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"If God is just,
I tremble for my country”
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,
in a state of civilization,
it expects what never was and never will be."

Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson, a true Renaissance man, was a giant among the Founding Fathers. His deeply-rooted disputes with Alexander Hamilton created the two-party system in the United States and launched two competing visions of what the United States should be that dominated 19th-century politics and still survive today. He was also a complex man, made up of penetrating intelligence, insatiable curiosity, high ideals, and deep contradictions. The author of the ringing assertion that “all men are created equal” was also the master of 200 slaves. The political theorist who saw the small-scale farmer as the bedrock of American democracy was himself the owner of many thousands of acres of land and a proud member of the Virginia plantation aristocracy.

Educated at the College of William and Mary, Jefferson was “the penman” of the American Revolution. His pamphlet, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, written at Monticello and published in 1774, demonstrated his knowledge of the law and his ability to write clearly. By the time Virginia sent him to the Second Continental Congress two years later, everyone recognized him as a fluent writer and superb legal draftsman. The committee appointed to draft a declaration of independence in June 1776 selected him to write it. He submitted his last draft on July 2. Two days later, Congress adopted the final version of the Declaration of Independence.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal,” and yet enslaved hundreds of people over the course of his life. Jefferson called slavery a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot,” but continued to hold human beings as property his entire adult life. Thomas Jefferson enslaved over 600 human beings throughout the course of his life. Jefferson acquired most of the over six hundred people he owned during his life through the natural increase of enslaved families. Some 400 people were enslaved at Monticello; the other 200 people were held in bondage on Jefferson’s other properties. At any given time, around 130 people were enslaved at Monticello. Slavery was an inherently violent and coercive system, although Jefferson wrote that he wished to mitigate the violence. “My first wish is that the labourers may be well treated,” he wrote to his overseer Manoah Clarkson in 1792.

Years after his wife’s death, Thomas Jefferson fathered at least six of Sally Hemings’s children. Four survived to adulthood and are mentioned in Jefferson’s plantation records: Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston Hemings. Sally Hemings worked for two and a half years (1787-89) in Paris as a domestic servant and maid in Jefferson’s household. While in Paris, where she was free, she negotiated with Jefferson to return to enslavement at Monticello in exchange for “extraordinary privileges” for herself and freedom for her unborn children.

The most serious flaw in the "SECOND REVOLUTION" of Jeffersonian America came from its embrace of slavery. The party's national leaders were slave-owning elites who had no intention of including African-Americans in their broadened commitment to democracy. Jefferson probed the fundamental contradiction between slavery and democracy more eloquently than any American of the day. This led him to conclusions that were far less than revolutionary. Jefferson repeatedly acknowledged that slavery was wrong, but he never saw a way to eliminate the institution. To Jefferson, slavery meant holding "a wolf by the ears." It was a danger that could never be released. Most disturbingly of all, Jefferson could not imagine America as a place where free blacks and whites could live together. To him, a biracial society of equality would "produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race."

Jefferson noted in his essays, "Notes on the State of Virginia" that "Many of the laws which were in force during the monarchy being relative merely to that form of government, or inculcating principles inconsistent with republicanism, the first assembly which met after the establishment of the commonwealth, appointed a committee to revise the whole code..." [Report of the Revisors, prepared by Jefferson, Wythe, and Pendleton, and reported to the legislature June 18, 1779.]

This report proposed "To emancipate all slaves born after passing the act.... they should be colonized to such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper, sending them out with arms, implements of houshold and of the handicraft arts, seeds, pairs of the useful domestic animals, &c. to declare them a free and independant people, and extend to them our alliance and protection, till they shall have acquired strength...

"It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expence of supplying by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.

"Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture."

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reformers, philanthropists, and government officials wrestled with “the Indian question” — the question of what was to be done with the Indians after they had been confined to reservations. Thomas Jefferson was the first president to give this question significant thought. He wanted to “civilize” the Indians and incorporate them into Anglo-American society. The best book on Jefferson’s Indian program is Bernard Sheehan’s The Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973). It argues that Jefferson’s well-intended reform program proved destructive of native culture—and that ultimately, “the white man’s sympathy was more deadly than his animosity.”

