against a national bank and the Jay Treaty. He was the second Vice President (1797–1801) under John Adams. Winning on an anti-federalist platform, Jefferson took the oath of office and became President of the United States in 1801. As president he negotiated the Louisiana Purchase (1803), and sent the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806) to explore the vast new territory and lands further west. Jefferson always distrusted Britain as a threat to American security; he rejected a renewal of the Jay Treaty that his ambassadors had negotiated in 1806 with Britain and promoted aggressive action, such as the embargo laws, that contributed to the already escalating tensions with Britain and France leading to war with Britain in 1812 after he left office.

Jefferson idealized the independent yeoman farmer as exemplar of republican virtues, distrusted cities and financiers, and favored states' rights and a limited federal government. Jefferson supported the separation of church and state and was the author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1779, 1786). Jefferson's revolutionary view on individual religious freedom and protection from government authority have generated much interest with modern scholars. He was the eponym of Jeffersonian democracy and the co-founder and leader of the Democratic-Republican Party, which dominated American politics for 25 years.

Born into a prominent planter family, Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves throughout his life; he held views on the racial inferiority of Africans common for this period in time. While historians long discounted accounts that Jefferson had an intimate relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, it is now widely held that he did and had six children by her.

Jefferson was a polymath who spoke five languages and could read two others. He was a major book collector with an enormous library, much of which he sold to the Library of Congress in 1814 after the British set fire to the Capitol which destroyed most of its works. He wrote more than sixteen thousand letters and was acquainted with nearly every influential person in America, and many throughout Europe. Jefferson is constantly rated by historical scholars as one of the greatest U.S. presidents.

Early life and education

Family

Main article: Ancestry of Thomas Jefferson

The third of ten children, Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743 into the Randolph family that linked him to some of the most prominent individuals in Virginia. His mother was Jane Randolph, daughter of Isham Randolph of Dungeness, a ship's captain and sometime planter, first cousin to Peyton Randolph, and granddaughter of wealthy English and Scottish gentry. Jefferson's father was Peter Jefferson, a planter and surveyor in Albemarle County (Shadwell, then Edge Hill, Virginia.) He was of possible Welsh descent, although this remains unclear. When Colonel William Randolph, an old friend of Peter Jefferson, died in 1745, Peter assumed executorship and personal charge of William Randolph's estate in Tuckahoe as well as his infant son, Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr. That year the Jeffersons relocated to Tuckahoe, where they would remain for the next seven years before returning to their home in Albemarle in 1752. Peter Jefferson was appointed to the colone]cy of the county, an important position at the time.

When Thomas Jefferson was 22, his oldest sister Jane died at the age of 25 on October 1, 1765. He fell into a period of deep mourning, as he was already saddened by the absence of his sisters Mary, who had been married several years to Thomas Bolling, and Martha, who had wed in July to Dabney Carr. Both had moved to their husbands' residences. Only Jefferson's younger siblings Elizabeth, Lucy, and the two toddlers, were at home. He drew little comfort from the younger ones, as they did not provide him with the same intellectual stimulation as the older sisters had.

Education

In 1752, Jefferson began attending a local school run by a Scottish Presbyterian minister. At the age of nine, Jefferson began studying Latin, Greek, and French; he learned to ride horses, and began to appreciate the study of nature. He studied under the Reverend James Maury from 1758 to 1760 near Gordonsville, Virginia. While boarding with Maury's family, he studied history, science and the classics.

At age 16, Jefferson entered the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, and first met the law professor George Wythe, who became his influential mentor. For two years he studied mathematics, metaphysics, and philosophy under Professor William Small, who introduced the enthusiastic Jefferson to the writings of the British Empiricists, including John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton. He also improved his French, Greek, and violin. A diligent student, Jefferson displayed an avid curiosity in all fields and graduated in 1762 with highest honors.

He read law while working as a law clerk for Wythe. They also read a wide variety of English classics and political works. Jefferson was admitted to the Virginia bar five years later in 1767.

Throughout his life, books played a vital role in Jefferson's education. Even during the American Revolution and while minister to France, Jefferson collected and accumulated thousands of books for his library at Monticello. A significant portion of Jefferson's library was also bequeathed to him in the will of George Wythe who himself had an extensive library. Always eager for more knowledge, Jefferson's education would continue throughout most of his life. Jefferson once stated "I cannot live without books".

Career

Jefferson handled many cases as a lawyer in colonial Virginia, and was very active from 1768 to 1773. Jefferson's client list included members of the Virginia's elite families, including members of his mother's family, the Randolphs.

Monticello

In 1768 Thomas Jefferson started the construction of Monticello, a neoclassical mansion. Since childhood, Jefferson had always wanted to build a beautiful mountaintop home within sight of Shadwell. Jefferson fell greatly in debt by spending lavishly over the years on Monticello in what was a continuing project to create a neoclassical environment, based on his study of the architect Andrea Palladio and the classical orders.

Besides practicing law, Jefferson represented Albemarle County in the Virginia House of Burgesses beginning in 1769. Wythe also served at the same time. Following the passage of the Coercive Acts by the British Parliament in 1774, he wrote a set of resolutions against the acts, which were expanded into A Summary View of the Rights of British America, his first published work. Previous criticism of the Coercive Acts had focused on legal and constitutional issues, but Jefferson offered the radical notion that the colonists had the natural right to govern themselves. Jefferson also argued that Parliament was the legislature of Great Britain only, and had no legislative authority in the colonies. The paper was intended to serve as instructions for the Virginia delegation of the First Continental Congress, but Jefferson's ideas proved to be too radical for that body.

Marriage and family

Wife and children

In 1772, at age 29 Jefferson married the 23-year-old widow Martha Wayles Skelton. They had six children, only two of whom survived to adulthood. Only their oldest daughter Martha lived beyond age 25.

• Martha Washington Jefferson (1772–1836), who married Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., future governor of Virginia. They had twelve children, eleven of whom survived to adulthood.
• Jane Jefferson (1774–1775)
• stillborn or unnamed son (1777)
• Mary Wayles Jefferson (1778–1804), married her cousin John Wayles Eppes, son of Martha's sister, Elizabeth Wayles Eppes. Mary died at age 25 after the birth of her third child; only their son Francis W. Eppes survived to adulthood. Jefferson made his grandson the designated heir of Poplar Forest, originally intended for Mary. In 1829 Francis Eppes moved to Florida, where he had a cotton plantation until the Civil War.
• Lucy Elizabeth (1780–1781)
• Lucy Elizabeth (1782–1785) (it was the tradition to name subsequent children after one who had died, particularly when the family was also trying to pass down family names). Lucy died while Jefferson was in Paris, prompting him to have his youngest daughter Polly (Mary) sent to him, who was then age nine.

Martha Jefferson died on September 6, 1782, a few months after the birth of her last child. Jefferson never remarried. At his wife's bedside when she died, Jefferson was deeply upset after her death, and often rode on secluded roads to mourn for his wife.

Political career from 1775 to 1800

Rudolph Evans' statue of Jefferson with excerpts from the Declaration of Independence to the right

Drafting a declaration

Jefferson served as a delegate to the Second Continental Congress beginning in June 1775, soon after the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War. When Congress began considering a resolution of independence in June 1776, Jefferson was appointed to a five-man committee to prepare a declaration to accompany the resolution. The committee selected Jefferson to write the first draft probably because of his reputation as a writer. The assignment was considered routine; no one at the time thought that it was a major responsibility. Jefferson completed a draft in consultation with other committee members, drawing on his own proposed draft of the Virginia Constitution, George Mason's draft of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and other sources.

Jefferson showed his draft to the committee, which made some final revisions, and after Franklin and Adams suggested a few changes, presented it to Congress on June 28, 1776. After voting in favor of the resolution of independence on July 2, Congress turned its attention to the declaration. Over three days of fiery debate, Congress made a few changes in wording and deleted nearly a fourth of the text, most notably a passage critical of the slave trade, changes that Jefferson resented. During the three day debate Jefferson spoke not a word for or against any of the revisions. On July 4, 1776, the wording of the Declaration of Independence was ratified. Before the signing a prayer was said and in silence the delegates to the convention applied their signature to the document, an act that would be considered treason by the Crown and which would cost them their lives should the revolution fail. The Declaration would eventually become Jefferson's major claim to fame, and his eloquent preamble became an enduring statement of human rights.

State legislator

In John Trumbull's painting Declaration of Independence, the five-man drafting committee is presenting its work to the Continental Congress. Jefferson is the tall figure in the center laying the Declaration on the desk.

