Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson was born in 1743 at Shadwell, a plantation on the Rivanna River in the Virginia Piedmont, the son of Peter Jefferson, a surveyor and landowner, and Jane Randolph Jefferson, who came from one of the colony’s most powerful families. When his father died in 1757, the fourteen-year-old inherited more than 5,000 acres and about twenty enslaved people, along with his father’s books and instruments.

He studied at the College of William and Mary, where the mathematician William Small gave him a lasting taste for science, and then trained in law under George Wythe. Admitted to the bar in 1767, he entered the Virginia House of Burgesses two years later and began building Monticello, the hilltop house he would redesign for the rest of his life. In 1772 he married Martha Wayles Skelton; through her father’s estate he acquired many more enslaved people, among them the Hemings family. Only two of their children survived to adulthood, and Martha died in 1782.

Jefferson first gained wide notice with A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), a pamphlet arguing that Parliament had no authority over the colonies. Sent to the Second Continental Congress, he was named in June 1776 to the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence and wrote nearly all of it.

Back in Virginia, he drafted laws to abolish entail and primogeniture and wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, adopted in 1786, a landmark in separating church and state. His two years as wartime governor (1779–1781) ended badly when British forces invaded the state and he had to flee Monticello. He then wrote Notes on the State of Virginia, his only book, and in 1784 went to Paris, succeeding Benjamin Franklin as American minister to France.

As George Washington’s first secretary of state, Jefferson clashed with Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton over the power of the federal government, the national bank, and relations with Britain and France. Their dispute helped produce the first national political parties. Jefferson narrowly lost the presidency to John Adams in 1796, serving as his vice president, and won it in the bitterly contested election of 1800.

As president, he cut taxes and military spending and reduced the national debt — even after paying $15 million for the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, which doubled the size of the United States. He sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the new territory and beyond. His second term was consumed by Britain and France’s war: the Embargo Act of 1807, which halted American exports to avoid entanglement, devastated the American economy and was replaced before he left office. In retirement he founded the University of Virginia, chartered in 1819.

Jefferson believed that free people should govern themselves through elected representatives, that government power — especially federal power — should be limited, and that a republic of independent farmers was the best safeguard of liberty. He distrusted banks, cities, and concentrated wealth, and he favored a strict reading of the Constitution, though he set that aside to buy Louisiana. He held unorthodox religious views and believed government should neither punish religious opinions nor support any church. On slavery, he called it a moral evil and a danger to the republic, yet he also put forward theories of Black inferiority in Notes on the State of Virginia and never acted to end the institution.

The central contradiction of Jefferson’s life is slavery. Through inheritance and births he enslaved more than 600 people over his lifetime and freed only a handful. His comfort at Monticello, and his large debts, rested on their labor. As president, he presided over slavery’s rapid expansion into the South and West.

Jefferson also had a long sexual relationship, beginning in the late 1780s or early 1790s, with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman at Monticello who was the half-sister of his late wife. She was about fourteen when she arrived in Paris to serve in his household. Because she was legally his property, historians stress that the relationship cannot be understood as one between equals. The Dictionary of Virginia Biography treats the relationship as established, and a genetic study published in 1998 concluded that “a Jefferson male” fathered her youngest son, Eston.

Critics in his own time also attacked his wartime governorship and the Embargo Act, which by the spring of 1808 had devastated the American economy.

Jefferson’s words have outlasted his actions. Abolitionists, suffragists, and civil rights leaders turned his promise of equality against the institutions he defended, and his ideas about religious liberty and self-government remain central to American political thought. Historians continue to debate how to weigh his ideals against his practice — a debate that is itself part of his legacy, since, as the Miller Center’s biographer notes, the principles he articulated have repeatedly been turned against him.