Jefferson served as governor of Virginia from 1779 to 1781. During this time, he drafted the important Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, although it did not become law until 1786. Driven from his home by the British and heavily criticized during his last year in office, he decided to abandon politics and retire to Monticello. The death of his wife in 1782 changed his plans. Although he lost his wife at a young age long before residing in the White House, Thomas Jefferson never remarried. They had six children, but only two survived to adulthood. Returning to politics, he served briefly in Congress under the Articles of Confederation, where he laid the foundations for the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 that established the framework for westward expansion. In 1784, he went to France as a member of a trade commission. A year later, he succeeded Benjamin Franklin as minister to France.

Jefferson’s five years in France had a dramatic impact both on his life and on his house. He thrived on the Enlightenment principles he encountered in France and was smitten with the new Neoclassical architecture that he saw. He witnessed the early days of the French Revolution, which he called “the first chapter of the history of European liberty".

When Jefferson returned to America in 1789, George Washington asked him to serve as his secretary of state. He held that position until 1793, when he resigned after a series of bitter disputes with Alexander Hamilton, secretary of the treasury. Hamilton generally distrusted the common man and favored a strong federal government that would encourage the development of industry in the new nation. Jefferson, on the other hand, had an abiding faith in the ability of the people to govern themselves and saw no need for a strong central government. His vision of America was of an agrarian nation of educated small farmers. The Constitution made no provision for political parties, but the new Federalist Party soon coalesced around Hamilton and his allies. Jefferson was at the heart of the Democratic-Republican Party.

Jefferson was part practical politician and part political philosopher. On the philosophical side, he envisioned a nation of self-sufficient small "yeoman farmers" living in rustic simplicity, peace, and liberty amid the splendors of nature. These farmers would be informed, intelligent citizens who would govern themselves in small democratic units, and the troubles of Europe—crowded cities, oppressive institutions, and the rest—would be far away beyond the broad Atlantic.

As Hamilton's economic program unfolded, Jefferson saw in it the death of his dream. The fiscal program would destroy the yeoman farmer's independence, tax him into debt, and destroy local political power. The tariff would interrupt the free trade that was sacred to the farmer's economic independence. It would also encourage the growth of manufacturing, which meant the growth of cities and the rise of a moneyed aristocracy. As Jefferson saw it, Hamilton's program might bring material wealth to the United States, but it would not improve the quality of life.

In the election of 1796, Jefferson finished second to John Adams, the Federalist candidate. Under the Constitution at that time, Jefferson became vice president, although the fact that the two men were from different parties guaranteed conflict. James Callender's (1758–1803) History of the United States for 1796 was the original public venue for reports of financial dealings by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton as well as his 1792 adulterous affair with Maria Reynolds (b. 1768), the wife of James Reynolds, a United States Treasury employee. Jefferson's political lieutenant, clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, and later first Librarian of Congress John James Beckley was the immediate source of the confidential documents used by Callender to discredit Hamilton. Callender was one of the political pamphleteers supported by Jeffersonians to attack their Federalist opponents.

By 1800 the American people were ready for a change. Under Washington and Adams, the Federalists had established a strong government, but sometimes failing to honor the principle that the American government must be responsive to the will of the people, they had followed policies that alienated large groups. For example, in 1798 they had enacted a tax on houses, land, and slaves, affecting every property owner in the country.

Jefferson had steadily gathered behind him a great mass of small farmers, shopkeepers, and other workers. He won a close victory in a contested election. Jefferson enjoyed extraordinary favor because of his appeal to American idealism. In his inaugural address, the first such speech in the new capital of Washington, DC, he promised “a wise and frugal government” that would preserve order among the inhabitants but leave people “otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry, and improvement.”