In September 1776, Jefferson returned to Virginia and was elected to the new Virginia House of Delegates. During his term in the House, Jefferson set out to reform and update Virginia's system of laws to reflect its new status as a democratic state. He drafted 126 bills in three years, including laws to abolish primogeniture, establish freedom of religion, and streamline the judicial system. In 1778, Jefferson's "Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge" and subsequent efforts to reduce clerical control led to some small changes at William and Mary College. While in the state legislature Jefferson proposed a bill to eliminate capital punishment for all crimes except murder and treason. His effort to end the death penalty law was defeated.

Governor of Virginia

In 1779, at the age of thirty-six, Jefferson was elected Governor of Virginia and served from 1779–1781. At this time the now united colonies were in the middle of the American Revolutionary War with Britain. Georgia had fallen helpless into the hands of the British, South Carolina was invaded, and Charleston threatened. In his capacity as Governor Jefferson made efforts to prepare Richmond for attack by moving all arms, military supplies and records from Richmond to a foundry located five miles outside of town. Arnold learned of this transfer and was rapidly approaching the foundry. Jefferson then attempted to devise a way for their removal to Westham, seven miles to the north, but he was too late. Arnold's men quickly descended upon and burned the foundry and then proceeded on towards Westham. Upon finding the Prussian ally and military adviser, Baron von Steuben, Arnold chose to return to Richmond where he burned much of the city the following morning. Jefferson at later points in his political career would be criticized, especially by his political opponents, for failing to defend Richmond during this time.

In January of 1781 Benedict Arnold led an armada of British ships and with 1600 British regulars conducted raids along the James River. Later he would join Lord Cornwallis whose troops were now marching across Virginia from the south. In advance Cornwallis dispatched British officer Banastre Tarleton on a secret expedition to Monticello to capture then Governor Jefferson. Quickly making his way at night Tarleton hoped to catch Jefferson by surprise, however in the midst of the activity and havoc of the invasion a heroic action by a young Virginian named Jack Jouett, a captain in the Virginia militia, thwarted the British capture of Virginia's governor. Jouett had spotted the assembly and departure of Tarleton and his men and making his way to Monticello, by way of various back roads of which he was familiar, arrived at Montecello in time to warn Jefferson, members of the Virginia Assembly and citizens at large. With little warning Jefferson and his family fled and managed to escape, leaving his home to be captured by British troops. A detachment of Cornwallis' troops, in their march north from the Carolinas, seized the estate along with another plantation which Jefferson owned on the James River. British troops destroyed all his crops, burnt his barns and fences, drove off the cattle, seized all usable horses, cut the throats of the colts, and after setting fires left the plantation a smouldering, blackened waste. Twenty-seven slaves were also captured to which Jefferson later replied.. "Had he carried off the slaves to give them freedom, he would have done right."

As governor in 1780, he transferred the state capital from Williamsburg to Richmond. He continued to advocate educational reforms at the College of William and Mary, including the nation's first student-policed honor code. In 1779, at Jefferson's behest, William and Mary appointed George Wythe to be the first professor of law in an American university. Many people disliked his tenure, and he did not win office again in Virginia. However, in 1783 he was appointed to Congress by the state legislature.

Notes on the State of Virginia

In the Fall of 1780, Gov. Thomas Jefferson was given a list of 22 questions, by Secretary of the French legation to the United States François Marbois, intended to gather pertinent information on the American colonies. Jefferson's responses to Marbois' "Queries" would become known as Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson, scientifically trained, was a member of the American Philosophical Society and had extensive knowledge of western lands from Virginia to Illinois. In a course of 5 years, Jefferson enthusiastically devoted his intellectual energy to the book, which discussed contemporary scientific knowledge, and Virginia's history, politics, and ethnography. Jefferson was aided by Thomas Walker, George R. Clark, and U.S. geographer Thomas Hutchins. The book was first published in France in 1785 and in England in 1787.

Member of Congress

Jefferson was a member of Congress at the time American had won its independence and signed the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The Virginia state legislature appointed Jefferson to the Congress of the Confederation on June 6 of that year, his term beginning on November 1. He was a member of the committee formed to set foreign exchange rates, and in that capacity he recommended that the American currency be based on the decimal system. Jefferson also recommended setting up the Committee of the States, to function as the executive arm of Congress when Congress was not in session. He left Congress when he was elected a minister plenipotentiary on May 7, 1784.

See also: Plan for Establishing Uniformity in the Coinage, Weights, and Measures of the United States

Minister to France

Memorial plaque on the Champs-Élysées, Paris, France, marking where Jefferson lived while he was Minister to France. The plaque was erected after World War I to commemorate the centenary of Jefferson's founding of the University of Virginia.

In May of 1784 Congress appointed Jefferson to act as Minister to France, serving from 1785 to 1789, replacing Benjamin Franklin, who was now well into his senior years. Franklin was much admired in France by both dignitary and common man alike and so it was a delicate matter for Jefferson to step into his position. When the French Foreign minister Count de Vergennes commented to Jefferson, "You replace Monsieur Franklin I hear", Jefferson replied, "I succeed him, no man can replace him.

While serving in France Jefferson did not attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, though he followed the proceedings by correspondence, and was supportive of it.

Beginning in early September 1785, Jefferson collaborated by mail with John Adams in London to outline an anti-piracy treaty with Morocco. Their work culminated in a treaty that was ratified by Congress on July 18, 1787 and is still in force today, making it the longest unbroken treaty relationship in U.S. history.

He enjoyed the architecture, arts, and the salon culture of Paris. He often dined with many of the city's most prominent people, but sided with the revolutionaries in 1789 French Revolution. While in Paris, Jefferson corresponded with a number of individuals who had important roles in events leading up to the French Revolution. These included marquis de Lafayette and comte de Mirabeau, a popular pamphleteer who repeated ideals that had been the basis for the American Revolution.

Jefferson brought some of his slaves to serve the household, including James Hemings for training as a French chef. After his youngest daughter died, he requested that a young woman slave accompany his daughter Polly to France. Sally Hemings was chosen to travel with Polly, and lived with the Jefferson household for about two years in Paris. It is generally held by modern day scholars that Jefferson began a long-term relationship with Sally Hemings while in Paris; that is what their son Madison Hemings reported in his 1873 memoir, however there are no known accounts from Sally Hemings herself.

Secretary of State

In September of 1789 Jefferson returned to America from France with his daughter. Immediately upon his return President Washington wrote to him urging him to accept a seat in his Cabinet as Secretary of State. After a brief conference Jefferson accepted the appointment.

As George Washington's Secretary of State, (1790–1793) Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton argued over national fiscal policy, especially the funding of the debts of the war. Jefferson later compared Hamilton and the Federalists with "Royalism", and stated the "Hamiltonians were panting after...crowns, coronets and mitres." Jefferson and James Madison founded and led the Democratic-Republican Party. He worked with Madison and his campaign manager John J. Beckley to build a nationwide network of Republican allies.

The French minister said in 1793: "Senator Morris and Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton...had the greatest influence over the President's mind, and that it was only with difficulty that he [Jefferson] counterbalanced their efforts." Jefferson supported France against Britain when they fought in 1793. Jefferson believed that political success at home depended on the success of the French army in Europe. The French minister in 1793, Edmond-Charles Genêt, caused a crisis when he tried to influence public opinion in appealing to the people, something Jefferson tried to stop.

Break from office

Jefferson retired to Monticello in late 1793 where he continued to oppose the policies of Hamilton and Washington. However, the Jay Treaty of 1794, led by Hamilton, brought peace and trade with Britain– while Madison, with strong support from Jefferson, wanted, "to strangle the former mother country" without going to war. "It became an article of faith among Republicans that 'commercial weapons' would suffice to bring Great Britain to any terms the United States chose to dictate."

Even during the violence of the Reign of Terror, Jefferson refused to disavow the revolution because "To back away from France would be to undermine the cause of republicanism in America."

Election of 1796 and Vice Presidency

As the Democratic-Republican candidate in 1796 he lost to John Adams, but had enough electoral votes to become Vice President (1797–1801). As one of the chief duties of a Vice president is presiding over the Senate, Jefferson was concerned about the lack of rules govering this body, often leaving matters to the descresion of the presideing officer. Jefferson one wrote: "It is now so long since I have acted in the legislative line that I am entirely rusty in the Parliamentary rules of procedure.”

Jefferson spent much of his time researching procedures and rules for governing bodies years before taking office. As a student he had transcribed notes on British parliamentary law into a manual he would later refere to as his Parliamentary Pocket Book. Jefferson had also served on the committee appointed to draw up the rules of order for the Continental Congress in 1776. As Vice President he was more than qualified to bring reform to Senatorial proceedual matters, and now prompted by the immediate need for such rules of order he would write his 'A Manual of Parliamentary Practice.' a document which the House of Representatives follow to the present day.

