Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal" in the summer of 1776 while enslaved people worked his Virginia plantation. He owned over six hundred human beings across his lifetime. He wrote extensively about liberty, the rights of man, and the tyranny of hereditary power. Both things are completely true. The contradiction is not a footnote to his legacy — it is the central fact of it, and the reason his words have never stopped requiring argument.
- Born: April 13, 1743, Shadwell, Virginia
- Died: July 4, 1826, Monticello, Virginia (age 83)
- Era: American Enlightenment; Founding Father
- Major works: The Declaration of Independence (1776), Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774)
- Third President of the United States, 1801–1809; first Secretary of State; Minister to France, 1784–1789
He was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, written at thirty-three in seventeen days in a rented room in Philadelphia. He was also a voracious reader who once wrote that he could not live without books — and whose personal library of nearly seven thousand volumes, sold to Congress after the British burned Washington in 1814, became the foundation of the Library of Congress.
He spent five years in France as American Minister, absorbing the intellectual ferment of pre-Revolutionary Paris, and returned convinced that education was the precondition for self-government — not an amenity but a necessity. He founded the University of Virginia in his retirement, designing the buildings himself, writing the curriculum, and recruiting the faculty. He considered it one of the three achievements worth listing on his tombstone — along with the Declaration and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. He did not list "President."
He believed in the future with a consistency that bordered on faith. He thought each generation should rewrite its own laws — that the earth belongs to the living, not the dead — and he thought curiosity was not optional for anyone who wanted to govern themselves honestly. His record on human rights is a permanent asterisk on all of that. Historians have been arguing the balance sheet for two centuries and have not resolved it, which is appropriate: he made it irresolvable by holding incompatible things simultaneously.
His words on the life of the mind, on learning, on the obligations of a free people — these are worth the argument they require. That is not a small thing to say about a document written two hundred and fifty years ago.