In 1800, Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, received the same number of electoral votes, throwing the decision into the House of Representatives, which finally chose Jefferson in February 1801. The two confused elections led in 1804 to the adoption of the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, which corrected the problems by providing for separate voting for vice president. Many Federalists feared the onset of mob rule in America after Jefferson's election in 1800, but this first transition from one political party to another passed smoothly.

President Jefferson's support for freedom of the press was sorely tested in 1802 when James Callender publicly charged that Jefferson “keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally.” The Richmond Recorder, first printed Callender's account of Jefferson's intimate relationship with his wife's half sister, Sally Hemings, but controversy has surrounded the accusation and the relationship to the present day. Callender, whose vitriolic attacks on Federalist opponents of Jefferson in the 1790s had been secretly funded by Jefferson and Republican allies, turned against Jefferson when the president failed to give him a patronage position.

The greatest achievement of Jefferson’s first term was the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, more than doubling the size of the United States. Jefferson immediately dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the new territory and to continue to the Pacific Coast. Jefferson’s mere presence in the White House encouraged democratic procedures. He preached and practiced democratic simplicity, eschewing much of the pomp and ceremony of the presidency. In line with Republican ideology, he sharply cut military expenditures. Believing America to be a haven for the oppressed, he secured a liberal naturalization law. Widely popular, Jefferson easily won reelection as president.

Easily re-elected in 1804, by the end of his second term, his far-sighted secretary of the treasury, Albert Gallatin, had reduced the national debt to less than $560 million. Jefferson had to deal with the effects of the Napoleonic Wars between Britain and France. The Federalists tended to support the English, while the Democratic-Republicans generally leaned towards the French. In 1807, Jefferson sought to avoid war by instituting an embargo prohibiting Americans from trading with both nations. The embargo turned out to do more damage to American traders than it did to the British and the French. It was so unpopular that Jefferson wisely decided not to run for president again in 1808. At the end of his term, he happily retired to Monticello.

Jefferson was fluent in six languages: Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, and Anglo-Saxon. He spent much time studying the natural sciences, ethnology, archaeology, agriculture, and meteorology. Jefferson was also a gifted architect, America’s first, according to some scholars. As American minister to France, he developed a love for the beauties of Classical architecture, as evidenced by two of his famous creations, Monticello and the University of Virginia. He almost single-handedly introduced the Neoclassical style to this country.

Jefferson made his chief contributions to the history of the United States in the realm of political theory. Jefferson was a life-long advocate for government as the servant of the people, for religious freedom and the separation of Church and State, and for education for all. Jefferson’s faith in the educated common man and his ability to use his liberties wisely has been a constant in American political life.

Debts inherited from his father-in-law, the cost of entertaining his many visitors, and his inability to curb his lavish tastes contributed to serious financial problems at the end of his life. Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, exactly 50 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence and only a few hours before his old friend and rival, John Adams. His tomb is in the family cemetery at Monticello.

The New York City Public Design Commission on 19 October 2021 voted 8-0 to remove a statue of Thomas Jefferson from the chambers of the New York City Council, due to Jefferson's history as a slave owner. "We're not being revisionist, we're not waging war on history," Councilmember Inez Barron said. "We're saying that we want to make sure that the total story is told." Councilmember Adrienne Adams, co-chair of the Black, Latino and Asian Caucus, said "Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder who owned over 600 human beings... It makes me deeply uncomfortable knowing that we sit in the presence of a statue that pays homage to a slaveholder who fundamentally believed that people who look like me were inherently inferior, lacked intelligence, and were not worthy of freedom or right."

Former President Donald Trump released a statement on the decision. "Well, it's finally happened. The late, great Thomas Jefferson, one of our most important Founding Fathers, and a principal writer of the Constitution of the United States, is being 'evicted' from the magnificent New York City Council Chamber. Who would have thought this would ever be possible (I did, and called it long ago!). Next up, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln and, of course, George Washington. The Radical Left has gone crazy, and it's hurting our Country badly -- But someday soon, sane people will be back, and our Country will be respected again!"