With the Quasi-War underway, the Federalists under John Adams started rebuilding the military, levied new taxes, and enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts. Jefferson interpreted the Alien and Sedition Acts as an effort to suppress Democratic-Republicans rather than dangerous enemy aliens, and were used to attack his party. Due to the resultant negative reaction to the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Democratic-Republican party won the election in 1800. Congress under Jefferson would later repeal the Naturalization Act in 1802, while the other acts were allowed to expire. Jefferson and Madison rallied support by anonymously writing the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which declared that the federal government had no right to exercise powers not specifically delegated to it by the states.

Election of 1800

Main article: United States presidential election, 1800

Working closely with Aaron Burr of New York, Jefferson rallied his party, attacking the new taxes especially, and ran for the Presidency in 1800. Before the passage of the Twelfth Amendment, a problem with the new union's electoral system arose. He tied with Burr for first place in the electoral college, leaving the House of Representatives (where the Federalists still had some power) to decide the election.

Hamilton convinced his party that Jefferson would be a lesser political evil than Burr and that such scandal within the electoral process would undermine the new constitution. On February 17, 1801, after thirty-six ballots, the House elected Jefferson President and Burr Vice President. Jefferson later removed Burr from the ticket in 1804 after Burr killed Hamilton in a duel.

Jefferson owed his election victory to the South's inflated number of Electors, which counted slaves under the three-fifths compromise. After his election in 1800, some called him the "Negro President", with critics like the Mercury and New-England Palladium of Boston that Jefferson had the gall to celebrate his election as a victory for democracy when he won "the temple of Liberty on the shoulders of slaves."

Presidency 1801–1809

Main article: Presidency of Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson took the oath of Office on March 4, 1801, at a time when partisan strife between the Republican and Federalist parties was growing to alarming proportions. Regarded as the 'People's President' news of Jefferson's election was well received in most parts of the new country and was marked by celebrations throughout the Union. He was sworn in by Chief Justice John Marshall at the new Capitol in Washington DC. In contrast to the preceding president John Adams, Jefferson exhibited a dislike of formal etiquette. Unlike Washington, who arrived at his inauguration in a stagecoach drawn by six cream colored horses, Jefferson arrived alone on horseback without guard or escort. He was dressed plainly and after dismounting, retired his own horse himself.

The three major achievements of Jefferson's presidency were the Louisiana Purchase, the winning of the first U.S. war overseas (Barbary War), and the abolition of the slave trade.

Administration, Cabinet and Supreme Court appointments

The Jefferson cabinet
Office	Name	Term
President	Thomas Jefferson	1801–1809
Vice President	Aaron Burr	1801–1805
George Clinton	1805–1809
Secretary of State	James Madison	1801–1809
Secretary of the Treasury	Samuel Dexter	1801
Albert Gallatin	1801–1809
Secretary of War	Henry Dearborn	1801–1809
Attorney General	Levi Lincoln, Sr.	1801–1804
	John Breckinridge	1805–1806
Caesar A. Rodney	1807–1809
Secretary of the Navy	Benjamin Stoddert	1801
Robert Smith	1801–1809

Associate Justice

• William Johnson – 1804
• Henry Brockholst Livingston – 1807
• Thomas Todd – 1807

States admitted to the Union:

• Ohio – March 1, 1803

Painting of Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale (1805)

First Barbary War

Main article: Barbary Wars

When Jefferson became president in 1801, the United States was at the time paying $80,000 to the Barbary states as a 'tribute' for protection against North African piracy. For decades, the pirates had been capturing American ships and crew members and demanding huge ransoms for their release. Before Independence, from 1775 until 1783, American merchant ships were protected from the Barbary pirates by the naval and diplomatic influence of Great Britain. When the American Revolution began, American ships were protected by the 1778 alliance with France, which required the French nation to protect "American vessels and effects against all violence, insults, attacks ...". On December 20, 1777, Morocco's Sultan Mohammed III declared that the American merchant ships would be under the protection of the sultanate and could thus enjoy safe passage into the Mediterranean and along the coast. The Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship stands as the U.S.'s oldest non-broken friendship treaty. The one with Morocco has been the longest-lasting treaty with a foreign power.

After the United States gained independence, it had to protect its own merchant vessels. It also had to pay $80,000 as tribute to the Barbary states, as did Britain and France at this time. When Tripoli made new demands on the new President for a prompt payment of $225,000 and an annual payment of $25,000, Jefferson refused. He decided it would be easier to fight the pirates than to continue to pay bribes. The pasha of Tripoli declared war on the United States and the First Barbary War began. As secretary of state and vice president, Jefferson had opposed funds for a Navy to be used for anything more than a coastal defense, however the continued pirate attacks on American shipping interests in the Atlantic and Mediterranean and the systematic kidnapping of American crew members could no longer be ignored. President Jefferson ordered a fleet of naval vessels to various points in the Mediterranean. He forced Tunis and Algiers into breaking their alliance with Tripoli which ultimately forced it out of the fight. Jefferson also ordered five separate naval bombardments of Tripoli, which restored peace in the Mediterranean for a while.

See also: Second Barbary War

Louisiana Purchase

In 1803 the United States under Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory from France, doubling the size of the United States. At the time France under Napoleon, whom Jefferson despised and feared, was facing imminent war against Britain and with bankruptcy. Jefferson sent James Monroe and Robert R. Livingston to Paris in 1802 to purchase the city of New Orleans and adjacent coastal areas. At the request of Jefferson, a French noblemen named Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, having close ties with both Jefferson and Napoleon, also helped negotiate the purchase with France. Napoleon was committed to affairs in France and was preparing for war with Britain on the home front and realized he could no longer defend the French territory in America. He astonished everyone by offering to sell the entire territory; the final price was a mere $15 million, which Treasure Secretary Albert Gallatin financed easily. Jefferson had acted contrary to his usual requirement of explicit Constitutional authority and the Federalists criticized him for acting without that authority, but this unique and rare opportunity could not be missed. On December 20, 1803 the French flag was lowered in New Orleans and the U.S. flag raised, symbolizing the transfer of the Louisiana territory from France to the United States.

Politically, the Louisiana Purchase would prove to be the most consequential executive decision in American history. Without realizing it at the time Jefferson had purchased the largest fertile tract of land on the planet, allowing the nation to be self sufficient. The purchase also changed the new nation's entire national security strategy by removing both British and French imperial ambitions in America. Opinions vary among historians as to who was the principle player in the purchase, some believing it was Napoleon, while others regard Jefferson's handling of the affair as brilliant as his Declaration of Independence. Others agree with Alexander Hamilton, Jefferson's arch rival, and contribute it to, "dumb luck". Still others concur that it was all of these things.

Lewis and Clark Expedition

Jefferson had an avid interest in the sciences and had long entertained ideas of exploring the American frontier even before Louisiana was purchased from France. As such Jefferson was a member of the American Philosophical Society, founded in Philadelphia in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin, and served as its President from 1797 to 1815. By the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries the society was well established, staffed and equipped and whose resources were availed by Jefferson who in 1803 sent Meriwether Lewis to Philadelphia for instruction and counseling in botany, mathematics, surveying, astronomy, chemistry and map making, among other subjects. On January 18, 1803, Jefferson sent a confidential letter to Congress asking for $2,500 to fund the expedition and on February 28, 1803, Congress appropriated the necessary funds for the Expedition. In 1804 Jefferson sent the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806), which explored the new territory and opened the American West to settlement and produced a wealth of scientific and geographical knowledge.

Before this advent knowledge of the western part of the continent was scant and incomplete, limited to what had been learned from traders, trappers and various explorers. Jefferson had also hoped to find a water route to the Pacific and establish trade relations with the Indians of the West. The expedition was the first American expedition to the Pacific Coast. Led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the expedition, consisting of about 45 men, had several goals, finding a "direct & practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce" (the Northwest Passage). Jefferson directed the men to follow the rivers, map them, and collect scientific data. Jefferson also wanted to establish a U.S. claim of "Discovery" to the Pacific Northwest and Oregon territory by mapping and then documenting an American presence there before Europeans could get a chance to claim the land. The expedition reached the Pacific Ocean by November 1805 and on its return in 1806 it had fulfilled Jefferson's hopes by amassing a considerable body of new data concerning the topographical features of the county and its natural resources, providing details on the flora and fauna as well as the Indian tribes. He also commissioned the Pike Expedition to explore the central region of the Purchase, and the Red River Expedition (1806), which was much less successful.

West Point

Ideas for a national institution for military education were founded during the American Revolution, but it wasn't until 1802 when Jefferson, following the advise of George Washington, John Adams and others, finally convinced Congress to authorize the funding and building of a military academy at West Point on the Hudson River in New York. On March 16, 1802, Jefferson signed the Military Peace Establishment Act, directing that a corps of engineers be established and "stationed at West Point in the state of New York, and shall constitute a Military Academy." The Act would provide well-trained officers for a professional army. The officers would be reliable republicans rather than a closed elite as in Europe, for the cadets were to be appointed by Congressmen, and thus exactly reflect the nation's politics. In May 1801 Secretary of War Henry Dearborn announced that the president had "decided in favor of the immediate establishment of a military school at West Point and also on the appointment of Major Jonathan Williams", grandnephew of Benjamin Franklin, to direct "the necessary arrangements, at that place for the commencement of the school." On July 4, 1802, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point formally commenced its role as an institution for scientific and military learning.

Other involvements

He obtained the repeal of many federal taxes in his bid to rely more on customs revenue. He pardoned people imprisoned under the Alien and Sedition Acts, passed in John Adams' term. He repealed the Judiciary Act of 1801 and removed nearly all of Adams' "midnight judges" from office, which led to the Supreme Court deciding the important case of Marbury v. Madison. He also signed into law a bill that officially segregated the U.S. postal system by not allowing blacks to carry mail.

Second Term

In 1807, Jefferson ordered his former vice president Aaron Burr tried for treason. Burr was charged with conspiring to levy war against the United States in an attempt to establish a separate confederacy composed of the Western states and territories, but he was acquitted. Jefferson championed the Embargo Act of 1807. Congress, however, repealed it at the end of his second term.

Later in 1807, the United States Congress, acting on Jefferson's request, passed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves. Jefferson signed the act and it went into effect January 1, 1808, the earliest date permitted by the United States Constitution for any law regulating slavery. The act made importation of slaves illegal but had no effect on the legal institution of slavery, which did not end in the South until after the Civil War in 1865.

Father of a university

Also see: History of the University of Virginia

The Rotunda, University of Virginia

After leaving the Presidency, Jefferson continued to be active in public affairs. He wanted to found a new institution of higher learning, specifically one free of church influences, where students could specialize in many new areas not offered at other universities. Jefferson believed educating people was a good way to establish an organized society. He believed such schools should be paid for by the general public, so less wealthy people could be educated as students. A letter to Joseph Priestley, in January 1800, indicated that he had been planning the University for decades before its founding.

In 1819 he founded the University of Virginia. Upon its opening in 1825, it was the first university to offer a full slate of elective courses to its students. One of the largest construction projects to that time in North America, the university was notable for being centered about a library rather than a church. No campus chapel was included in Jefferson's original plans. Until his death, Jefferson invited students and faculty of the college to his home.

Jefferson is widely recognized for his architectural planning of the University of Virginia grounds. Its innovative design was an expression of his aspirations for both state-sponsored education and an agrarian democracy in the new Republic. His educational idea of creating specialized units of learning is expressed in the configuration of his campus plan, which he called the "Academical Village". Individual academic units were defined as distinct structures, represented by Pavilions, facing a grassy quadrangle. Each Pavilion housed classroom, faculty office, and residences. Though distinctive, each is visually equal in importance, and they are linked with a series of open-air arcades that are the front facades of student accommodations. Gardens and vegetable plots are placed behind and surrounded by serpentine walls, affirming the importance of the agrarian lifestyle.

His highly ordered site plan establishes an ensemble of buildings surrounding a central rectangular quadrangle, named The Lawn, which is lined on either side with the academic teaching units and their linking arcades. The quad is enclosed at one end with the library, the repository of knowledge, at the head of the table. The remaining side opposite the library remained open-ended for future growth. The lawn rises gradually as a series of stepped terraces, each a few feet higher than the last, rising up to the library set in the most prominent position at the top, while also suggesting that the Academical Village facilitates easier movement to the future.

Stylistically, Jefferson was a proponent of the Greek and Roman styles, which he believed to be most representative of American democracy by historical association. Each academic unit is designed with a two story temple front facing the quadrangle, while the library is modeled on the Roman Pantheon. The ensemble of buildings surrounding the quad is an unmistakable architectural statement of the importance of secular public education, while the exclusion of religious structures reinforces the principle of separation of church and state. The campus planning and architectural treatment remains today as a paradigm of building of structures to express intellectual ideas and aspirations. A survey of members of the American Institute of Architects identified Jefferson's campus as the most significant work of architecture in America.

The University was designed as the capstone of the educational system of Virginia. In his vision, any citizen of the state could attend school with the sole criterion being ability.

Slavery

Main article: Thomas Jefferson and slavery

Historians have disagreed on how to interpret Thomas Jefferson's public and private positions on slavery. He opposed slavery as an institution and said he wanted it to end, but he depended on enslaved labor to support his household and plantations. His first public attack on slavery came in 1774; when he was chosen in 1776 to draft the Declaration of Independence, his opposition to slavery was well known. Junius P. Rodriguez says, "All aspects of Jefferson's public career suggest an opposition to slavery." Peter Onuf points to "his well-known opposition to slavery, most famously expressed in... his Notes on the state of Virginia (1785). Jefferson called slavery an "abominable crime," and a "moral depravity". The historian David Brion Davis said that by 1784 Jefferson was "one of the first statesman in any part of the world to advocate concrete measures for restricting and eradicating Negro slavery." But Davis also noted that after Jefferson returned to the U.S. in 1789 from France, "the most remarkable thing about Jefferson's stand on slavery is his immense silence." Paul Finkelman noted the lack of action after this date in terms of correcting or ending the institution. He said Jefferson's greatest failing was "his inability to join the best of his generation in fighting slavery and in his working instead to prevent any significant change in America's racial status quo."

In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson condemned the British crown for the slave trade. He also condemned the King for "inciting American Negroes to rise in arms against their masters", related to the Crown's promise of freedom for slaves who fought for the British. At the request of delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, this language was dropped from the Declaration.

From the mid-1770s, Jefferson advocated a plan of gradual emancipation in Virginia, by which children of slaves would be freed. But he did not advance legislation for it while in the assembly. During the 1770s as a Virginia legislator, Jefferson also wrote bills to prevent free blacks from living in or moving into Virginia, and to punish interracial relations. Jefferson believed that free blacks should be deported and replaced with white settlers. He feared free blacks would encourage a rebellion by slaves against whites. He proposed policies to prepare slaves for freedom: education, emancipation, and transportation of the freedmen to Africa.

In 1778 Jefferson pushed a bill through the Virginia legislature—one of the first of its kind in modern history—to ban further importation of slaves into the state. Davis says that abolitionists assumed "that an end to slave imports would lead automatically to the amelioration and gradual abolition of slavery.". Many slave owners opposed the international slave trade, while still supporting slavery. Ending the importation benefited slaveholders because it increased the value of slaves and decreased the chances of slave rebellion associated with new arrivals.

As a Virginia legislator, Jefferson failed to lead on gradual emancipation and discouraged efforts to include it in law. After he left, in 1782 Virginia "easily adopted a law allowing private manumission." Maryland and Delaware passed similar laws as part of the post-Revolutionary War trend toward increased freedoms. In the two decades after the Revolution, in Virginia the number of free blacks climbed from less than one percent in 1782, to 4.2 percent in 1790, and 13.5 percent in 1810. In Delaware, three-quarters of blacks were free by 1810. In these two decades, numerous slaveholders were moved by ideals to free their slaves, either during their lives or by deed of will. In this period, when thousands of slaveholders in the Upper South gave freedom, Jefferson nominally freed only two slaves: he allowed Robert Hemings to purchase his freedom at market rates in 1794; and he freed his younger brother James Hemings in 1796, after requiring him to train his brother Peter for three years as a replacement chef.

In 1784, Jefferson wrote an ordinance banning slavery in all the nation's territories (not just the Northwest), but it failed by one vote. While he was in France as US minister, the US Congress adopted a version that banned slavery in the Northwest Territory (north of the Ohio River). He was a leader in abolishing the international slave trade, both for Virginia (1778) and the nation as a whole (1808).

During his presidential term, Jefferson was disappointed that the younger generation was making no move to abolish slavery, but he kept silent. In December 1806 in his presidential message to Congress, he called for a law to ban the international slave trade. He denounced the trade as "violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, in which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country have long been eager to proscribe." Jefferson signed the bill passed by Congress, and the international trade became illegal in January 1808. By that time only South Carolina had been officially importing slaves. Illegal smuggling continued for decades.

Views of slaves and blacks

File:Isaac Jefferson.gif

Isaac Jefferson, ca. 1847, a blacksmith who worked as a slave on Jefferson's plantation. His interview was published in 1842 as Memoirs of a Monticello Slave. His account provided details to historians about life at Monticello.

In recent years, historians have focused on Jefferson's attitudes to the enslaved people he held. His ambivalence was reflected in his treatment of those slaves who worked most closely with him and his family at Monticello and in other locations. He had inherited slaves as a child, and he owned upwards of 700 different people at one time or another. Some biographers take the position that Jefferson's debt prevented his freeing his slaves; other scholars say that freeing slaves was "not even a mildly important goal". Unlike Jefferson, some planters allowed slaves to "hire out" and pay off their purchase prices to gain freedom and generate income for the planter. Finkelman notes that leading slaveholders, such as George Washington, Robert Carter III, and Henry Laurens, did find ways to free their slaves. Although many slaveholders took advantage of the 1782 manumission law to free their slaves, Jefferson was reluctant to free his slaves out of his concern of freed blacks living within white society and his personal financial debt.

According to historian Stephen Ambrose: "Jefferson, like all slaveholders and many others, regarded Negroes as inferior, childlike, untrustworthy and, of course, as property." He believed they were inferior to whites in reasoning, mathematical comprehension, and imagination. Jefferson thought these "differences" were "fixed in nature" and was not dependent on their freedom or education. He thought such differences that created the "innate inferiority of Blacks compared to Whites". The historian Nicholas Magnis says of his writings: "This is the essence of racial bias."

Jefferson did not believe that African Americans could live in American society as free people together with whites. For a long-term solution, he thought that slaves should be freed after reaching maturity and having repaid their owner's investment; afterward, he thought they should be sent to African colonies in what he considered "repatriation", despite their being American-born. Otherwise, he thought the presence of free blacks would encourage a violent uprising by slaves' looking for freedom. Jefferson expressed his fear of slave rebellion: "We have the wolf by the ears; and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other."

In 1809, he wrote to Abbé Grégoire, whose book argued against Jefferson's claims of black inferiority in Notes. Jefferson said blacks had "respectable intelligence", but did not alter his views. In August 1814 the planter Edward Coles and Jefferson corresponded about Coles' ideas on emancipation. Jefferson urged Coles not to free his slaves, but the younger man took all his slaves to the free state of Illinois and freed them.

Life as a widower

Jefferson became a widower at age 40 in 1783, and remained so to his death in 1826. As the Monticello Website says:

"Through his celebrity as the eloquent spokesman for liberty and equality as well as the ancestor of people living on both sides of the color line, Jefferson has left a unique legacy for descendants of Monticello's enslaved people as well as for all Americans."

Sally Hemings and her children

Main articles: Sally Hemings, Harriet Hemings, Madison Hemings, and Eston Hemings

Historians now widely accept that the widower Jefferson had a 38-year intimate relationship with his mixed-race slave Sally Hemings, and had six children by her. In that historical period, the Hemingses would have been called a "shadow family". Hemings was three-fourths white and a half-sister to Jefferson's late wife, as her father was also John Wayles. Wayles had six children by his 12-year liaison with his slave Betty Hemings; the youngest was Sally.

Hemings' children by Jefferson were seven-eighths European in ancestry and legally white according to Virginia law of the time. (The "one-drop rule" did not become law until 1924.) Of the four who survived to adulthood: William Beverley, Harriet, James Madison and Thomas Eston Hemings, all but Madison eventually identified as white and lived as adults in white communities. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, the president's oldest grandson, noted the Hemings' children's strong resemblance to his grandfather.

Controversy

Main articles: Jefferson DNA data and Jefferson-Hemings controversy

As early as the 1790s, neighbors talked about Jefferson's connection to Hemings, and in 1802 the journalist James T. Callender reported that Jefferson had fathered several children with Sally Hemings. He never responded publicly, but his family denied the issue. The controversy has referred to the family's and historians' denial of Jefferson's paternity for nearly 200 years, and disagreements over how to interpret limited evidence related to the issue. His daughter Martha told her son Thomas Randolph that Jefferson had been away from Monticello for more than a year before one of Hemings' children was born. Randolph later named Peter Carr, Jefferson's nephew, as father of the Hemings children. The biographer Henry Randall passed on this family testimony to the historian James Parton, while strengthening his account. Randall's letter was a "pillar" of historians' defenses of Jefferson.

In 1873 Madison Hemings claimed Jefferson as father in a memoir recounting his family life at Monticello. He said Jefferson promised Sally Hemings to free her children when they came of age. Historians generally attacked Hemings' account and the political intentions of the journalist who interviewed him; they essentially discounted the content, although Peterson noted it was mostly accurate. In 1873, Israel Jefferson, also a former slave of Monticello, confirmed the account of Jefferson's paternity of Hemings' children in his own memoir.

James Parton repeated the family's Carr paternity thesis and assertion of Jefferson's critical absence in his 1874 book on the president. Succeeding 20th-century historians, such as Merrill Peterson and Douglass Adair, relied on Parton's book. In turn, Dumas Malone adopted their positions. In the 1970s, he also published a letter by Ellen Randolph Coolidge, Randolph's sister, who claimed Samuel Carr had fathered Hemings' children. Briefly, 20th-century supporters "defended" Jefferson on these grounds: he was absent at the conception of one child; the family identified Peter or Samuel Carr as father(s)); the nature of his character (although the prevalence of such arrangements among planters was well known); and his expressed antipathy to blacks. They discounted accounts from former slaves, including Madison Hemings, and did not cross check the facts to determine whose account was best supported. For instance, Madison Hemings' account was supported by the fact that Jefferson freed all of Sally Hemings' children, although he was deeply in debt.

Facts

• Jefferson was at Monticello at the time of conception of each of Hemings' children, during a 15-year period when he was often away for months at a time. Hemings conceived only when Jefferson was at Monticello. These facts overturned his daughter's testimony.
• The Hemings children were named for people in the Randolph-Jefferson family or important to Jefferson.
• Jefferson gave the Sally Hemings family special treatment: the three boys were each apprenticed to the master carpenter of the estate, the most skilled artisan.
• Most importantly, Jefferson freed all the Hemings children, the only slave family to go free from Monticello. Harriet Hemings was the only female slave he allowed freedom.
• He allowed Beverley (male) and Harriet to "escape" in 1822 at ages 23 and 21, although Jefferson was already struggling financially and would be $100,000 in debt at his death. This avoided publicity but meant that the young adults were legally fugitive slaves until Emancipation. Their absences were noted among the gentry.
• In his 1826 will, Jefferson freed the younger brothers Madison and Eston Hemings. He petitioned the legislature to permit them and three older Hemings males, who were also freed in his will, to stay in the state with their families. His daughter Martha Randolph gave Sally Hemings "her time", and she lived freely with her two sons in nearby Charlottesville for a decade.

In 1997 Annette Gordon-Reed identified errors of fact in family testimony, showed that many historians had failed to assess critical evidence, and noted the significance of Jefferson's actions related to the Sally Hemings' family, which he took for no other. For 180 years, historians represented Peter or Samuel Carr as the likely father(s) of Sally Hemings' children. This was disproved in the 1998 DNA study of the Y-chromosome of direct male descendants of the Jefferson male line, the Carr line, and an Eston Hemings descendant. In the same study the team did find a match between the Eston Hemings descendant and the Jefferson male line.

Conclusions

With this new evidence, formerly skeptical biographers such as Joseph Ellis and Andrew Burstein publicly stated their being convinced of Jefferson's paternity of Hemings' children. In addition, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which operates Monticello, issued its own report in 2000 supporting Jefferson's paternity. Dr. Daniel P. Jordan, president of Monticello, committed to incorporate "the conclusions of the report into Monticello’s training, interpretation, and publications." New article and monographs on the Hemings descendants reflecting this have been published by the Foundation, and exhibits installed,. The field of Jeffersonian scholarship widely accepts Jefferson's paternity as a given. In February 2000, PBS Frontline produced a program about the issues. It noted in its overview of material published about Jefferson-Hemings:

"More than 20 years after CBS executives were pressured by Jefferson historians to drop plans for a mini-series on Jefferson and Hemings, the network airs, "Sally Hemings: An American Scandal." Though many quarrelled with the portrayal of Hemings as unrealistically modern and heroic, no major historian challenged the series' premise that Hemings and Jefferson had a 38-year relationship that produced children."

A few historians continue to disagree with these conclusions. For instance, in 1999 the newly formed Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society (TJHS) commissioned its own report. Its Scholars Commission, who included Lance Banning, Robert F. Turner and Paul Rahe, among others, concluded in 2001 there was insufficient evidence to determine that Jefferson was the father of Hemings's children. It suggested that his younger brother Randolph Jefferson was the father, and that Hemings may have had multiple partners. Paul Rahe published a minority view saying he thought Jefferson's paternity of Eston Hemings was more likely than not.

Critics noted Randolph Jefferson had never been seriously proposed as a candidate by historians until after the DNA study of 1998 showed a genetic match between the Hemings descendant and the Jefferson line. They said "previous testimony had agreed" that Hemings had only one father for her children. Other researchers have documented that Randolph Jefferson was seldom at Monticello.

Legacy

In 2010 three Jefferson descendants, one identifying as African American and two as white, who represent both the Hemings and Wayles lines, were honored with the international "Search for Common Ground" award for "their work to bridge the divide within their family and heal the legacy of slavery." They have spoken about race and family in numerous appearances across the country. They organized "The Monticello Community", for descendants of all who lived and worked there during Jefferson's lifetime.

Interests, activities, inventions, and improvements

Jefferson was a farmer, with a lifelong interest in mechanical innovations, new crops, soil conditions, and scientific agricultural techniques. He took special interest in his gardens. 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 feed and clothe his family, slaves and white employees, but he had cash flow problems and was always in debt.

Jefferson's drawing of a pasta machine, ca. 1787

Jefferson had a love for reading and collecting thousands of books in his personal library and kept several collections. Jefferson stated that he could not "live without books" and that he had a "canine appetite for reading." His collection, which he sold to the Library of Congress in 1815, contained 6,700 books. In honor of Jefferson's contribution, the library's website for federal legislative information was named THOMAS. In 2007, Jefferson's two-volume 1764 edition of the Qur'an was used by Rep. Keith Ellison for his swearing in to the House of Representatives. In February 2011 the New York Times reported that a part of Jefferson's retirement library, containing 74 volumes with 28 book titles, was discovered at Washington University in St. Louis.

Jefferson was an accomplished architect who helped popularize the Neo-Palladian style in the United States. Jefferson was said to advocate growing and smoking hemp. Modern scholarship indicates that hemp was a secondary crop at Monticello, but there is no evidence that Jefferson used the plant for smoking. Jefferson was interested in birds and wine, and was a noted gourmet. Jefferson was a prolific writer. He learned Gaelic to translate Ossian, and sent to James Macpherson for the originals.

Jefferson invented many small practical devices and improved contemporary inventions. These include the design for a revolving bookstand to hold five volumes at once to be viewed by the reader. Another was the "Great Clock", powered by the Earth's gravitational pull on Revolutionary War cannonballs. Its chime on Monticello's roof could be heard as far as the University of Virginia. Louis Leschot, a machinist, aided Jefferson with the clock. Jefferson invented a 15 cm long coded wooden cypher wheel, mounted on a metal spindle, to keep secure State Department messages while he was Secretary of State. The messages were scrambled and unscrambled by 26 alphabet letters on each circular segment of the wheel. He improved the moldboard plow and the polygraph, in collaboration with Charles Wilson Peale.

Political philosophy and views

In his May 28, 1818, letter to Mordecai Manuel Noah, Jefferson expressed his faith in humanity and his views on the nature of democracy.

Jefferson was a leader in developing republicanism in the United States. He insisted that the British aristocratic system was inherently corrupt and that Americans' devotion to civic virtue required independence. Jefferson's vision was that of an agricultural nation of yeoman farmers minding their own affairs.

Jefferson's republican political principles were heavily influenced by the Country Party of 18th century British opposition writers. He was influenced by John Locke (particularly relating to the principle of inalienable rights).

Jefferson had a decided dislike and distrust of banks and bankers and opposed borrowing from banks because he believed it created long-term debt as well as monopolies, and inclined the people to dangerous speculation, as opposed to productive labor on the farm.

Jefferson believed that each man has "certain inalienable rights". He defines the right of "liberty" by saying, "Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others..." A proper government, for Jefferson, is one that not only prohibits individuals in society from infringing on the liberty of other individuals, but also restrains itself from diminishing individual liberty.

Abigail Adams excepted, Jefferson did not support gender equality, and opposed female involvement in politics, saying that "our good ladies ... are contented to soothe and calm the minds of their husbands returning ruffled from political debate."

Democracy

There is no dispute that Jefferson is a major iconic figure in the emergence of democracy—he was the "agrarian democrat" who shaped the thinking of his nation and the world. As Vernon Louis Parrington concluded in 1927:

"Far more completely than any other American of his generation he embodied the idealisms of the great revolution -- its faith in human nature, its economic individualism, its conviction that here in America, through the instrumentality of political democracy, the lot of the common man should somehow be made better."

But Jefferson's concepts of democracy were rooted in The Enlightenment, as Peter Onuf has stressed. He envisioned democracy an expression of society as a whole, calling for national self-determination, cultural uniformity, and based upon the education of the all the people. The emphasis on uniformity allowed no opportunity for a multiracial republic in which some groups were not fully assimilated into the identical republican values. Onuf argues that Jefferson was unable and unwilling to abolish slavery until a such demand could issue naturally from the sensibilities of the entire people. Public education and a free press was essential to a democratic nation: "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free it expects what never was and never will be....The people cannot be safe without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.

Rebellion

In the 1780s Jefferson saw occasional upheaval as a natural event. In a letter to James Madison on January 30, 1787, Jefferson wrote, "A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical...It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government." Similarly, in a letter to Abigail Adams on February 22, 1787 he wrote, "The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all." Concerning Shays' Rebellion after he had heard of the bloodshed, on November 13, 1787 Jefferson wrote to William S. Smith, John Adams' son-in-law, "What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure." In another letter to William S. Smith during 1787, Jefferson wrote: And what country can preserve its liberties, if the rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.

Religion

Further information: Thomas Jefferson and religion

Jefferson rejected the orthodox Christianity of his day and was especially hostile to the Catholic Church as he saw it operate in France. Throughout his life Jefferson was intensely interested in theology, biblical study, and morality. As a landowner he played a role in governing his local Episcopal Church; in terms of belief he was inclined toward Unitarianism and the religious philosophy of Deism. Under the influence of several of his college professors, he converted to the deist philosophy. Dulles concludes:

"Jefferson was a deist because he believed in one God, in divine providence, in the divine moral law, and in rewards and punishments after death, but did not believe in supernatural revelation. He was a Christian deist because he saw Christianity as the highest expression of natural religion and Jesus as an incomparably great moral teacher. He was not an orthodox Christian because he rejected, among other things, the doctrines that Jesus was the promised Messiah and the incarnate Son of God."

In private letters, Jefferson refers to himself as "Christian" (1803): "To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence....

Jefferson believed in the moral teachings of Christ and edited a compilation of Christ's teachings leaving out the miracles. Jefferson was firmly anticlerical saying that in "every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot...they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer for their purposes." Jefferson told Adams he had doubts on the existence of invisible beings such as God, angels, and the soul writing, "To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings."

Native American policy

Jefferson was the first President to propose the idea of a formal Indian Removal plan. Andrew Jackson is often erroneously credited with initiating Indian Removal, because Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 during his presidency. He was in favor of this policy as well and gained legislative support for it. In addition he was involved in the extermination and forceful removal of many Eastern tribes. Jefferson had laid out an approach to Indian removal in a series of private letters that began in 1803 (for example, see letter to William Henry Harrison below).

Between 1776 and 1779, Jefferson recommended forcing the Cherokee and Shawnee tribes to lands west of the Mississippi River. His first such act as president, was to make a deal with the state of Georgia: if Georgia were to release its legal claims to discovery in lands to its west, the U.S. military would help forcefully expel the Cherokee people from Georgia. At the time, the Cherokee had a treaty with the United States government which guaranteed them the right to their lands, which was violated by Jefferson's deal with Georgia.

Acculturation and assimilation

Jefferson's original plan was for Natives to give up their own cultures, religions, and lifestyles in favor of western European culture, Christian religion, and a European-style agricultural lifestyle.

Jefferson believed that their assimilation into the European-American economy would make them more dependent on trade with white Americans, and would eventually thereby be willing to give up land that they would otherwise not part with, in exchange for trade goods or to resolve unpaid debts. In an 1803 letter to William Henry Harrison, Jefferson wrote:

To promote this disposition to exchange lands, which they have to spare and we want, for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.... In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi. The former is certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves; but, in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only. Should any tribe be foolhardy enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation.

Forced Indian relocation

With the colonial and native civilizations in collision compounded by British incitement of Indian tribes and mounting hostilities between the two peoples quick measures were resorted to so as to avert another major conflict and measures were taken to forcefully relocate the various Indian tribes to points further west. Jefferson relates his feelings of the affair in a letter to Alexander von Humboldt in 1813:

You know, my friend, the benevolent plan we were pursuing here for the happiness of the aboriginal inhabitants in our vicinities. We spared nothing to keep them at peace with one another. To teach them agriculture and the rudiments of the most necessary arts, and to encourage industry by establishing among them separate property. In this way they would have been enabled to subsist and multiply on a moderate scale of landed possession. They would have mixed their blood with ours, and been amalgamated and identified with us within no distant period of time. On the commencement of our present war, we pressed on them the observance of peace and neutrality, but the interested and unprincipled policy of England has defeated all our labors for the salvation of these unfortunate people. They have seduced the greater part of the tribes within our neighborhood, to take up the hatchet against us, and the cruel massacres they have committed on the women and children of our frontiers taken by surprise, will oblige us now to pursue them to extermination, or drive them to new seats beyond our reach.

Jefferson believed assimilation was best for Native Americans; second best was removal to the west. The worst possible outcome would happen if Native Americans attacked the whites. He told his Secretary of War, General Henry Dearborn (who was the primary government official responsible for Indian affairs): "if we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down until that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississipi."

Death

Jefferson's gravesite

Jefferson' health began to deteriorate by July 1825, and by June 1826 he was confined to bed. He likely died from uremia, severe diarrhea, and pneumonia.Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and a few hours before John Adams.

Though born into a wealthy slave-owning family, Jefferson had many financial problems, and died deeply in debt. After his death, his possessions, including his slaves, were sold, as was Monticello in 1831. Thomas Jefferson is buried in the family cemetery at Monticello. The cemetery only is now owned and operated by the Monticello Association, a separate lineage society that is not affiliated with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation that runs the estate.

His epitaph, written by him, reads:

"HERE WAS BURIED THOMAS JEFFERSON

AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

OF THE STATUTE OF VIRGINIA FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

AND FATHER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA." And below it:

BORN APRIL 2. 1743. O.S.

DIED JULY 4. 1826.

Reputation and memorials

Further information: List of places named for Thomas Jefferson

Reputation

Jefferson has always been one of the two or three central American icons of liberty, democracy and republicanism, standing with Washington and Lincoln. Americans have celebrated him as the most articulate spokesman of the American Revolution, and as a renaissance man who promoted science and scholarship. He articulated a political philosophy that has retained its power across the centuries. Abraham Lincoln in particular was heavily indebted to Jefferson for the political philosophy of liberty and equality used in Lincoln's battle against slavery. Lincoln used the natural rights precepts of the Declaration of Independence as his guide to a better Union. He considered Jefferson to be "the most distinguished politician in our history."

During the New Deal era of the 1930s, Democrats honored Jefferson as the founding father and continued inspiration for their party. President Franklin D. Roosevelt took the lead in building his monument in Washington. Jefferson's reputation among the general public and in the school textbooks has generally been high based on his leadership as a founding father during the Revolution and early national period.

On racial issues some historians express dismay at his harsh treatment of Native Americans, while others acknowledge the realities involved and understand that there were few choices available in dealing with the two colliding civilizations. There is also dismay about his opposition to a biracial society, and his indifferent opinion of blacks. The likelyhood of his relationship with Sally Hemings, a slave who was three-quarters white, and his "shadow family" by her suggests he kept his privacy and was a complex man of apparent contradictions. Jefferson's legacy as a champion of Enlightenment ideals has been challenged by modern historians who find his ownership of hundreds of slaves at Monticello to be in contradiction to his views on freedom and the equality of men. Historian Peter Onuf stated that "Jefferson's failure to address the problem of slavery generally and the situation of his own human chattel...is in itself the most damning possible commentary on his iconic standing as 'apostle of freedom'." The historian Clarence E. Walker said that Jefferson could rationalize being a slave owner and defender of freedom since he believed blacks were inferior and needed supervision.

Memorials

First Jefferson Postage stamp Die Proof, Issue of 1856

Jefferson has been memorialized in many ways, including buildings, sculptures, and currency. The Jefferson Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C. on April 13, 1943, the 200th anniversary of Jefferson's birth. The interior of the memorial includes a 19-foot (6 m) statue of Jefferson and engravings of passages from his writings. Most prominent are the words which are inscribed around the monument near the roof: "I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man".

Thomas Jefferson's portrait has been found engraved on the face of the various U.S. Postage issues that have honored him. His portrait appears on the U.S. $2 bill, nickel, and the $100 Series EE Savings Bond, and a Presidential Dollar which released into circulation on August 16, 2007.

His original tombstone, now a cenotaph, is located on the campus in the University of Missouri's Quadrangle.

A life mask of Jefferson was created by John Henri Isaac Browere in the 1820s.

Jefferson, together with George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, was chosen by sculptor Gutzon Borglum and approved by President Calvin Coolidge to be depicted in stone at the Mount Rushmore Memorial. Other memorials to Jefferson include the commissioning of the NOAA ship Thomas Jefferson in Norfolk, Virginia on July 8, 2003, in commemoration of his establishment of a Survey of the Coast, the predecessor to NOAA's National Ocean Service; and the placement of a bronze monument in Jefferson Park, Chicago at the entrance to the Jefferson Park Transit Center along Milwaukee Avenue in 2005.

Writings

• A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774)
• Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms (1775)
• Memorandums taken on a journey from Paris into the southern parts of France and Northern Italy, in the year 1787
• Notes on the State of Virginia (1781)
• Manual of Parliamentary Practice for the Use of the Senate of the United States (1801)
• Autobiography (1821)
• Jefferson Bible, or The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth

See also

• Jeffersonian democracy
• Maria Cosway
• Monticello Association
• France in the American Revolutionary War
• Founding Fathers of the United States
• US Presidents on US postage stamps
• List of Presidents of the United States

Bibliography

Biographical

• Appleby, Joyce. Thomas Jefferson (2003), short interpretive essay by leading scholar.
• Bernstein, R. B. Thomas Jefferson. (2003) Well-regarded short biography.
• Brodie, Fawn McKay. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, W.W. Norton, 1974, the "first extensive investigation of the Sally Hemings story".
• Burstein, Andrew. Jefferson's Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello, New York: Basic Books, 2005
• Gordon-Reed, Annette. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American controversy, Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1997 (reprint 1998 to include discussion of DNA analysis)
• Cunningham, Noble E. In Pursuit of Reason (1988) well-reviewed short biography.
• Crawford, Alan Pell, Twilight at Monticello, Random House, New York, (2008)
• Ellis, Joseph. "American Sphinx: The Contradictions of Thomas Jefferson".
• Ellis, Joseph. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1996). Prize-winning essays; assumes prior reading of his biography.
• Hale, Edward Everett, Illustrious Americans, Their lives and Great Achievements, 1896 Hale, Edward Everett (1896). Illustrious Americans, Their lives and Great Achievements. International Publishing Company, Philadelphia, PA., and Chicago, ILL, 1896, by W. E. SCULL, Library of Congress, Washington DC. ISBN 9781162227023.
• Gordon-Reed, Annette. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American controversy, Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1997 (reprint 1998 to include discussion of DNA analysis)
• Halliday, E. M. (2001, 2002). Understanding Thomas Jefferson. New York, NY: Perennial HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-019793-5. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Hitchens, Christopher (2005). "Thomas Jefferson: Author of America". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help), short biography.
• Malone, Dumas. Jefferson and His Time, 6 vols. (1948–82). Multi-volume biography of TJ by leading expert; A short version is online.
• Padover, Saul K. Jefferson: A Great American's Life and Ideas
• Peterson, Merrill D. (1975). Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help) A standard scholarly biography.
• Peterson, Merrill D. (ed.) Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography (1986), 24 essays by leading scholars on aspects of Jefferson's career.
• Randall, Henry Stephens (1858). The Life of Thomas Jefferson (volume 1 ed.).
• Salgo, Sandor (1997). Thomas Jefferson: Musician and Violinist. Abook detailing Thomas Jefferson's love of music.
• Schachner, Nathan (1951). Thomas Jefferson: A Biography. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help) 2 volumes.
• Scharff, Virginia. The Women Jefferson Loved (2010)

Politics and ideas

• Ackerman, Bruce. The Failure of the Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Marshall, and the Rise of Presidential Democracy. (2005)
• Adams, Henry. History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (1889; Library of America edition 1986) famous 4-volume history
  • Wills, Garry, Henry Adams and the Making of America (2005), detailed analysis of Adams' History
• Banning, Lance. The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (1978)
• Brown, Stuart Gerry (1954). The First Republicans: Political Philosophy and Public Policy in the Party of Jefferson and Madison. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Channing; Edward. The Jeffersonian System: 1801–1811 (1906), "American Nation" survey of political history
• Dunn, Susan. Jefferson's Second Revolution: The Election Crisis of 1800 and the Triumph of Republicanism (2004)
• Elkins, Stanley and Eric McKitrick. The Age of Federalism (1995) in-depth coverage of politics of 1790s
• Fatovic, Clement. "Constitutionalism and Presidential Prerogative: Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian Perspectives." : American Journal of Political Science, 2004 48(3): 429–444. Issn: 0092-5853 Fulltext: in Swetswise, Ingenta, Jstor, and Ebsco
• Ferling, John (2004). Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Finkelman, Paul. Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (2001), esp ch 6–7
• Hatzenbuehler, Ronald L. "I Tremble for My Country": Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia Gentry, (University Press of Florida; 206 pages; 2007). Argues that the TJ's critique of his fellow gentry in Virginia masked his own reluctance to change
• Hitchens, Christopher (2005). Author of America: Thomas Jefferson. HarperCollins.
• Horn, James P. P. Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf, eds. The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic (2002) 17 essays by scholars
• Jayne, Allen. Jefferson's Declaration of Independence: Origins, Philosophy and Theology (2000); traces TJ's sources and emphasizes his incorporation of Deist theology into the Declaration.
• Roger G. Kennedy. Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase (2003).
• Knudson, Jerry W. Jefferson and the Press: Crucible of Liberty. (2006)
• Lewis, Jan Ellen, and Onuf, Peter S., eds. Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, Civic Culture. (1999)
• McDonald, Forrest. The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson (1987) intellectual history approach to Jefferson's Presidency
• Matthews, Richard K. "The Radical Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson: An Essay in Retrieval," Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXVIII (2004)
• Mayer, David N. The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson (2000)
• Miller, Robert (2006). Native America, Discovered and Conquered: : Thomas Jefferson, Lewis & Clark, and Manifest Destiny. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 9780275990114.
• Onuf, Peter S., "Every Generation Is An 'Independant Nation': Colonization, Miscegenation and the Fate of Jefferson's Children", William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. LVII, No.1, January 2000, JSTOR
• Onuf, Peter S. Jefferson's Empire: The Languages of American Nationhood. (2000). Online review
• Onuf, Peter. "Thomas Jefferson, Federalist" (1993) online journal essay
• Rahe, Paul A. "Thomas Jefferson's Machiavellian Political Science". Review of Politics 1995 57(3): 449–481. ISSN 0034–6705 Fulltext online at Jstor and Ebsco.
• Sears, Louis Martin. Jefferson and the Embargo (1927), state by state impact
• Sloan, Herbert J. Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (1995). Shows the burden of debt in Jefferson's personal finances and political thought.
• Smelser, Marshall. The Democratic Republic: 1801–1815 (1968). "New American Nation" survey of political and diplomatic history
• Staloff, Darren. Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding. (2005)
• Tucker, Robert W. and David C. Hendrickson. Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (1992), foreign policy
• Urofsky, Melvin I. "Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall: What Kind of Constitution Shall We Have?" Journal of Supreme Court History 2006 31(2): 109–125. Issn: 1059-4329 Fulltext: in Swetswise, Ingenta and Ebsco
• Valsania, Maurizio. "'Our Original Barbarism': Man Vs. Nature in Thomas Jefferson's Moral Experience." Journal of the History of Ideas 2004 65(4): 627–645. Issn: 0022-5037 Fulltext: in Project Muse and Swetswise
• Wagoner, Jennings L., Jr. Jefferson and Education. (2004).
• Wilentz, Sean (2005). The Rise of American Democracy. W. W. Norton & Company, New York NY. ISBN 0-393-05820-4.

Religion

• Gaustad, Edwin S. Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson (2001) Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, ISBN 0-8028-0156-0
• Sanford, Charles B. The Religious Life of Thomas Jefferson (1987) University of Virginia Press, ISBN 0-8139-1131-1
• Sheridan, Eugene R. Jefferson and Religion, preface by Martin Marty, (2001) University of North Carolina Press, ISBN 1-882886-08-9
• Edited by Jackson, Henry E., President, College for Social Engineers, Washington, D. C. The Thomas Jefferson Bible (1923) Copyright Boni and Liveright, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Arranged by Thomas Jefferson. Translated by R. F. Weymouth. Located in the National Museum, Washington, D. C.

Legacy and historiography

• Cogliano, Francis D. Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy (Edinburgh University Press, 2006) online edition
• Gordon-Reed, Annette. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American controversy, Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1997 (reprint 1998 to include discussion of DNA analysis)
• Onuf, Peter. "The Scholars' Jefferson," William and Mary Quarterly 3d Series, L:4 (October 1993), 671–699. Historiographical review or scholarship about TJ; in JSTOR
• Onuf, Peter S., ed. Jeffersonian Legacies. (1993)
• Onuf, Peter S., ed. (with Jan Ellen Lewis). Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, University Press of Virginia, 1999, Google preview.
• Perry, Barbara A. "Jefferson's Legacy to the Supreme Court: Freedom of Religion", Journal of Supreme Court History 2006 31(2): 181–198. Issn: 1059-4329 Fulltext in Swetswise, Ingenta and Ebsco
• Peterson, Merrill D. The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (1960), how Americans interpreted and remembered Jefferson
• Taylor, Jeff. Where Did the Party Go?: William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jeffersonian Legacy (2006), on Jefferson's role in Democratic history and ideology.
• Wiltse, Charles Maurice. The Jeffersonian Tradition in American Democracy (1935), analysis of Jefferson's political philosophy
• "Thomas Jefferson", PBS interviews with 24 historians

Primary sources

• Thomas Jefferson: Writings: Autobiography / Notes on the State of Virginia / Public and Private Papers / Addresses / Letters (1984, ISBN 978-0-940450-16-5) Library of America edition. There are numerous one-volume collections; this is perhaps the best place to start.
• Thomas Jefferson, Political Writings ed by Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball. Cambridge University Press. 1999 online
• Lipscomb, Andrew A. and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds. The Writings Of Thomas Jefferson 19 vol. (1907) not as complete nor as accurate as Boyd edition, but covers TJ from birth to death. It is out of copyright, and so is online free.
• Edwin Morris Betts (editor), Thomas Jefferson's Farm Book, (Thomas Jefferson Memorial: December 1, 1953) ISBN 1-882886-10-0. Letters, notes, and drawings—a journal of plantation management recording his contributions to scientific agriculture, including an experimental farm implementing innovations such as horizontal plowing and crop-rotation, and Jefferson's own moldboard plow. It is a window to slave life, with data on food rations, daily work tasks, and slaves' clothing. The book portrays the industries pursued by enslaved and free workmen, including in the blacksmith's shop and spinning and weaving house.
• Boyd, Julian P. et al., eds. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. The definitive multivolume edition; available at major academic libraries. 36 volumes covers TJ to March 1802.
• The Jefferson Cyclopedia (1900) large collection of TJ quotations arranged by 9000 topics; searchable; copyright has expired and it is online free.
• The Thomas Jefferson Papers, 1606–1827, 27,000 original manuscript documents at the Library of Congress online collection
• Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), London: Stockdale. This was Jefferson's only book
  • Shuffelton, Frank, ed., (1998) Penguin Classics paperback: ISBN 0-14-043667-7
  • Waldstreicher, David, ed., (2002) Palgrave Macmillan hardcover: ISBN 0-312-29428-X
  • online edition
• Cappon, Lester J., ed. The Adams-Jefferson Letters (1959)
• A MANUAL OF PARLIAMENTARY PRACTICE:, for the Use of the Senate of the United States. BY THOMAS JEFFERSON.
• Howell, Wilbur Samuel, ed. Jefferson's Parliamentary Writings (1988). Jefferson's Manual of Parliamentary Practice, written when he was vice-President, with other relevant papers
• Melton, Buckner F.: The Quotable Founding Fathers, Potomac Books, Washington D.C. (2004).
• Smith, James Morton, ed. The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776–1826, 3 vols. (1995)

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

External links

• The Papers of Thomas Jefferson – Digital Edition
  • University of Virginia Jefferson Papers
  • B. L. Rayner's 1829 Life of Thomas Jefferson, an on-line etext
  • "The Hobby of My Old Age": Jefferson's University of Virginia
  • Quotations from Jefferson
  • University of Virginia biography
• Biography on White House website
• A collection of photographs of Thomas Jefferson's architecture
• Library of Congress
  • Library of Congress: Jefferson exhibition
  • Library of Congress: Jefferson timeline
  • Thomas Jefferson: A Resource Guide from the Library of Congress
• Massachusetts Historical Society
  • Thomas Jefferson Papers: An Electronic Archive This digital collection of Thomas Jefferson manuscripts held by the Massachusetts Historical Society includes the page images and transcriptions of Jefferson's Farm Book and Garden Book, also page images of Jefferson's library catalogs and architectural drawings.
• National Park Service
  • Thomas Jefferson's Plan for the University of Virginia: Lessons from the Lawn, a National Park Service Teaching with Historic Places (TwHP) lesson plan
  • Jefferson Memorial, Washington DC
• Monticello – Home of Thomas Jefferson
• Poplar Forest-Thomas Jefferson's second home
• "Frontline: Jefferson's blood: Chronology: The Sally Hemings story (1977), PBS
• The Papers of Thomas Jefferson at the Avalon Project
• United States Congress. "Thomas Jefferson (id: J000069)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
• Notes on the State of Virginia from American Studies at the University of Virginia.
• Works by Thomas Jefferson at Project Gutenberg
• Online catalog of Thomas Jefferson's personal library, based on the catalog of books he sold to the Library of Congress in 1815
• Template:Worldcat id
• The Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, for information on TJ's life and times, written and referenced by historians at Monticello
• A Guide to the Executive Papers of Governor Thomas Jefferson, 1779-1781 at The Library of Virginia